Crisis Style: The Aesthetics of Repair by Michael Dango (review)

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:

• Crisis Style: The Aesthetics of Repair by Michael Dango
• Yueling Ji

DANGO, MICHAEL. Crisis Style: The Aesthetics of Repair. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021. 336 pp. $140.00 hardcover; $35.00 cloth; $35.00 e-book.

Crisis Style proposes a new approach to the old enigma of “style” in literary and aesthetic theory; it also provides a new taxonomy of the styles of contemporary American literature and art, with particular attention to the genre of the novel, while drawing analogies between the form of the novel and that of other media. In doing so, it identifies and analyzes four major styles in contemporary American culture, four distinct aesthetic tendencies that transpire across media. While the aesthetic tendencies are distinct and the corresponding styles look different, Crisis Style argues that they originate from a shared context and serve a similar end: They are all coping tactics for a permanent perception of crisis that characterizes the lived experience of our contemporary era, even though the nature of the specific crisis varies, as well as the specific tactic employed.

Borrowing a popular culture vocabulary, Crisis Style terms the four styles “detox,” “filter,” “binge,” and “ghost.” Detox stands for “the attempted removal of a kind of risk that is primarily environmental” (75) and the creation of a space where the environmental toxins are temporarily under control. Filter, in the sense of the image-modifying tool provided by social media applications, is marked by a logic of “coordinating the form of an overlay and the content of a subject in the production of a genre” (143); it produces “new roles, new genres of subject, that, even if they cannot partition the hegemony of economization, can at least deliver the fantasy of its punctuation” (110–11). Binge refers to “a strategy of holding everything in one place when people cannot decide what to select from the whole” and “stealing from across institutions and discourses when neither institutions nor discourses are able to shore up their borders” (172). Lastly, ghost can be summarized as “withdraw[ing] from recognition instead of obsessively filtering new scenes in which to appear, and belong, to a public” (251).

Notably, the four styles are identified and categorized by the action each undertakes. Here lies the major distinction between the theory of style in Crisis Style and prior scholarship on stylistics. Conventionally, literary or artistic styles can be categorized in a number of ways. They can be categorized by association with an artistic movement or school (“minimalist”); by association with a historical period or location (“Victorian”); or by aesthetic categories, that is, adjectives such as “terse” or “verbose.” Building on these prior models of stylistic categorization but departing from them, Crisis Style proposes, instead, that styles can be categorized by way of action—by verbs instead of adjectives. Under this new framework, what defines a style is not an [End Page 206] aesthetic feature assigned to the text, but how the text coordinates form and content to achieve its effect. This act of coordination is authorly, for it lies in the “production of a work” (12); but the approach to textual intepretation adopted by Dango here is more than an author-centered one, as the book is ultimately concerned with “the reflexes operating in an artist at the scene of production” or the “socially circulated strategies within the production process” (12).

The representative texts of each of the four styles are diverse, but the novel may still be considered the one form that is the backbone of the study, a constant point of reference that allows the four stylistic types to differentiate one another and to dialogue. Novels are close-read with ample attention to linguistic features at the sentence level. For example, in Chapter 4, the binge style is introduced through an analysis of long sentences in Joyce Carol Oates’s Them and We Were the Mulvaneys, Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, Don DeLillo’s Underworld, and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. The long sentences in Oates are “bingeing” in the sense that “they are collecting objects and stuffing them into subjects in order to hallucinate them” (176); the identification of this action is grounded in syntactic...