Eternalized Fragments: Reclaiming Aesthetics in Contemporary World Fiction, Wang W. Michelle

Since postmodern and contemporary fiction tend to be dominated by disjunctures, paradoxes, and incongruities, this book offers an account of how and why readers choose to engage regardless, articulating the cognitive rewards such difficulties offer. By putting narrative and philosophical approaches in conversation with evolutionary psychology and contemporary neuroscience, W. Michelle Wang examines the value of attending to aesthetic experiences when we read literature and effectively demonstrates that despite the aesthetics stumble in time, our ongoing love affair with fiction is grounded in our cognitive engagements with the texts aesthetic dimensions.