While advocacy of literary criticism often singles out close reading, this essay argues that a more important skill that enables formalism in the first place is taxonomy—dividing, categorizing, and mapping the cultural field by means other than, say, Amazon’s algorithms that tell us if we like x we should also buy y. Taxonomy is a skill of aesthetic judgment, exploring the dialectic between object and category, and although the paradigmatic category is the beautiful (and related evaluative categories like good art), (...) the skill can, and should be, directed to a wider set of categories, including ones we are prompted to invent and name by the objects we study. This categorical approach traces back less to the New Critics and more to the Neo- Aristotelian Critics affiliated with the University of Chicago. This essay recovers their approach to genre and goes on to argue that it came closest to being perfected in a succeeding generation by radical feminists, whose politicization of rape in the 1970s was fundamentally a project of literary criticism. Intervening into recent debates on the politics of aesthetic education, I argue that apprehension of an aesthetic field of categories depends on a prior apprehension of a political field of categories, which for radical feminists included what harms belonged to categories such as rape or what subjects were paradigmatic of categories such as survivor. Approaching political categories with the aesthetic skill of taxonomy, I ultimately recommend politics as an exercise in genre criticism. (shrink)

In this expansive and provocative new work, Michael Dango theorizes how aesthetic style manages crisis--and why taking crisis seriously means taking aesthetics seriously. Detoxing, filtering, binging, and ghosting: these are four actions that have come to define how people deal with the stress of living in a world that seems in permanent crisis. As Dango argues, they can also be used to describe contemporary art and literature. Employing what he calls "promiscuous archives," Dango traverses media and re-shuffles literary and art (...) historical genealogies to make his case. The book discusses social media filters alongside the minimalism of Donald Judd and La Monte Young and the television shows West Wing and True Detective. It reflects on the modernist cuisine of Ferran Adrià and the fashion design of Issey Miyake. And, it dissects writing by Jenifer Egan, David Foster Wallace, David Mitchell, and Zadie Smith. Unpacking how the styles of these works detox, filter, binge, or ghost their worlds, Crisis Style is at once a taxonomy of contemporary cultural production and a theorization of action in a world always in need of repair. Ultimately, Dango presents a compelling argument for why we need aesthetic theory to understand what we're doing in our world today. (shrink)