ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the contemporary art novel in phenomenological key. Focusing on Mayra Santos-Febres’ Fe en Disfraz (2009), it argues that art novels were always concerned with orientation by making some lives fashionable and worth being lived; by attributing aesthetic value to artistic objects; and by generating a “social contract” that produced an urge to “be creative” among readers. In this chapter, however, the possibility of a queer orientation within the contemporary art novel, of a radical (re)positioning of self and others, is advanced as the starting point for a radical, non-individualistic sociality.
