For centuries, a central goal of art has been to make us see the world
with new eyes. Thinkers from Edmund Burke to Elaine Scarry have
understood this effort as the attempt to create new forms. But as anyone
who has ever worn out a song by repeated listening knows, artistic form
is hardly immune to sensation-killing habit. Some of our most ambitious
writers--Keats, Proust, Nabokov, Ashbery--have been obsessed by this
problem. Attempting to create an image that never gets old, they
experiment with virtual, ideal forms. Poems and novels become workshops,
as fragments of the real world are scrutinized for insights and the
shape of an ideal artwork is pieced together. These writers, voracious
in their appetite for any knowledge that will further their goal, find
help in unlikely places. The logic of totalitarian regimes, the
phenomenology of music, the pathology of addiction, and global commodity
exchange furnish them with tools and models for arresting
neurobiological time. Reading central works of the past two centuries in
light of their shared ambition, Clune produces a revisionary
understanding of some of our most important literature.