Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism

Rachel Greenwald Smith's Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism examines the relationship between American literature and politics in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. Smith contends that the representation of emotions in contemporary fiction emphasizes the personal lives of characters at a time when there is an unprecedented, and often damaging, focus on the individual in American life. Through readings of works by Paul Auster, Karen Tei Yamashita, Ben Marcus, Lydia Millet, and others who stage experiments in the relationship between feeling and form, Smith argues for the centrality of a counter-tradition in contemporary literature concerned with impersonal feelings: feelings that challenge the neoliberal notion that emotions are the property of the self. Cover 1 Half-title 3 Title page 5 Copyright information 6 Dedication 7 Epigraph 8 Table of contents 9 Acknowledgments 11 Introduction The Affective Hypothesis 15 Emotional Economies 17 Managing the Emotional Portfolio: The Case of The Corrections 20 A Brief History of Impersonal Feelings 25 Impersonal Connections: The Case of Tropic of Orange 34 From the Impersonal to the Ecological 38 The Chapters 40 1 Personal and Impersonal: Two Forms of the Neoliberal Novel 44 The Value of Fiction 47 The Liberal Novel and the Neoliberal Novel 51 Emotional Scarcity: The Case of The Road 56 Subtracting the Personal: The Case of The Book of Illusions 62 Assessing Literary Affects 69 2 Affect and Aesthetics in 9/11 Fiction 75 Sentimental Innovation: The Case of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close 78 Crisis and Continuity 80 Uneasy Metaphors: The Case of The Exquisite 84 3 Reading Like an Entrepreneur: Neoliberal Agency and Textual Systems 91 Neoliberal Agents 94 Choose Your Own Adventure: The Case of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius 98 Making the Familiar Strange: The Case of The Age of Wire and String 103 The Limits of Critique 108 4 Ecology, Feeling, and Form in Neoliberal Literature 114 The Paradox of the Environmental Bildungsroman: The Case of How the Dead Dream 118 Wonder and the Wild 124 Narrative Patterns and Ecological Form: The Case of The Echo Maker 126 Neoliberalism, Affect, Ecology 136 Epilogue 141 Notes 145 Introduction: The Affective Hypothesis 145 1 Personal and Impersonal: Two Forms of the Neoliberal Novel 155 2 Affect and Aesthetics in 9/11 Fiction 160 3 Reading Like an Entrepreneur: Neoliberal Agency and Textual Systems 164 4 Ecology, Feeling, and Form in Neoliberal Literature 168 Epilogue 174 Bibliography 177 Index 189 Rachel Greenwald Smith's Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism examines the relationship between contemporary American literature and politics. Through readings of works by Paul Auster, Karen Tei Yamashita and others, Smith challenges the neoliberal notion that emotions are the property of the self.