“Nostalgic Aesthetics: The Fictive Nostalgic Experience”

In this paper I will introduce and discuss the idea of a specific nostalgic mood, or more specifically nostalgic aesthetics. Nostalgia is not only about reviving the past, about commercial retro ideas, about liking French new wave films. It is also about a specific aesthetic mood, and this mood can be evoked in a reader through a nostalgic poetics.

The critical literature about this experience has been very sparse. Fred Davis, in his monumental Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia (1979), is one of the few who acknowledges the part aesthetics play in nostalgic art: “So frequently and uniformly does nostalgic sentiment seem to infuse our aesthetic experience that we can rightly begin to suspect that nostalgia is not only a feeling or mood that is somehow magically evoked by the art object but also a distinctive aesthetic modality in its own right […]” (73). Davis complains that “the musicologist, the art historian, and the literary critic” (83) have not yet defined such a style. The relationships between narrative texts, individual and collective memory, and affective, perceptive and cognitive reception of these texts can constitute the basis of a simulated, fictive nostalgic experience of narrative art. In this paper I will illustrate these relations through a few illustrative narrative examples in order to introduce the idea of nostalgic aesthetics as a particular experience of fiction.

Works Cited:

Davis, Fred. Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia. London: New York Free Press, 1979.