| Contents |
The new aesthetic, the contemporary, and compositional criticism. Flat aesthetics: things, forms, and exchange regimes -- Flat reading: object tangles and criticism without "us" -- Contemporaneity, periodization, and the signature of the present -- Language. Cap'n crunch, planet of the apes, the kingfishers: Ben Lerner and the uselessness of poetry -- Necklaces, novels, backpacks: a post is being formed in Leaving the Atocha Station -- Bees, parrot, trains: murder by numbers and "the foulest of crimes" in The final solution -- Display. Freighters, snow globes, comics: Mandel's museum of civilization, or survival is insufficient -- Photographs, instant coffee, baby octopuses: "mere objecthood," messianic readymades, and the institute of totaled art in 10:04 -- Exit. Go, dog. go! scuba diving, massage chairs: The dog, X/it-men, and other things that go -- Ravann, doors, cell phones: un-telling, "mocking objects," and Hamid's Exit West -- Revenant. Copula, ding, assembly: zombies and the body politic -- Corsica, dust, skels: the insistence of things and the object of race in Whitehead's Zone one -- Kinship. Fish, peacock, ram: Schulz, Blecher, Foer, and Kafka's unknown family -- Hilton, suitcase, ein-sof: Forest dark and the machine of Jewish literature -- Conclusion: Composing the contemporary. |
