Abstract
How can a work of art admit accidents–admit, that is, what is outside all formal recuperation? This is the aesthetic question of the twentieth century, whose defining event was the Great War, an accidental catastrophe, and whose continuous emblem was the car crash. Car crashes are routinely referred to as “fatal accidents,” an oxymoron in need of explication. In Nabokov’s “Lolita,” accidents are always referred to this self-contradiction; in Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” the series of deaths at the end, beginning with a car crash, are self-contradictorily conceived as “accident” and “holocaust.” I argue that the possibility of aesthetics, starting around 1918, when the number of automobile fatalities in the US passed intentional homicides once and for all, has depended on making the accident available for art.
Presenters
John LimonJohn Hawley Roberts Professor of English, English, Williams College, Massachusetts, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Literature, Aesthetics, Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Automobiles, Accidents, Fate, Substance
