The Art of Hunger
Aesthetic Autonomy and the Afterlives of Modernism

For many modernists and their contemporary heirs, writing is imagined as a kind of starvation. The Art of Hunger uses this trope as a lens to examine contemporary literature’s engagement with modernism, arguing that hunger offers a way of grappling with the fate of aesthetic autonomy—the idea that art ought to hold itself separate from commerce, politics, and other spheres of life—in modernism’s afterlives. More specifically, I argue that the art of hunger appears at moments where aesthetic autonomy enters a period of crisis. The writers that I examine develop an alternate theory of aesthetic autonomy, which imagines art not as a conduit for freedom, but rather as an enactment of unfreedom.

For influential early modernists, including Herman Melville, Arthur Rimbaud, Knut Hamsun and Franz Kafka, the trope of hunger offers a way of articulating the contradictions of aesthetic autonomy in contexts that lack the social conditions for freedom’s full flourishing. Drawing on a philosophical tradition that stretches from Immanuel Kant to Theodor Adorno, which repeatedly opposed aesthetic autonomy to eating, these writers seize on hunger as a way of embodying the contradictions between aesthetic autonomy as an ideal and the grim physical reality of poverty that arises from a refusal to make art social or commercial. Hunger therefore functions for them as a testing ground for the limits of this concept, representing a form of autonomy radical enough to disrupt the writers’ position in society, but fatally compromised by their reliance on language, on literary markets, and on their fragile physical bodies. The result is a new aesthetic mode, which imagines aesthetic autonomy as the encounter with human finiteness and unfreedom.

The post-war and contemporary writers who follow in this tradition explicitly position themselves as heirs to these modernist “hunger artists.” For such authors, hunger provides a way of considering new crises in the reception of aesthetic autonomy, in the light of both their debt to modernism and their specific historical circumstances. I focus particularly on three authors who redeploy the modernist art of hunger as a response to key moments in the history of the deligitimisation of modernist aesthetic autonomy: Samuel Beckett in post-Vichy France, Paul Auster in post-1968 Paris and New York, and J. M. Coetzee in late-apartheid South Africa. In each of these moments, political conflagration pressed the authors’ literary and intellectual worlds into turmoil. Under these circumstances, writers were forced to reconsider how literature related to the pressing political, social, and cultural upheavals taking place. Aesthetic autonomy’s insistence on literature’s independence from political life became a source of doubt. Writers like Beckett, Auster, and Coetzee, who remained committed to literature as an autonomous undertaking but were sensitive to the demands of their political moments, used hunger and its modernist legacy to conceptualise the contradictions of literature’s role in society.

The Art of Hunger was published by Oxford University Press in 2018. It was shortlisted for the Australian University Heads of English Prize in Literary Scholarship.