This book examines the question of aesthetic experience in the novels of Joris-Karl Huysmans, Marcel Proust, Tom McCarthy and Rachel Cusk in order to propose a reconsideration of aesthetic experience informed by literature and philosophy in equal measure. The introduction suggests an alternative four moments (of aesthetic experience) to Kant’s four moments of aesthetic judgement, derived in part from my four literary authors respectively: curation, quietness, violence and disconnection. Taken collectively, the four moments show the danger of becoming too invested or interested in aesthetic experience, as well as patience and openness toward the creative act of writing. While these four moments are not meant as determinations, taken together, they offer a picture of aesthetic experience as involuntary, subject to chance and resistant to calculation on the part of the aesthetic subject. Besides contributing to the scholarship on each of the four novelists, this book advances a theory of
