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.
“This book marks a significant contribution to studies of twenty-first century American literature and media and theories of popular culture and judgment. . . . From AI and TikTok to The Crown, Tao Lin, and Lydia Davis, Rooney offers us a type of taste-making that is somatically attuned yet networked to provide a history in the moment of how taste is made and then circulated in contemporary American culture.”—Alexandra Kingston-Reese, editor,
Art Essays
“In The Afterlife of Taste Hierarchies in Contemporary U.S. Art and Literature, Monique Rooney overturns the familiar story of cultural flattening. Taste has not disappeared—it has migrated into networks, where judgment now flickers through clicks, metrics, and fleeting acts of attention. Sharp, inventive, and attuned to the textures of the present, this book captures how value persists in a world where everything seems instantly equal—and nothing is.”
—Catherine Malabou, University of California, Irvine
