Aesthetic Apprehensions: Silence and Absence in False Familiarities (Transforming Literary Studies)

Aesthetic Apprehensions: Silences and Absences in False Familiarities is a scholarly conversation about encounters between habitual customs of reading and seeing and their ruptures and ossifications. In closely connected discourses, the thirteen essays collected here set out to carefully probe the ways our aesthetic immersions are obfuscated by deep-seated epistemological and ideological apprehensions by focusing on how the tropology carried by silence, absence, and false familarity crystallize to define the gaps that open up. As they figure in the subtitle of this volume, the tropes may seem straightforward enough, but a closer examination of their function in relation to social, cultural, and political assumptions and gestalts reveal troubling oversights. Aesthetic Apprehensions comes to name the attempt at capturing the outlier meanings residing in habituated receptions as well as the uneasy relations that result from aesthetic practices already in place, emphasizing the kinds of thresholds of sense and sensation which occasion rupture and creativity. Such, after all, is the promise of the threshold, of the liminal: to encourage our leap into otherness, for then to find ourselves and our sensing again, and anew in novel comprehensions. Cover Aesthetic Apprehensions Series page Aesthetic Apprehensions: Silences and Absences in False Familiarities Copyright Contents Figures Acknowledgments Introduction Works Cited Chapter 1 Drawing Closer Note Works Cited Chapter 2 A Chair Is Not a House Intimacies 0: Sepulchral Spaces Intimacy 1: Not a Story to Pass On Intimacy 2: A Politics of Denial Conclusion Works cited Chapter 3 “The Immortal Conception, the Perennial Theme” Notes Works cited Chapter 4 Not Reading the Signs in Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina Images, Positioning, and Interpretation Drnaso’s Aesthetics of the Nondescript Visually Indeterminate Faces Reading Silences and Absences Works Cited Chapter 5 Apprehensive Figurations Note Works Cited Chapter 6 Apprehending the Past in the National Parks San Juan Island National Historical Park World War II Valor in the Pacific National Monument Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site Conclusion: Disrupting the Aesthetic Imaginary Notes Works Cited Chapter 7 The Garrulous Eye Sense as Sense: The Critical Eye/I Reading Line by Line Rape: A Love Story The Passion of Cheerful: Reframing Layouts Blind Spots and Rendering the Invisible Notes Works Cited Chapter 8 Metonymy and the “Art of Reading the World Slowly” Notes Works Cited Chapter 9 Aesthetic Apprehension, Hauntology, and Just Literature Notes Works Cited Chapter 10 Close Reading and Critical Immersion Notes Works Cited Chapter 11 Indians, Aliens, and Superheroes Reading Absence/Visualizing Silence History and the Superheroic Notes Works Cited Chapter 12 Listening to Ourselves The Bear Comes Home Note Works Cited Chapter 13 Harlem to World and World to Harlem Works Cited Index About the Editors About the Contributors