What Lies Between Void Aesthetics and Postwar Post-Politics [Hardcover]

Tierney traces a 'void aesthetics' from the mid-20th century to the present in the work of novelists such as Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, filmmakers such as Orson Welles and Jonas Mekas, and the critics of the 'Melville revival,' especially Richard Chase, that challenges the stability of consensus. . . .Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.By tracking the generative figure of the void in mid-twentieth-century American fiction, cinema, and criticism, and by articulating that figure to questions of medium, intermediality, race, narrative, communication, and community, Matt Tierney offers not only an original statement on aesthetic form but also an informed critique of the technological complacency of our time. Written with remarkable learning and subtlety, this book makes us appreciate anew the vital indispensability of political dissensus.Ex nihilo nihil fit. Out of nothing, nothing comes. Matt Tierney puts insistent and subtle pressure on this ancient cosmological and philosophical chestnut by recasting nothing as void. And, as one might expect, what comes out of the void is far from nothing. Situated initially in the literary, critical and filmic practices of figures as diverse as Richard Wright, Jonas Mekas and Paul Goodman, void is shown to generate a medium of aesthetic politics that, in the end, Tierney wants to call Melvillean. As the reference to Melville might suggest, this resourceful and principled meditation on the void and its textual iterationsblankness, darkness, negativity, the silhouetteis a bold disruption of the dispersed field of American literary and cultural studies, one that moves to gather the void into a point: it offers us a way to keep the future open and avoid succumbing to the deadlock of a presumed post-political era of contemporary America, a national project indefinitely suspended between utopia and nostalgia. Dissatisfied with merely pointing, Tierney concludes by teasing out of a work like KaralÃ*