Super Sad True Love Story Research Articles

Welcome to America 2.0”: Reading Waste in Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story

This article proposes a reading of Gary Shteyngart’s celebrated novel Super Sad True Love Story (2010), a text that straddles the dystopian and the satiric in its depiction of a quasicontemporary America, from the perspective of Waste Studies. Through the problematic relationship between its two main characters, Shteyngart’s novel articulates the wide-ranging effects of globalization on a generationally-ruptured American society, that in many ways stands also for the First World at large. Drawing from sociologists, cultural critics, and philosophers like Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck, Byung-Chul Han, John Scanlan and Susan Sontag, who have theorized how individuals today are molded, challenged and threatened by powerful extrinsic forces in the era of globalization, this article aims to explore how Super Sad True Love Story showcases a range of mutually interrelated “modes of waste,” resulting from the writer’s pushing to a satiric/dystopic extreme contemporary American practices in politics and finance, citizenship and social ethics, culture and language, and even biological research.

Dystopic Simulacra, Virtual Identities and Cultural Implosion in Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story

This paper offers a critique of contemporary media culture, virtual identities, and simulacra in the implosion of cultural and human values. The contemporary culture is characterized by media and virtual reality,which reduces the traditional concept of human interaction, language, and culture. The paper interprets GarryShteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story in the light of Jameson, Baudrillard and Nicol's concepts of simulacra and media culture. Shteyngart’s novel takes the dystopic view of a consumer society where human lives are subject to social media feeds, and human subjectivity is nothing more than an algorithm of credit and ranking. In this dystopic situation, Jameson's aesthetic of cognitive mapping can help to make sense of one's subjectivity and orientation in the culture of simulation and implosion. This paper claims that dystopic simulacra produce virtual identities at the cost of human subjectivity and language, which causes cultural and social implosion.

How the Other Half Looks: The Lower East Side and the Afterlife of Images

How the Other Half Looks: The Lower East Side and the Afterlife of Images

Big Data and the Practice of Reading in Super Sad True Love Story

Big Data and the Practice of Reading in Super Sad True Love Story

Shteyngart's Super Sad True(th): The Äppärät, a "Work[ing] of Art" in an Internet Age of Digital Reproduction

"Shteyngart's Super Sad True(th): The Äppärät, a 'Work[ing] of Art' in an Internet Age of Digital Reproduction" examines Gary Shteyngart's neo-Orwellian interrogation of how race/ethnicity (Jewish American, Korean American, and other minority identities), gender, sexuality, class, immigration, and the surveillance technology of the American present provide the context in which the democracy collapses. Shteyngart's novel is an epic study, influenced by the collapse of the Soviet Union, of how the equivalent of iPhone technology enables the demise of the state. Part love story, part comic satire, part sci-fi dystopia, Shteyngart's Super Sad True also deploys a critique of neo-liberal consumerist culture and shows the decay of the critical thought requisite for a healthy republic. In short, Shteyngart's novel offers surveillance and society, digital reproduction and propaganda (an update of Benjamin) as the theme for our new era of post-literacy. This essay highlights, in particular, the central role Shteyngart's äppärät plays throughout the novel. This multifaceted trope is the key to discerning Shteyngart's logic, and the hidden ironies of Super Sad True Love Story.

Hamilton, Geoff Understanding Gary Shteyngart (review)

SEER, 96, 4, OCTOBER 2018 772 Hamilton, Geoff. Understanding Gary Shteyngart. Understanding Contemporary American Literature. The University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, SC, 2017. xi + 142 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $39.99. Of the third wave of Russian immigrant writers currently residing in the United States, only Gary Shteyngart can be said to have achieved true celebrity status. Thisisperhapsbecause,asGeoffHamiltonelucidatesinhisengagingstudyforthe University of South Carolina Press’s ‘Understanding Contemporary American Literature’ series, Shteyngart stands apart from many of his contemporaries as an émigré of the Soviet, rather than the post-Soviet era. Arriving in New York in 1979 at the age of 7, Shteyngart had to assimilate fast, but it was not an easy process. Not because his parents resisted becoming American citizens — quite the opposite, in fact — but because of the extent to which finding his place in late Cold War American society meant that Shteyngart had to revoke the heritage that had so briefly but intensely defined him. Shteyngart’s predicament has drawn many comparisons with that of his predecessor, Vladimir Nabokov, who like Shteyngart was forced to abandon his homeland and negotiate a new identity, first as an émigré in interwar Europe, andultimatelyasaRussianinAmericawritinginEnglish.MuchofShteyngart’s work is about this problem of negotiating identity — in his case a triad of Russian, American and Jewish personae — and the impossibility of shaking off the formative influences of a Russia that has been similarly lost to history. In an early New York Times interview, following the publication of his first novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, Shteyngart is described as perhaps ‘the only Soviet émigré in history who had no desire to leave’ (‘From Russia With Tsoris’, New York Times Magazine, 2 June 2002). ‘It sounds weird, but I loved my Soviet childhood. […] The Communist life suited me just great. I loved the Red Army and everything. It only became horrible once you were an adult’ (ibid.; p. 7). Shteyngart’s response to this dilemma is to deploy a combination of self-irony and satire, each serving as a kind of leveller such that he is able to construct a public persona that is carefully mediated —through his fictional, autobiographical, press and online incarnations — as well as versions of the United States and Russia in the post-Cold War world that are remorselessly and equally bleak. In the same New York Times interview, Shteyngart declared that ‘it was his duty to capture the aching desperation of modern Russian life, whether in Brighton Beach or in Moscow’, whilst the ‘rankly overripe and miserably discordant America’ of his third novel, Super Sad True Love Story (2010), offers a dystopian vision in which ‘capitalism and totalitarianism [merge] to produce a society that is at once open […] yet definitively closed’, as the ‘nearly unlimited freedoms [it offers] can be expressed only within an environment of relentless public exposure and punitive control’ (p. 66). REVIEWS 773 Not necessarily despite, but possibly because of his success as a RussianAmerican writer of celebrity status and universal acclaim in the West, he has, as Hamilton points out, been ‘disinherited by Russia’. A reviewer for TimeOut Moskva accused Shteyngart of ‘masquerading as a Russian’ because ‘his style and his jokes are always completely American’ (p. 19). What they failed to appreciate was that, although he may have given up his native language (‘he does not have a Russian keyboard at home’), the formative influence of classic Russian literature shares an equal significance in his fiction to the work of American writers, from Gogol´ to Chekhov, Mark Twain to Joseph Heller. Hamilton’s study is structured in the form of a chronological survey of Shteyngart’s career, detailing the critical reception of and offering in-depth commentaries on the memoir and three novels published between 2002 and 2014, as well as a concluding chapter on his status as an American literary celebrity. Shortly after the publication of his memoir, Little Failure, at the beginning of 2014, Shteyngart embarked on a new novel, Hotel Solitaire, pegged as ‘an international thriller’ by the New York Times (25 March 2014), in which his preoccupation with ‘the agency individuals might claim in abandoning one identityandassuminganother’(p.109)stillappearedtobeatitsheart.Theresult, Lake Success, published in September 2018, which...

“Act Two for America”: Narcissism, Money, and the Death of American Literature in Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story

Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story is set in a dystopian New York City of the not-so-distant, and uncannily familiar, future. Shteyngart's America is hopelessly indebted to China, has ceded government control of the military to private corporations, and is populated by a citizenry narcissistically enthralled with hand-held media devices called “äppäräti.” In this article, I examine how Shteyngart depicts the collapse of the United States as a global power as a corollary to the devaluation of US currency and the end of American literature as a mode of cultural production. Money, literature, and American national identity are all yoked to the concept of narcissism in Shteyngart's novel. American narcissism has often been supported by narratives of US exceptionalism, which represent the United States as the centre of global geopolitics, New York City as the global centre of culture and commerce, the US dollar as the de facto currency of a global economy, and American literature as valuable cultural capital. However, when the US loses its place as a global superpower in Super Sad True Love Story, it is significant that many of the novel's characters—especially Shteyngart's narrator, Lenny Abramov—note this loss primarily in terms of their changed relationships with both money and literature. I read Shteyngart's novel as a (sometimes failed) critique of the role of narcissism in establishing bonds of national, economic, and literary belonging, and of the ways in which globalization and economic crises can destabilize these affective connections.

Editor's Note

Editor's Note Mari Yoshihara, Editor This issue begins with Kandice Chuh's presidential address delivered at the ASA annual meeting in Chicago in November 2017. In the face of a wide range of attacks on academic freedom nationally and globally, Chuh asks us to deliberate responses to the current scene, not by defending academic freedom but first by tracing the longue durée of the principle originating in professionalization of the academy with its underpinning liberal ideology and US nationalism. She further reminds us of the conceptions of the autonomous rights-bearing citizen that shape the understanding of academic freedom, which has then been deployed against the interrogation of racism and settler colonialism in the name of civility. She calls on us, as an association, to unlearn the inherited ways of knowing and being and to practice the year's conference theme, "a pedagogy of dissent": "an organized approach to un/learning grounded in the world and founded in generosity and compassion, understood to be essential to social transformation." In response, Soo Ah Kwon reflects on the ways in which our own professional labor in universities is often implicated in the logic of liberal academic freedom and its neoliberal products—for instance, in our advocacy for institutional diversity that is devoid of political and structural inquiry into inequality and injustice. She reminds us of the need for a relentless critique of our profession, its governing logic, and our relationship to universities as our workplace. Jodi Melamed uses Chuh's address to situate US higher education in the context of the proliferation of rights-based forms of racial and colonial capitalist violence in the name of the common good. Discussing how the ASA itself has been a very site of such contestations, she asks us to contemplate the kinds and forms of "thick relationality" that would form pedagogies of collective action in our own association. Four essays address various modes of temporalities and spatialities in the way the world is captured by artists, writers, and critics. Frances Tran's elegant essay, "Time Traveling with Care: On Female Coolies and Archival Speculations," approaches the history of the coolie trade and the figure of the female coolie using the science fiction trope of time travel, proposing an affective and aesthetic practice with the archive that does not aim to reproduce mastery or establish subjects as knowable entities. In "Appraisal Narratives: Reading Race on the Midcentury Block," Adrienne Brown problematizes another set of archives—narratives of residential segregation in literary fiction, forms, manuals, maps, and urban reportage—to illustrate how idioms of perception, value, and taste undergirding home ownership and neighborhood value in the United [End Page vii] States have been organized by race. Brandon Webb's "Laughter Louder Than Bombs? Apocalyptic Graphic Satire in Cold War Cartooning, 1946–1959" examines the left-liberal divide in the works of the nation's leading syndicated cartoonists, Herbert Block and Jules Feiffer, to argue that satirizing the contradictions of the nuclear era meant questioning the basic assumptions of the Cold War rivalry and breaking from the consensus framework. Simon Willmetts's "Digital Dystopia: Surveillance, Autonomy, and Social Justice in Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story" analyzes the question of autonomy in Shteyngart's novel to argue for personhood presented in the dystopian genre that is socially embedded and politically engaged, and a necessary but insufficient precondition for the resistance and refusal of digital mass surveillance. The issue carries four book reviews on topics that are all the more relevant in our times. Joseph Stuart reviews five books on racial formation and the civil rights movement. Rebecca Hill discusses works on the history of political culture and the shaping of public opinion and discourse. The three books reviewed by Benjamin Medeiros take up the political and cultural battles over free speech on college campuses. Christopher Perreira discusses three books that deal with the cultures and logics of the carceral state and settler colonialism. In the Event Review, Doug Ishii discusses the exhibit on the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II at Alphawood Gallery in Chicago. The social impact game Survivance—which takes its name from Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor's term that...

Digital Dystopia: Surveillance, Autonomy, and Social Justice in Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story

This essay proposes Gary Shteyngart's dystopian satire, Super Sad True Love Story, as an appropriate heuristic model for understanding surveillance and society in the twenty-first century. While George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four remains influential, many of his observations now seem anachronistic. Shteyngart, it is argued, offers a more appropriate vision for our world of decentralized digital "surveillant assemblages" that maintain a "control society" with little need for a Big Brother–like state. Unlike Orwell, who predicted the "proles" would be relatively free from surveillance, Shteyngart also emphasizes the disproportionate impact of surveillance on different sections of society. Finally, this essay turns to the thorny question of personal liberty and autonomy as a justification for the right to privacy and as a central theme within the dystopian genre. Many critics argue that dystopian literature is inherently reactionary because of its anti-utopianism and individualism. This essay, however, argues that the kind of autonomy that privacy activists and dystopian novelists most often wish to defend should be understood not as a self-sufficiency but as personhood that is socially embedded and politically engaged, and, crucially, a necessary but insufficient precondition for the resistance and refusal of digital mass surveillance.

Citizens United v The Federal Election Commission, Inverted Totalitarianism and Contemporary Fiction

In this paper I will explore the results of the 2010 Supreme Court Citizens United vs The Federal Election Commission as reflected in the contemporary literature. I will look at the role the corporation plays in American politics post Citizens United. My primary texts is the novel Super Sad True Love Story. My research question is: did the Citizens United decision open the door for ‘inverted totalitarianism’ to seep through the cracks of American society Using the allegorical novel Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart, I will show how Citizens United, the political theory of Hannah Arendt, and the novel parallel and reflect the reality of our culture; where the weight of corporate oppression squashes the individual leaving that person simultaneously exposed and in complete loneliness.

Human life as digitised data assemblage: health, wealth and biopower in Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story

With recent and emerging developments in technology, we are witnessing a process of cultural and social redefinition where the foundations of how we understand the body, the human and the...

“Some new dimension devoid of hip and bone”: Remediated Bodies and Digital Posthumanism in Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story

In its discussion of Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story , this essay shows how posthuman fantasies of a bodiless existence come about through processes of digital remediation similar to those described in Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s now classic study of new media. For these critics, Western desires for unfiltered encounters with reality paradoxically result in the proliferation of new media forms that substitute “hypermediacy” for “immediacy.” Likewise, in Shteyngart’s novel, characters’ desires for attenuated or completely erased bodies are realized in the act of multiplying their bodies’ relationships with information technologies. In this respect, the novel enables us to explore the ways that a new posthuman realism shapes human bodies, desires, and politics in the digital age.

Bad Credit

This essay reads twenty-first-century credit scoring against eighteenth- and nineteenth-century forms of credit evaluation. While the latter famously draws its qualitative model of credibility from the novel, and the former predictably describes itself as quantitative and impersonal, in fact the credit score, the social person, and literary character remain significantly entangled. Through a reading of Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, this essay shows what kinds of persons the practice of credit rating produces.

Novels and novelty in trend research — Using novels to perceive weak signals and transfer frames of reference

Science fiction (SF) prototyping uses fictional stories about the future to investigate the implications of science and technology not yet feasible at present. Since such a setting enhances creativity and perception, it has been identified as a means to develop new products, services, and business models. Novelty starts with weak signals of change within an environment and leads to innovations. From a constructivist perspective, in which knowledge needs to be processed or �constructed�, weak signals of change are not perceived by the outside environment. Rather, they have to be conceptualized in a cognitive process. We use this theoretical perspective to illustrate the value of novels in identifying and cognitively conceptualizing weak signals. With the support of sense-making theory, we illustrate how novels contribute to comprehending novelty in two frames of reference: by broadening the perspective, enhancing the creativity, and increasing the sensitivity of managers/corporate decision makers to detect weak signals; and by ensuring that the customer comprehends the link of an SF prototype to a future product or service. Our theoretical considerations are illustrated by an example from the novel, Super Sad True Love Story, in which the SF prototype is part of a broader fictional story.

Ending aging in the Shteyngart of Eden: Biogerontological discourse in a Super Sad True Love Story

This article broaches the topic of biogerontology as presented in Gary Shteyngart's dystopic novel Super Sad True Love Story(2010) from the perspective of cultural and literary gerontology and examines how the novel manages to challenge predominant discourses in the field of scientific anti-aging studies, especially the notion that old age is a disease that can be cured. It compares the novel's presentation of biogerontological knowledge to current developments in the field, using Cambridge biogerontologist and immortality prophet Aubrey de Grey's book Ending Aging(2007) as an example. Based on the assumption that cultural criticism can and should impact scientific and medical research on aging, this paper asks whether (the analysis of) fictional texts can be seen as a cultural critical intervention into the ageism so often openly displayed in scientific discourses.

The Future of Convergence

Novelists have a better track record than economists at foretelling the future. Consider then Gary Shteyngart’s timely comic novel “Super Sad True Love Story” (Random House, 2010), which provides a rather graphic vision of what lies in store for the world economy. The novel takes place in the near future and is set against the backdrop of a United States that lies in economic and political ruin. The country’s bankrupt economy is ruled with a firm hand by the IMF from its new Parthenon-shaped headquarters in Singapore. China and sovereign wealth funds have parceled America’s most desirable real estate among themselves. Poor people are designated as LNWI (“low net worth individuals”) and are being pushed into ghettoes. Even skilled Americans are desperate to acquire residency status in foreign lands. This is sheer fantasy of course, but one that seems to resonate well with the collective mood. A future in which the U.S and other advanced economies are forced to play second fiddle to the dynamic emerging economies in Asia and elsewhere is rapidly becoming cliche. This vision is based in part on the very rapid pace of economic growth that emerging and developing economies experienced in the run-up to the global financial crisis of 2008-2009. Latin America benefited from a pace of economic development that it had not experienced since the 1970s, and Africa began to close the gap with the advanced countries for the first time since countries in the continent received their independence. Even though most of these countries were hit badly by the crisis, their recovery has also been swift. Optimism on developing countries is matched by pessimism on the rich country front. The United States and Europe have emerged from the crisis with debilitating challenges. They need to address a crushing debt burden and its unpleasant implications for fiscal and monetary policy. They also need to replace growth models which were based in many instances on finance, real estate, and unsustainable levels of borrowing. Japan has long ceased to exhibit any growth dynamism. And the eurozone’s future remains highly uncertain - with the economic and political ramifications of its unraveling looking nothing less than scary. In such an environment, rapid growth in the developing world is the only thing that could propel the world economy forward and generate increasing demand for rich-country goods and services - the only silver lining in an otherwise dreary future. The question I address in this paper is whether this gap in performance between the developed and developing worlds can continue, and in particular, whether developing nations can sustain the rapid growth they have experienced of late. I will not have anything to say on the prospects for the advanced economies themselves, assuming, along with conventional wisdom, that their growth will remain sluggish at best. My focus is squarely on the developing and emerging countries and on the likelihood of continued convergence.