The Starving Artist as Dying Author

This chapter examines the questions raised about the role of art in the aftermath of the 1968 student protests in France and the US, as aesthetic autonomy was being absorbed into the university and the university itself was changing in response to the emergence of what in the US became known as “French theory.” Paul Auster, who was a student at Columbia in 1968 and spent the early 1970s in Paris, moves between these two milieus, using his commitment to the art of hunger to locate himself outside both. In the process, Auster reinvents the art of hunger in line with the preoccupations of his own historical moment, locating the beseiged author at the center of the tradition, and linking the art of hunger’s preoccupation with aesthetic autonomy to the 1960s’ and 1970s’ quest for personal authenticity.