Description
- Abstract:
- "Postmodern Realism and the Neoliberal Imagination" argues that postmodern fiction’s primary engagement with the politics of neoliberalism is generic, rather than ideological. Neoliberalism, I suggest, threatened to dissolve the very notion of reality by replacing it with the financial market as the primary engine for all social, political, and economic experience. This dissertation contends that in response writers such as William Gaddis, Stephen King, Joan Didion, Ishmael Reed, and Philip Roth conceived of the novel genre as a way of reconstructing the social order in the face of neoliberalism’s economic determinism. By actively engaging questions about their professional relationship to the free market, these writers articulate the limits and the limitations of the neoliberal imagination, while emphasizing their own formal commitment to realism as the precondition of novelistic production. To think of postmodernism as the reinvention of realism—rather than the rejection of it—suggests the common aesthetic project of the novel form, even in its disparate incarnations. Postmodern realism thus envisions the novel as an imagined alternative for mediating the proper relationship between the market and society. Accordingly, this dissertation expands our understanding of postmodernism by reading it not as a symptom of or an escape from capitalist pursuits, but as a powerful confrontation of neoliberalism’s ideology of the market. I examine a diverse literary and theoretical archive alongside contemporary economic and political debates surrounding neoliberalism in order to provide a cultural history of the realist novel’s evolution from modernist social critique to postmodernist social institution.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2015)
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Citation
Allan, Angela S.,
"Postmodern Realism and the Neoliberal Imagination"
(2015).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z06T0K07
