ABSTRACT
This essay focuses on contemporary ekphrastic novels which take as their primary concern the aesthetic experience of painting, photography, performance art, sculpture, and music. Less concerned with plot, theme, or traditional conflict, writers like Teju Cole, Siri Hustvedt, and Ben Lerner foreground the experience of beholding art, so that we come to understand their characters vis-à-vis aesthetic encounters. This chapter argues that these writers turn to art in order to cultivate the intersubjective sensitivity they find eroding in neoliberal capitalism. The first person narrators of these novels often face a crisis of interpretation; as connoisseurs, they may excel in “reading” art but often blunder when it comes to comprehending the signs they receive from other characters and responding appropriately. The formal intersectionality of linguistic and visual media underscores this hermeneutic challenge, such that intertextual aesthetic experience serves as a kind of conduit for intersubjective readiness on the part of narrators and readers alike. The foundational question this essay raises is how a robust and sustained inquiry into fine art can counter the erosion of creative and emotional vitality while at the same time critiquing the pervasive commodification of visual culture in late capitalism through advertising and social media. Why does art matter, these novelists ask, when the world is coming to an end?
