Eternalized Fragments: Reclaiming Aesthetics in Contemporary World Fiction by W. Michelle Wang (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Eternalized Fragments: Reclaiming Aesthetics in Contemporary World Fiction by W. Michelle Wang Lucien Darjeun Meadows W. Michelle Wang. Eternalized Fragments: Reclaiming Aesthetics in Contemporary World Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2020. 217 p. In Eternalized Fragments, the ninth publication of Ohio State UP's Cognitive Approaches to Culture Series, W. Michelle Wang brings the literary theory of aesthetics into robust conversation with the cognitive science theories of neuroaesthetics and evolutionary psychology through an examination of world long-form fiction across the post-World War II period. Wang locates three central themes, or aesthetic modes, to postwar fiction: the aesthetics (1) of play, (2) of the literary sublime, and (3) of muted beauty. Clearly structured, Wang organizes her text into two chapters on the aesthetics of play, two on the literary sublime, and one on muted beauty. She includes an introduction that offers a primer on neuro/aesthetic theory and her approach in language that feels accessible to audiences from advanced undergraduates to faculty, with a closing coda on continuing to expand possibilities for theorizing postwar fiction. Wang's book joins Cognitive Approaches to Culture Series publications including Shaming into Brown: Somatic Transactions of Race in Latina/o Literature by Stephanie Fetta (2018), winner of the 2019 MLA Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies, and Literatures of Liberation: Non-European Universalisms and Democratic Progress by Mukti Lakhi Mangharam (2017). Together, these texts bring literary studies and cognitive sciences into a dialogue that enhances scholars' understandings of, as Ohio State UP describes, "the social and political consequences of cognitive cultural study." As such, Wang dedicates space in her introduction and across the book to discuss the fraught contemporary relationship with aesthetics and the "anti-aesthetic emphasis" (2) of creative and critical work in the twentieth century, where concepts such as beauty and the sublime can feel detached at best from the postmodern "brokenness of human experience" and "radical skepticism" (127). Yet, while some scholars might argue that literature of juxtaposition and disjuncture—such as postwar world fiction—might not be an apt subject for studies of aesthetics, with its focus on the beautiful and pleasing, even the sublime, Wang convincingly [End Page 255] argues that paradox generates pleasure and play. These postwar fiction writers "invite readers to participate in their always unfinished acts of meaning-making" (163), an essential energizing activity in the long-term cyclical renewal of aesthetic paradigms. She activates her methodology through an experiential cognitive science approach into Schiller's and Kant's definitions of beauty and the sublime, invoking and revising their theorizations of the sublime along with those from Burke, Hegel, Longinus, and Lyotard. Wang posits that, in addition to the three aesthetic modes of postwar fiction described above, such fiction is concerned with three drives toward information: (1) the sense-drive, or the open-ended, sensuous, and imaginative impulse; (2) the formdrive, or the orderly, rational, and pattern recognition-driven impulse; and (3) the moral-drive, or the impulse toward unity and congruence in how one should live. Wang discusses all three drives in virtually every chapter, for these three drives, like the three aesthetic modes, often blur and overlap in the fractured genre of postwar fiction. Opening with an epigraph from, and closing with a coda on, Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), a novel Wang credits to her text's "genesis" in 2008 (ix), Wang invokes García Márquez's novel as a touchstone across her analysis of "texts that straddle the borders of aesthetic modes" (14). Wang features two such texts in each of her five chapters: Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), Italo Calvino's The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1969) and Invisible Cities (1972), Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) and The Third Policeman (1939-40/1967), Alasdair Gray's Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981), Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (1997), Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian (1985), Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body (1992), and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (2005). This is a diverse list of works...