Four Moments of Aesthetic Experience

Four Moments is an eloquent challenge to the notion that an aesthetic experience can be consciously pursued and fetishized. Instead, Counter foregrounds the role played by such elements as chance and nuance. Through his four case studies, he forges an original, exhilarating theory of the aesthetic moment.” —Peter Schwenger, Mount Saint Vincent University, Nova Scotia, Canada. “Through close readings of novels by Huysmans, Proust, McCarthy, and Cusk, Counter offers a lucid and engaging treatment of four moments of aesthetic experience: curation, quietness, violence, and disconnection. This is a work of real theoretical sophistication, consistently insightful in its treatments of literature and philosophy.” —Robert S. Lehman, Boston College, MA, USA. “The question of the aesthetic, long neglected, has become a focus of the current debate about the nature and value of literary study. This important book enhances our understanding of literary art through its original taxonomy of aesthetic effects into four interrelated moments: curation, violence, disconnection, and quietness. These categories are surprising, and enable Counter to discuss familiar concepts in a new way, and to discover neglected aspects of canonical literature. Counter’s aesthetic moments operate as lenses through which familiar works emerge in an entirely new light.” —Michael Clune, Case Western Reserve University, OH, USA. “Ingeniously proposing its four moments—idiosyncratic and persuasively presented—Counter's analyses continually turn around paradox (we can see that he has closely read Blanchot) and continually return to crucial junctures, both textual and experiential, in which aesthetic experience loses its bearings, as it always must. Counter articulates this condition of possibility in all its unpredictability, lack of system, and unruly force. This book has a strong argument, but it is not polemical; it is an affirmation, a reminder that “aesthetic experience is alive” and a patient act of reading that maps the unsettled risks, the unforeseeable encounters, and the unsteady returns to which this experience opens. —Jeff Fort, French and Francophone Studies, University of California Davis, USA.