The Afterlife of Taste Hierarchies in Contemporary U.S. Art and Literature

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 Beyoncé’s Lemonade and Andrea Long Chu’s “China Brain” to Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation and the viral Bernie Sanders mittens meme, Monique Rooney traces how aspirations to refinement and gestures of condescension—once associated with high-, middle-, and lowbrow culture—continue to define aesthetic experience. This book moves between literary and popular forms, attending as closely to the meme’s dispersed creativity as to the novel’s intentional aesthetics.