Contemporary World Narrative Fiction and the Spaces of Neoliberalism

184 Pages·2016·0.592 MB·English

by  Michael K. Walonen (auth.)

Contemporary World
Narrative Fiction and
the Spaces of Neoliberalism
Michael K. Walonen
Contemporary World Narrative Fiction and the Spaces
of Neoliberalism
New Comparisons in World Literature
Series editors: Professor Pablo Mukherjee (University of Warwick, UK) and
Professor Neil Lazarus (University of Warwick, UK)
New Comparisons in World Literature offers a fresh perspective on one of the
most exciting current debates in humanities by approaching ‘world literature’
not in terms of particular kinds of reading but as a particular kind of writing.
We take ‘world literature’ to be that body of writing that registers in various
ways, at the levels of form and content, the historical experience of capitalist
modernity. We aim to publish works that take up the challenge of understand-
ing how literature registers both the global extension of ‘modern’ social forms
and relations and the peculiar new modes of existence and experience that are
engendered as a result. Our particular interest lies in studies that analyse the
registration of this decisive historical process in literary consciousness and affect.
Pablo Mukherjee is Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in English
and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, UK.
Neil Lazarus is Professor and teaches on the English and Comparative Literary
Studies program at the University of Warwick, UK.
Editorial Board:
Nicholas Brown, University of Illinois, USA; Bo G. Ekelund, University of
Stockholm, Sweden; Dorota Kolodziejczyk, Assistant Professor, Wroclaw
University, Poland; Paulo de Medeiros, University of Warwick, UK; Robert
Spencer, University of Manchester, UK; Imre Szeman, University of Alberta,
Canada; Peter Hitchcock, Baruch College, USA; Ericka Beckman, University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA; Sarah Brouillette, Carleton University,
Canada; Supriya Chaudhury, Jadavpur University, India; Stephen Shapiro,
University of Warwick, UK
New Comparisons in World Literature
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Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England
Contemporary World
Narrative Fiction and
the Spaces of Neoliberalism
Michael K. Walonen
Assistant Professor, Bethune-Cookman University, USA
Michael Walonen
Bethune-Cookman University
Florida, USA
ISBN 978-1-349-71521-3 ISBN 978-1-137-54955-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-54955-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016003103
Springer London Heidelberg New York Dordrecht
© Michael Walonen 2016
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2016 978-1-137-54954-9
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether
the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifi cally the rights of translation,
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks,
etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifi c statement, that
such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore
free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice
and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of
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Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by SpringerNature
The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. London.
To my friend and mentor Robert Coleman-Senghor, and to
my two grandfathers, the Finnish Bolshevik and the railroad
union man. This world that’s been wrought is not the one they
struggled for.
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Contents
Acknowledgments viii
1 Introduction 1
Part I Broad Trends
2 Contemporary North American Narrative Fiction
and the Landscapes of Neoliberalism: The Explosion
of Corporate Capitalism and the Spaces of the Fallen
American Middle Class 21
3 Speculation, Social Conflict, and the Ethics
of Untrammeled Accumulation in the American
Neoliberal Financier Novel 45
4 Spatial Division, Bricolage Settlement, and Informal
Economies in the Developing-World Slum Novel 79
Part II Cases in Point
5 Psycho-Geographic Orientation in the Neoliberal City:
Establishing and Contesting Place Identity in the
Nascent Literature of Dubai 107
6 Sense of Place, Consumer Capitalism, and
the Sexual Politics of Global Nomadism
in the Popular Fiction of Dubai 128
7 The Spatial/Political-Economic Dynamics of Theme
Parks in Contemporary Transatlantic Fiction 151
8 Conclusion: Humanistic Study in a Time
of Nightmare Economics 165
Bibliography 168
Index 177
vii
Acknowledgments
Many individuals have helped to sustain this book and/or its author
through the course of completion. First off, I would like thank my editors
and reviewers at Palgrave Macmillan for their generous encouragement
and feedback. My colleagues Louis Colombo and Douglas Rivero pro-
vided early insightful commentary on the conceptual framework of this
study, while Helen Morey at the Carl Swisher Library has worked tirelessly
to acquire the broad array of source texts this project has necessitated. My
student research assistant Hope Conroy has been a great help in locating
and acquiring additional research material – and has been a good sport,
tolerating my repetitive jibes about her massively circumscribed dietary
habits. The students in my Postcolonial Literature and Contemporary
Literature classes aided me in thinking through the novels I examine
in Chapters 3 and 4 here, while my department head Jan Holston has
done everything in her power to secure for me the time to pull this study
together.
Finally, I need to thank Hunter Blake Walonen, Esq. for understanding
that Daddy has to write some evenings in the summer and Lorien Leonard
for her bountiful support and affirmation.
viii
1
Introduction
Recent American public discourse – strongly impacted by the 2008
economic collapse, the nation’s plodding recovery from it, and the
Occupy Wall Street Movement’s popularization of a vision of a soci-
ety divided by the class-based interests of the wildly affluent richest
1 percent of the population and those of everyone else – has evinced a
dawning awareness of the ravages the neoliberal economic project has
wrought domestically (if not abroad). The long-standing hegemonic
American self-image construct – based on core notions of meritocracy,
socio-economic self-determination, and social class fluidity – that has kept
substantial segments of the population from apprehending the erosion
of the more even wealth distribution of the immediate postwar decades
and the rising tide of plutocracy seems to be breaking down, judging, for
instance, from a Gallup World report picked up by numerous newspapers
that shows a steep reduction in Americans’ ‘satisfaction with their free-
dom’ to set their life courses, seemingly due to pessimism about their eco-
nomic outlooks and perceptions of government ‘corruption’ (Clifton). Or
take the fact that even a relatively conservative publication like Forbes will
publish an article, ‘The U.S. Middle Class is Turning Proletarian,’ arguing
that ‘capitalism is becoming less democratic’ and one out of three people
born into the American middle class will fall out of it when they enter
into adulthood (Kotkin). Or that Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman’s
New York Times articles on rising wealth inequality and the degeneration
of American democracy have made him a minor celebrity, while econo-
mist Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014),
which argues that a rising inequality of wealth distribution is endemic to
capitalism, has enjoyed a crossover success with the general public almost
unheard of for an academic tome – becoming a New York Times bestseller
and the top-selling volume on Amazon.com for a time (Cohn). This trend
1