Reading for Neoliberalism, Reading like Neoliberals

Abstract

This review essay considers Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution and Rachel Greenwald Smith’s Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism by placing both works in a genealogy of studies both of neoliberalism itself as well as other works of economically oriented literary and cultural criticism. The authors suggest that neoliberalism might well take over the mantle of organizing economic narrative in a manner similar to “late capitalism” and “globalization,” and they explore what a literary or cultural neoliberalism might look like. While both of the reviewed works offer a great deal to scholars, the authors note that, for the most part, theorists of neoliberalism itself—Foucault excepted—are not prominent in these studies. This omission, the authors conclude, has as its effect an obfuscation of the ways in which our current reading and interpretative practices do in fact share some real contiguity with, for example, a neoliberal thinker such as Friedrich Hayek. The article concludes by wondering what form a more inclusive conversation between literary and cultural studies and neoliberalism might take.