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Taking up four different political themes--human rights, the relation between public and private space, racial justice, and environmentalism--After Critique suggests that the ontological forms emerging in contemporary U.S. fiction articulate a version of politics that might successfully evade neoliberal appropriation.
What is the political value of time, and where does that value reside? Should politics place its hope in future possibility, or does that simply defer action in the present? Can the present ground a vision of change, or is it too circumscribed by the status quo? In Qualified Hope: A Postmodern Politics of Time, Mitchum Huehls contends that conventional treatments of time's relationship to politics are limited by a focus on real-world experiences of time. By contrast, the innovative literary forms developed by authors in direct response to political events such as the Cold War, globalization, the emergence of identity politics, and 9/11 offer readers uniquely literary experiences of time. And...
New essays examining the interface between 18th- and 20th-century culture both in Pynchon's novel and in the historical past. Thomas Pynchon's 1997 novel Mason & Dixon marked a deep shift in Pynchon's career and in American letters in general. All of Pynchon's novels had been socially and politically aware, marked by social criticism and a profound questioning of American values. They have carried the labels of satire and black humor, and "Pynchonesque" has come to be associated with erudition, a playful style, anachronisms and puns -- and an interest in scientific theories, popular culture, paranoia, and the "military-industrial complex." In short, Pynchon's novels were the sine qua non of ...
"Examines works by Sheila Heti, Chris Kraus, Salvador Plascencia, Percival Everett, Jonathan Foer, and Rachel Kushner to rethink the politics of form in twenty-first-century US fiction"--
Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture is essential reading for anyone invested in the ever-changing state of literary culture.
The book aims at interrogating the contemporary problematic of neoliberalism and its relationship to culture and ideology through the lens of a theoretical synthesis interweaving the emancipatory aesthetics of Herbert Marcuse, Fredric Jameson's pathbreaking analysis of the cultural logic of late capitalism, and the late Mark Fisher's work on "post-capitalist desire" and "acid communism." The main imperative is to formulate a possible (and, as it turns out, necessary) opening for aesthetic critique in the climate of contemporary neoliberal capitalism. This mode of aesthetic critique is then operationalized through an exemplary reading of the emancipatory poetics of Ben Lerner's 2014 novel "10:04."
Draws on Einstein's Theory of Relativity to examine of the workings of narrative time in the novels of Thomas Pynchon, including Against the Day.
The Complicit Text: Failures of Witnessing in Postwar Fiction identifies the causes of complicity in the face of unfolding atrocities by examining the works of Albert Camus, Milan Kunera, Kazuo Ishiguro, W. G. Sebald, Thomas Pynchon, and Margaret Atwood. Ivan Stacy argues that complicity often stems from narrative failures to bear witness to wrongdoing. However, literary fiction, he contends, can at once embody and examine forms of complicity on three different levels: as a theme within literary texts, as a narrative form, and also as it implicates readers themselves through empathetic engagement with the text. Furthermore, Stacy questions what forms of non-complicit action are possible and explores the potential for productive forms of compromise. Stacy discusses both individual dilemmas of complicity in the shadow of World War II and collective complicity in the context of contemporary concerns, such as the hegemony of neoliberalism and the climate emergency.
This book examines the relationship between empathy and neoliberalism as it unfolded in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and through the turbulent 2010s. Via close readings of contemporary novels, as well as various non-fictional texts, it traces the changing approaches to empathy in the post-financial-crisis imagination, highlighting a crucial re-conceptualization of empathy as a boundaryless force, untethered to local or social circumstance. This reconceptualization implicitly aligns empathy with the neoliberal ethos of globalism and distances it from the traditional notion of “sympathy.” Via complex dialogue with the novelistic tradition of sympathy, contemporary novelists highlight the problematics of boundaryless empathy, while exploring ways to resist neoliberal views and values. Analyzing engagements with empathy in post-2008 literature and culture, the book sheds light on the underlying affective dynamics that enabled the persistence of neoliberalism after the 2008 financial crisis, alongside efforts to challenge its dominance.
Surveying the relationship between American politics and the twentieth-century novel, this volume analyzes how political movements, ideas, and events shaped the American novel. It also shows how those political phenomena were shaped in turn by long-form prose fiction.