Writing Against the Image: Teju Cole, Ben Lerner, and Aesthetics of Failure

Abstract

Given the striking contemporary turn towards literary mediations of aesthetic experience, this project suggests the need for a concerted critical realignment in understanding literary form’s potential for artistic expansiveness. Focussing on writers Teju Cole and Ben Lerner, and in particular their debut novels Open City and Leaving the Atocha Station, this thesis seeks to explore their interrogations of this kind of experience as blueprints for direct aesthetic experience, experimenting with perceptual responses to art. It not only draws on concepts of the ‘virtual’ as that which opposes the ‘actual,’ but as a mapmaking strategy for proposing the ways in which the novel can offer new and insightful ways of attending to art. Indeed, I approach this concern as a reinterpretation and insurrection of the literary’s image, as a site of formal convention, the novel’s tendency towards realism, and as writers’ reinvestment in the conversation between literature and visual art. Where theories of the virtual mode have traditionally been conceptualised as opposed to the formally actual or possible, this study seeks to instead put forward a model of writing that is concerned with the mediation of aesthetic experience in and through literary language, and that makes new claims about the relationship literary prose has to other artistic forms. Engaging with sensory aesthetic experience – visual art, music, and literature – the works of both novelists not only refract and problematise direct artistic experience but also to provide a lyrical lens through which these experiences are compellingly interrogated. In doing so, they situate the novel as an absorptive form that offers significant implications for our practices of reading and critical judgment.