Abstract
ABSTRACT This article examines two novels by contemporary American women writers: Luster by Ravel Leilani (2020) and My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh (2018). It charts some of the ways in which both use art and portrayals of art to theorise late capitalism: its amorphous grip on the aesthetics of the contemporary, and what Fredric Jameson famously referred to as the ‘waning of affect’ under its cultural dominance. I argue, however, that these novels also offer a distinct approach to navigating late capitalism and the types of desires (for more of the same) it generates, and that they do this by resisting genre. This resistance of genre reads in terms of a plotlessness or ongoingness which serves the purpose, I suggest, of holding space for other, illegible, as-yet uncast desires which might disrupt capitalist convention.
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