Abstract

Combining a Nietzschean framework with close attention to a wide range of carefully selected literary texts, Autoaesthetics presents a case for Nietzche's centrality in contemporary aesthetic and literary studies. Based on Nietzche's own practice of combining poetry and philosophy by transcending ressentiment and approaching life to its fullest, Autoaesthetics engages in a heated but intricate debate through and with Nietzche's re-articulation of the self as a strategic (and impossible) aesthetic creation." "Stephen Barker argues that all notions of self are aesthetic, literary, strategic, and teleological, and must be seen not in the context of any essential self but as a complex series of self-articulations. He sets out a strategy of reading that combines Nietzschean "psychology" with subsequent theoretical investigations and shows how Nietzschean dialectics of the self are at work in all (self-defining) human experience in the (post)modern world. His book itself is a play of dialectics (again after Nietzche), designed for interdisciplinary scholars and graduate students interested in exploring the scope of literary and aesthetic theory and philosophy.