Art Theory Revolution

<div>Can form be political? Do specific aesthetic and literary forms necessarily point us toward a progressive or reactionary politics? Artists authors and critics like to imagine so but what happens when they lose control of the politics of their forms? In <i>Art Theory Revolution: The Turn to Generality in Contemporary Literature</i> Mitchum Huehls argues that art's interest in revolution did not end with the twentieth century as some critics would have it but rather that the relationship between literary forms and politics has been severed resulting in a twenty-first century investment in forms of generality such as genre gesture constructivism and abstraction. Focusing on three particular domains (art theory and revolution) in which the relationship between form and politics has collapsed Huehls shows how twenty-first-century US fiction writers such as Chris Kraus Percival Everett Jonathan Safran Foer Rachel Kushner Salvador Plascencia and Sheila Heti are turning to forms of generality that lead us toward a more modest ad hoc context-dependent way to think about the politics of form. The result is the first major study of generality in literature.</div>