The Neoliberal Imagination in Contemporary Literature
The Neoliberal Imagination in Contemporary Literature

Author: Tammy Amiel Houser

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-08-06

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 1040107311

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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.

Landscapes of Accumulation
Landscapes of Accumulation

Author: Llerena Guiu Searle

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2016-09-21

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 022638523X

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Over the past few decades, India has experienced a sudden and spectacular urban transformation. Gleaming business complexes encroach on fields and villages. Giant condominium communities offer gated security, indoor gyms, and pristine pools. Spacious, air-conditioned malls have sprung up alongside open-air markets. In Landscapes of Accumulation, Llerena Guiu Searle examines India’s booming developments and offers a nuanced ethnographic treatment of late capitalism. India’s land, she shows, is rapidly transforming from a site of agricultural and industrial production to an international financial resource. Drawing on intensive fieldwork with investors, developers, real estate agents, and others, Searle documents the new private sector partnerships and practices that are transforming India’s built environment, as well as widely shared stories of growth and development that themselves create self-fulfilling prophecies of success. As a result, India’s cities are becoming ever more inaccessible to the country’s poor. Landscapes of Accumulation will be a welcome contribution to the international study of neoliberalism, finance, and urban development and will be of particular interest to those studying rapid—and perhaps unsustainable—development across the Global South.

The Neoliberal Imagination
The Neoliberal Imagination

Author: Ross Abbinnett

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-10-29

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 0429588747

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This book presents a polemical account of the historical development of the neoliberal imagination. Inspired by the thought of Frederic Jameson, Bernard Stiegler, and Timothy Morton, it argues that the evolution of virtual and information technologies has transformed the ideological imaginary of capitalism. Owing to the inseparability of the process of commodification from developments in the sphere of media technology – particularly the rise of the digital networks through which information is processed and disseminated – the aesthetic forms of the neoliberal imaginary are not external to the accelerated productivity and adaptability of human beings. Rather, they are essential both to the vision of progress that informs the technoscientific organization of capitalist society and to the practical formation of ‘the self’ that takes place within its networks. A snapshot of the evolving ‘world picture’ that is formed in the neoliberal imagination as articulated in its particular regime of capitalization, The Neoliberal Imagination will appeal to scholars of social theory and social philosophy with interests in neoliberalism.

Literature and Citizenship in the Age of Revolution
Literature and Citizenship in the Age of Revolution

Author: Mitchell Gauvin

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-09-11

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 104012027X

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Citizenship is at the forefront of popular imagination as political movements and state governments around the world traffic in anti-immigrant rhetoric and call for increased policing of borders. Literature and Citizenship in the Age of Revolution: A Wish for Air and Liberty looks back to a critical historical juncture in the development of citizenship to uncover how literature contoured and contested imaginings of citizenship. While territory and the nation-state often frame our understanding of citizenship, this book focuses on how non-citizens, foreigners, and strangers have long been central to citizenship’s coherence. Rather than rootedness, literary texts exposed the circulations of persons, ideas, and affections at the heart of citizenship. This book brings together an unlikely combination of writers—Olaudah Equiano, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and Herman Melville—to show how literature in the Age of Revolution exposed contradictions in notions of liberty and slavery that impacted how citizenship was conceived and practiced.

Cultural Heritage and the Literary Archive
Cultural Heritage and the Literary Archive

Author: Tim Sommer

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-09-30

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 1040119719

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Modern literary archives play a key role in how authors’ lives and works get canonized and consecrated as cultural heritage. This interdisciplinary volume combines literary studies, book history, textual criticism, heritage studies, archival theory, and the digital humanities to examine the past, present, and future of literary archiving. Featuring contributions from leading international scholars and archive professionals, the book explores the objects, practices, and institutions that have been at the heart of the modern archival landscape since its emergence in the nineteenth century. Covering a wide range of questions, the volume reconstructs how literary manuscripts turned into secular relics and analyzes the impact that the rise of the archive has had on the scholarly study and public perception of literature as cultural heritage. Individual chapters range from historical accounts of the Romantic origins of manuscript worship to critical discussions of the archiving of contemporary writers’ born-digital material.

Beat Film, Beat Writers
Beat Film, Beat Writers

Author: David Stephen Calonne

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-10-25

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 1040183395

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Beat Film, Beat Writers is the first monograph to analyze the films of Christopher Maclaine, Lawrence Jordan, ruth weiss, Ron Rice, Robert Frank, Barbara Rubin, Shirley Clarke, William S. Burroughs, and Joanne Kyger. The book is noteworthy for its emphasis on women filmmakers who have traditionally been excluded from close analysis by film scholars. Beat Film, Beat Writers also explores the ways Beat authors such as Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, Diane di Prima, Wiliam S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso, Joanne Kyger, and others became deeply involved with the film communities of New York and California. The book discusses their roles as both actors and participants in the making of these films and demonstrates how many of the same themes that characterized Beat literature surface in cinema. The anxiety over the possibilities of nuclear war, the search for deeper modes of spirituality in the study of Buddhism as well as occult and esoteric systems, the struggle for equality for the LGBTQ+ community, the beginnings of the ecological movement, and the fight against censorship and the open depiction of sexuality are all themes that occur both in Beat film and in Beat literature. Beat Film, Beat Writers also features an Epilogue on the cinema of singer and poet Jim Morrison, who, although not part of the Beat movement, was deeply influenced by Beat literature and carried on many of the aesthetic and philosophical aims of the Beats into the late sixties.

The Public Mind and the Politics of Postmillennial U.S.-American Writing
The Public Mind and the Politics of Postmillennial U.S.-American Writing

Author: Jolene Mathieson

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2022-08-22

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 3110771357

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The Anglia Book Series (ANGB) offers a selection of high quality work on all areas and aspects of English philology. It publishes book-length studies and essay collections on English language and linguistics, on English and American literature and culture from the Middle Ages to the present, on the new English literatures, as well as on general and comparative literary studies, including aspects of cultural and literary theory.

Beyond Alterity: Contemporary Indian Fiction and the Neoliberal Script
Beyond Alterity: Contemporary Indian Fiction and the Neoliberal Script

Author: Shakti Jaising

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2023-09-15

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 1837644861

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Beyond Alterity contests a core tendency in postcolonial studies as well as emerging critiques of neoliberalism—to assume that nations of the Global South are categorically distinct from their counterparts in the North and that they provide an alternative, or even an antidote, to the competitive and individualistic cultures of the advanced capitalist world. Through a textured analysis of cultural production from contemporary India, Shakti Jaising argues that neoliberal capitalism has produced significant continuities in class dynamics and subjective experience across the North-South divide—continuities that are at least as worthy of our consideration as differences arising from colonialism and its aftereffects. The book engages an array of political, economic, and cultural narratives, while focusing in particular on widely circulating Indian English-language novels and their audio-visual adaptations that demonstrate the growing currency of a neoliberal script extoling values like privatization and deregulation as conduits to both individual growth and national development, as well as freedom from poverty. With their potent enactments of personal and national maturation, contemporary Indian novels and films offer striking illustrations of the imaginative means by which the neoliberal script proliferates— even as economic precarity and inequality worsen in India, much like elsewhere in the world. Whereas literary scholars tend to approach the Indian English novel as an exemplar of resistance from the formerly colonized world, Beyond Alterity contends that far from inevitably modelling resistance, this genre’s contemporary examples instead encapsulate the challenges of disentangling literature from the all-pervasive logics and narratives of neoliberal capitalism.

The Materiality of Literary Narratives in Urban History
The Materiality of Literary Narratives in Urban History

Author: Lieven Ameel

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-08-12

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 1000507475

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The Materiality of Literary Narratives in Urban History explores a variety of geographical and cultural contexts to examine what literary texts, grasped as material objects and reflections on urban materialities, have to offer for urban history. The contributing writers’ approach to literary narratives and materialities in urban history is summarised within the conceptualisation ‘materiality in/of literature’: the way in which literary narratives at once refer to the material world and actively partake in the material construction of the world. This book takes a geographically multipolar and multidisciplinary approach to discuss cities in the UK, the US, India, South Africa, Finland, and France whilst examining a wide range of textual genres from the novel to cartoons, advertising copy, architecture and urban planning, and archaeological writing. In the process, attention is drawn to narrative complexities embedded within literary fiction and to the dialogue between narratives and historical change. The Materiality of Literary Narratives in Urban History has three areas of focus: literary fiction as form of urban materiality, literary narratives as social investigations of the material city, and the narrating of silenced material lives as witnessed in various narrative sources.

Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture
Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture

Author: Mitchum Huehls

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2017-09-19

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 1421423111

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How has the pervasive spread of free market thinking affected contemporary literature? Neoliberalism has been a buzzword in literary studies for well over a decade, but its meaning remains ambiguous and its salience contentious. In Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture, Mitchum Huehls and Rachel Greenwald Smith offer a wide-ranging exploration of contemporary literature through the lens of neoliberalism’s economic, social, and cultural ascendance. Bringing together accessible and provocative essays from top literary scholars, this innovative collection examines neoliberalism’s influence on literary theory and methodology, literary form, literary representation, and literary institutions. A four-phase approach to the historical emergence of neoliberalism from the early 1970s to the present helps to clarify the complexity of the relationship between neoliberalism and literary culture. Layering that history over the diverse changes in a US-Anglo literary field that has moved away from postmodern forms and sensibilities, the book argues that many literary developments—including the return to realism, the rise of the memoir, the embrace of New Materialist theory, and the pursuit of aesthetic autonomy—make more coherent sense when viewed in light of neoliberalism’s ever-increasing expansion into the cultural sphere. The essays gathered here engage a diverse range of theorists, including Michel Foucault, Wendy Brown, Giorgio Agamben, Bruno Latour, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gary Becker, and Eve Sedgwick to address the reciprocal relationship between neoliberalism and conceptual fields such as biopolitics, affect, phenomenology, ecology, and new materialist ontology. These theoretical perspectives are complemented by innovative readings of contemporary works of literature by writers such as Jennifer Egan, Ben Lerner, Gillian Flynn, Teju Cole, Jonathan Franzen, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Salvador Plascencia, E. L. James, Lisa Robertson, Kenneth Goldsmith, and many others. Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture is essential reading for anyone invested in the ever-changing state of literary culture.