@article{Contemporary:1339,
      recid = {1339},
      author = {Dango, Michael Thomas},
      title = {Contemporary Styles: A Taxonomy of Novel Actions},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2017-06},
      pages = {335},
      abstract = {This dissertation argues for and practices a new theory of  style that in turn produces a taxonomy of contemporary  novels in America.  At least since Nelson Goodman,  stylistics has moved beyond the untenable distinction  between content as what is said and style as how it is said  by seeing style instead as a harmonization of form and  content.  In prose fiction, style coordinates different  forms of words, sentences, and chapters with different  themes and subjects.  But if style always coordinates, I  claim we should identify styles according to the action of  coordination itself.  I thus shift the terrain: content is  what is said and style is what is done.  In particular,  drawing on both affect theory and analytic action  philosophy, I argue what styles do is process transforming  conditions of their contemporary world.  Different  styles—different coordinations of form and content—assemble  groups of people who adapt to structural transformations in  similar ways. 

I develop this theory of style as action in  my introductory Chapter One, engaging style theorists  including Arthur Danto, D. A. Miller, and Mark McGurl;  action theorists in the tradition of G. E. M. Anscombe; and  affect theorists of the historical present such as Lauren  Berlant.  I then demonstrate how a number of consequences  follow from this theory, two of which are immediately  important.  First, style becomes available for a cultural  criticism without content, because it shows what people are  doing regardless of what they may say they are feeling or  thinking.  To read style is to read how people adapt to  their changing worlds, even when they may not be able to  slow down the world long enough to represent it.  Such a  theory is particularly important when the period under  study is the historical present; whereas narrative  representations of what life is like in transitional  periods often lag behind the transitions themselves, style  is synchronous with the present it acts within.  Second, to  read style as a mode of adaptation means liberating it from  the particularly individualizing terms (e.g., Dickens  style, Warhol style) or universally periodizing terms  (e.g., Victorian style, Postmodern style) in which it is  usually discussed.  Rather, styles refer to new social  groups that emerge in a contemporary situation through  sharing actions.  Because they come into being only through  action, these style groups do not have to be primarily  organized by demographic categories like class or  institutions like the family; in fact, I argue the  circulation of styles today shows us the loosening impact  of these forms of organization.  To enumerate the multiple  styles at play in our world is to list what kinds of  relations are budding when previous norms tying action to  identities or institutions weaken. 

In the remainder of  the dissertation, I identify four contemporary styles by  surveying American fiction from the past 30 years and  observing repeated patterns of form/content coordination.   Following the approach of my theory, I name each style as  an action and then unfold the forms of social emergence  incarnated in them.  The first pair of styles I look at,  detoxification and intoxication, use transforming  environmental conditions in the age of manmade pollution or  climate change as a resource for creating new forms of  intimacy and domesticity; the second pair, invasion and  evasion, intervene in an altered public sphere in ways that  mirror new social and political movements like Occupy and  Anonymous, respectively.  

As I argue in Chapter Two,  detoxification style coordinates anxieties about  heterosexual domesticity, racial difference, and the  natural environment from 1980 to the present.  This is a  style that I show lives at the level of sentences within a  range of authors including Raymond Carver, Tao Lin, and  Mary Robison, each of whom use detoxification to produce  domestic spaces carved out from a wider natural world.  In  each of these writers, I argue that environmental  detoxification is also twinned with a project of racial  purification.  Along the way, I also show how  detoxification style re-creates the outlines of a familiar  canon of minimalism, but by referring minimalism to an  action and thus a mode of adaption to a complex of social  and environmental variables, detoxification is also able, I  argue, to account for both a larger set of authors and a  wider range of features within their writing than available  theories of minimalism have allowed.  In turn, I show that  what we have thought of as minimalism is not just a  retraction of words, as some scholars have indicated, but  also a proliferation of smaller words; and it is best  understand primarily in relation not to the institution of  the university, as Mark McGurl has argued, but to the  institution of the family.    

Chapter Three turns to  intoxication style, which inverts the logic of the previous  chapter: here, intoxication is associated not with  minimalism, but with maximalism.  In particular, I show how  intoxication produces the sentences of Don DeLillo, Joyce  Carol Oates, Sergio de la Pava, Zadie Smith, and David  Foster Wallace.  Intoxication sentences are inhalation  machines that bury their subjective anchors under stuff  ranging from information to material substances.  Whereas  detoxification style sought to create spaces of intimacy by  subtracting from the environment, intoxication style  suggests what happens in a world in which no  institution—say, the Sierra Club—can ever adequately  mediate between subjects and their natural world.  Without  institutional mediation, subjects and world become  conflated in these works.  Thus, intoxication also  theorizes a kind of agency particularly germane to the  period we have come to know as the Anthropocene, in which  human history becomes knotted with ecological history.  But  whereas most work on the Anthropocene has pointed to a  universal human species as an actor on a global scale,  looking at intoxication as one style among many  particularizes rather than universalizes experience.   Therefore, the question for this chapter is not the  scientific one of whether human agency is distributed and  imbricated with a planet, but rather, culturally: for whom  does agency feel that way, or under what social conditions  is it desirable for people to intoxicate themselves and  distribute their agency across the world at the same time  that the world comes into them?  My close readings suggest  intoxication, or the Anthropocene’s style of action, has  affiliations that are particularly masculine and  millennial.  

If detoxification and intoxication are a  pair concerned with the environment, then the next two  styles I examine—invasion and evasion—are a pair concerned  with public space.  In particular, I argue that the unit of  the chapter in these styles is acted upon to re-distribute  public space and create new kinds of political collectives.   In Chapter Four, I describe invasion as a style that  administers what we have come to recognize as novels of  interconnected short stories.  Authors of the style  including Jennifer Egan, Colum McCann, David Mitchell, and  Elizabeth Strout are nostalgic for disciplinary techniques  of cutting up a social world into distinct institutions  with limited social roles, and breaking up a novel into  autonomous stories is one way of re-asserting an ability to  section a world and therefore compartmentalize psychology.   The action of this style is best understood as invasion, I  argue, because the novels try to fill up a discrete space  with enough energy to convert it into a new kind of  institution, dispensing new political subjectivities that  arrest ongoing processes of modulation by re-asserting the  boundaries of emerging political communities.  As I tease  out, invasion is then analogous to social movements like  Occupy (turning a park into a political forum) and provides  an object to test the logic of invasion (of which  occupation is a species) as a public action.  In  particular, I show how invasion excludes queerness as a  background condition.  

Whereas invasion style incarnates  a social action of invasion structurally kin to movements  like Occupy, evasion style, as I argue in Chapter Five,  produces sociality through a common bypass of surveillance,  analogous to hacktivist collectives like Anonymous.   Whereas invasion reconstructs novels into many stories,  evasion reduces the novel entire to being just one chapter  of a larger story: evasion style is manifest in transmedia  narrative in which a novel-book participates as one  networked node.  What becomes interesting in this style is  what gets pushed out of the novel, evading its  surveillance, and I show how evasions in the novels of  Barbara Browning, Mark Danielewski, and Chris Ware are  consistently explained by an attempt of the authors to make  themselves anonymous.  Evasion style in turn imagines a  social space—the space of the novel—as clustering around  and forming on top of a personal absence.  But as in the  previous chapter, I do not see evasion novels as mere  exemplifications of social experiments; rather, I show how  novels feel out in their actions for social forms capacious  and complicated in their logic that in turn provide lessons  for thinking through what is at stake in collectives like  Anonymous.  When these novels begin to query the  sustainability of the collectives they form through  evasion, they also provide warnings and lessons for other  anonymous forms of sociality, especially ones queer theory  and theories of stranger intimacy have celebrated and  taught us about in the past generation.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/1339},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.1339},
}