Connecting literary studies, media theory, and cultural criticism, The Afterlife of Taste Hierarchies in Contemporary U.S. Art and Literature offers a fresh vocabulary for understanding how we evaluate art and each other in an age of digital mediation. Drawing on works and artifacts ranging from Beyonc茅鈥檚 Lemonade and Andrea Long Chu鈥檚 鈥淐hina Brain鈥 to Ottessa Moshfegh鈥檚 My Year of Rest and Relaxation and the viral Bernie Sanders mittens meme, Monique Rooney traces how aspirations to refinement and gestures of con- descension鈥攐nce associated with high-, middle-, and lowbrow culture鈥攃ontinue to define aesthetic experience. This book moves between literary and popular forms, attending as closely to the meme鈥檚 dispersed creativity as to the novel鈥檚 intentional aesthetics.
鈥淭his book marks a significant contribution to studies of twenty-first century American literature and media and theories of popular culture and judgment. . . . From AI and TikTok to The Crown, Tao Lin, and Lydia Davis, Rooney offers us a type of taste-making that is somatically attuned yet networked to provide a history in the moment of how taste is made and then circulated in contemporary American culture.鈥濃擜lexandra Kingston-Reese, editor, Art Essays
鈥泪苍&苍产蝉辫;The Afterlife of Taste Hierarchies in Contemporary U.S. Art and Literature, Monique Rooney overturns the familiar story of cultural flattening. Taste has not disappeared鈥攊t has migrated into networks, where judgment now flickers through clicks, metrics, and fleeting acts of attention. Sharp, inventive, and attuned to the textures of the present, this book captures how value persists in a world where everything seems instantly equal鈥攁nd nothing is.鈥濃擟atherine Malabou, author, TK