Chapter 3 - Neoliberalism

Summary

This chapter offers a schematic overview of the many different ways in which scholars and theorists have thought about what exactly makes literature neoliberal. After introducing several representational and heuristic models, the chapter summarizes the economic and theoretical history of neoliberalism in the United States and then introduces a four-phase approach to conceptualizing the relationship between neoliberalism and literature. Identifying economic, political, sociocultural, and ontological features of neoliberalism, it offers brief readings of three US novels that foreground these distinct features. Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, which explores the intersection of finance capital and racial politics in 1980s New York City, helps us see neoliberalism as an economic and political phenomenon. Dana Spiotta’s Eat the Document, which worries about the aesthetic representation of revolutionary politics, reveals neoliberalism’s intrusion into the cultural domain. And Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad asks where meaning and value might be found in a world where art, language, and being have been captured by neoliberalism’s for-profit technologies. These three texts are exemplary neoliberal novels, but the differences among them also provide a fuller picture of the neoliberal novel as a literary phenomenon of the past four decades.