Aesthetic Transaction, Digital Answerability and Literature

Aesthetic Transaction, Digital Answerability and Literature: Contact Light brings the theories of John Dewey, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Louise Rosenblatt into the evolving world of digital culture, where texts, images, and performances move through widening currents of circulation and meaning gathers shape through renewed contact. Dewey describes aesthetic activity as a rhythmic joining of feeling and form. Bakhtin's early essays, often overshadowed by his later studies of dialogue, offer a vivid account of expression as an act charged with responsibility and animated by the demand for response. Rosenblatt reimagines reading as a poem created in the meeting of text and reader in lived time. Together, their theories show aesthetic activity as a practice of perception and relation moving through everyday experience. Digital culture brings these ideas into sharper view. A single sentence, image, or gesture travels outward and returns in altered settings, gaining new resonance with each encounter. Contemporary theorists such as Wendy Hui Kyong Chun show how circulation and repetition shape attention and response, revealing aesthetic activity as a living exchange carried by the ways expression is seen and shared. Examples ranging from the acclaimed Broadway adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray to the swift, recursive currents of TikTok illustrate how meaning deepens through repetition, reinterpretation, and collective attention.

Claudia Chung, PhD, is a writer, researcher, and educator whose work examines aesthetic activity, digital culture, and the creation of meaning through perception and relation. She earned her doctorate from Teachers College, Columbia University, after more than a decade as a journalist in New York City covering everyday feminism, human interest, grief, national politics, and contemporary lifestyle. Her teaching draws on both scholarly research and editorial practice, and she has taught writing, rhetoric, aesthetic theory, and digital media at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York Film Academy, and Hunter College. Her work brings together literary theory, cultural analysis, and creative practice to explore how aesthetic expression moves across digital and material environments.

Introduction 1 Aesthetics as Mutual Pursuit of Meaning-Making 2 Aesthetic Transaction and Experience of Digital Everyday 3 Answerability and the Digital Horizon of the Superaddressee 4 Aesthetic Answerability in Rabelais and the Digital Dorian Gray Index