If there is one thing that elicits almost universal distrust among contemporary scholars, it is any literary work that seeks to uplift its readers. Texts that terrify, disgust, depress, derange, devastate, destabilize, disorient, disconcert, or in some other way inflict pain upon us are treated as model citizens within the contemporary republic of letters, commended for the important work they are doing. Texts by contrast that seek to alleviate our misery, raise our spirits, or make us feel better about our lives are clearly up to no good. The painful truths of existence, so goes the consensus, should not be disguised or evaded. Indeed, literary works that present reality as anything other than brutal and grim are analogous to those well-wishers who tactlessly try to console survivors of unimaginable tragedies with useless bromides about the better place the deceased now occupy or the importance of cherishing the happy memories they...
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May 1, 2022
Book Review|
May 01 2022
Suffering with Style
James, David,
Discrepant Solace: Contemporary Literature and the Work of Consolation
(New York
: Oxford UP
, 2019
), pp. 288
, cloth, $90.00.
Timothy Aubry
Baruch College, City University of New York
TIMOTHY AUBRY is a professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York. He is the author of Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures (2018) and Reading as Therapy: What Contemporary Fiction Does for Middle-Class Americans (2011), and the coeditor of Rethinking Therapeutic Culture (2015). His essays and reviews have appeared in the New Republic, Point Magazine, Chronicle Review, New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Music & Literature, n+1, Best American Essays 2014, PMLA, Criticism, American Studies, and other academic journals.
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Novel (2022) 55 (1): 131–135.
Citation
Timothy Aubry; Suffering with Style. Novel 1 May 2022; 55 (1): 131–135. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-9615046
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