Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture ed. by Mitchum Huehls and Rachel Greenwald Smith

Abstract

Reviewed by: Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture ed. by Mitchum Huehls and Rachel Greenwald Smith Edward Ardeneaux IV (bio) Mitchum Huehls and Rachel Greenwald Smith, eds., Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. 331 pp., $34.95 (paper or ebook). ISBN: 978–1–14214–2310–4. As editors Mitchum Huehls and Rachel Greenwald Smith note in the collection’s introduction, “Four Phases of Neoliberalism: An Introduction,” the persistence of neoliberalism as a critical idea in literary studies has become more prevalent, even as the term carries little consistency of definition. Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture seeks to redress the dissonance of critical discussion around the “many competing takes on neoliberalism” in contemporary scholarship (12). To this end, the editors’ most useful intervention comes through a taxonomy that divides neoliberalism into four distinct, chronological phases: the first, economic phase; the second, political phase; the third, sociocultural phase; and, the fourth, ontological phase. The editors present a prodigious historical and cultural context for neoliberalism as a term, noting “our hope is that in offering such a mapping of theory, history, and literature, we can address the perceived incoherence of the field while maintaining a breadth of coverage, both here and in the chapters we have collected, that will be useful to students and scholars new to the field” (4). To this aim, the collection succeeds, providing an overview of different approaches to and ways of maneuvering through the complexities—ontological or otherwise—of neoliberalism. Specifically, this collection will be most useful to readers new to the field or seeking an overview of neoliberalism in literary culture, while scholars already ensconced in the field or in search of methodologies of resistance will more likely find specific essays useful based on topic or theoretical approach than they will the collection as a whole. The collection presents a fairly dark, hopeless statement on literary culture and contemporary literature in the ontological phase of neoliberalism. Divided into four sections of grouped essays, including “Literary Theory,” “Literary Form,” “Literary Representations,” and “Literary Institutions,” the collection comments on the aesthetic and institutional responses to neoliberalism in contemporary life, specifically narrowed to a geographical focus on the United States and Great Britain. These essays are thematically tied together by the idea that neoliberalism—and its associated economic complications—is inescapable and that literary works provide a ground for mapping their imbrication within and resistance to its economic and cultural influences. Hope, then, emerges from readings of specific novels or nonfiction works, as in Jeffery T. Nealon’s reading of conceptual poetry, Jason M. Baskin’s reading of Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office of Soft Architecture, and Marcial Gonzáles’s reading of People of the Paper. Each of these essays uncovers methods that [End Page 105] literary works use to challenge the fixity of neoliberalism. The two readings of Gone Girl, on the other hand, by Jane Elliott and Andrew Hoberek respectively, both locate this novel as neoliberalism’s new realism, with realism reframed by Hoberek as “a practice of inventing new social logics, particularly in times of transition” (237). Of course, Hoberek notes that perhaps “in order to thrive within neoliberalism one has to be a bit—maybe more than a bit—of a sociopath” (250). Much of the remainder of the collection, especially the fourth section on “Literary Institutions,” dwells in the ontological horrors of the contemporary moment, whether in the author become executive producer on an HBO model, in the scarcity politics of the literary marketplace (especially for non-white authors), or in the humanities’ ever-tenuous place in the neoliberal university. This collection shines when unleashing neoliberalism’s critical and theoretical apparatus at our disposal today. Though many of the essays included are pitched at a fairly high level of theoretical engagement, a critical discussion foundationally located in Marx, Foucault, and Jameson expands into the theory most apt to explain or dispel neoliberalism, as a look at the collection’s helpful index attests. Readers can expect to leave the collection with an updated sense of the theoretical approaches available for entering the critical conversation. In this vein, the collection opens with a brief essay by Walter Benn Michaels, but...