Abstract:
Over the past forty years literary studies have not been very kind to the idea of aesthetic autonomy. As our field moved away from its formalist roots in order to focus on literature’s social and ideological entanglements, it has also grown deeply suspicious of claims to aesthetic detachment in their many guises, from Kantian disinterestedness to Oscar Wilde’s celebration of the aesthetic as a sphere outside the reach of moral judgment, and further to the New Critical understanding of the literary text as a self-contained object. More often than not, such claims are seen as distracting or disingenuous, an expression of a certain kind of Western bourgeois habitus that aim to obfuscate the relationship between the aesthetic and the political. In this talk, extracted from my new book project, I argue for a more complex political genealogy behind autonomist literary doctrines: rather than a mere expression of a certain kind of solipsism that we tend to associate with such figures as Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Flaubert, or Oscar Wilde, the demand for aesthetic autonomy constitutes an inherently oppositional gesture, a form of refusal typically directed at hegemonic social forces and naturally affiliated with various forms of marginality and dissidence. To fully appreciate aestheticism’s dissident potential, in this talk I focus on aesthetic detachment’s productive second life among immigrant and exiled writers, among Holocaust survivors and postcolonial intellectuals. I pay particular attention to the work of the Serbian-Jewish writer Danilo Kiš in order to demonstrate how familiar Baudelairean and Wildean assumptions can be retooled to for the purposes of Holocaust representation and political critique in socialist Eastern Europe.

Biography:

Aleksandar Stević is assistant professor of English at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. Primarily a historian and theorist of the novel, he is the author of Falling Short: The Bildungsroman and the Crisis of Self-Fashioning (University of Virginia Press, 2020) and the editor of several volumes, including a forthcoming special issue of Genre on Aestheticism Now. His essays have appeared in such venues as New Literary History, Victorian Literature and Culture, Journal of Modern Literature, Comparative Literature Studies, and ELH. He is also the Serbian translator of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and has recently completed a book on the afterlives of aestheticism in twentieth-century literature.