Textual Practice

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Introduction: reading and writing the economic

present

Emily Johansen & Alissa G. Karl

To cite this article: Emily Johansen & Alissa G. Karl (2015) Introduction: reading and writing the
economic present, Textual Practice, 29:2, 201-214, DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2014.993516

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Textual Practice, 2015
Vol. 29, No. 2, 201 –214, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2014.993516

Emily Johansena and Alissa G. Karlb

Introduction: reading and writing the economic present1

This introduction to the issue offers an overview of current debates on

neoliberalism as it relates to the contemporary novel. Distinguishing it
from the novel of globalisation and the cosmopolitan novel, we suggest
that the neoliberal novel is one particularly attuned to the economic ration-
alities of its time; it signals an attention to the ways novels circulate in an
economic and geopolitical field and a consideration of the apparatus that
structures the exchange and distribution of texts. We argue that the neolib-
eral novel is as much about methods and priorities of reading as it is about
mimesis, thematics, or content. We also consider the way that, in addition
to making visible the transformation of neoliberal economic values into
cultural norms, the neoliberal novel is implicated in forms of power and
the consent they require. Rather than seeing the multiple paths of the con-
temporary novel as signs of its superfluity or its capitulation to capital, this
special issue attends to how this multiplicity of purpose demonstrates a
response to the capacious mobility of neoliberalism itself.

Keywords
Neoliberalism; novel; novel of globalisation; cosmopolitan novel; literary
criticism

# 2015 Taylor & Francis

Textual Practice

In a 2008 review of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland and Tom McCarthy’s

Remainder, Zadie Smith outlines the contemporary crisis of the novel
and two potential paths forward, one exemplified by each novel. Smith
notes that, for the contemporary novel, ‘the last man standing is the
Balzac-Flaubert model [of which Netherland is emblematic], on the evi-
dence of its extraordinary persistence’, but she asks, ‘is it really the
closest model we have to our condition? Or simply the bedtime story
that comforts us most’?2 As Smith’s language here makes clear, she is scep-
tical of the aestheticising tendencies of novels written in the lyrical realist
mode – a mode in which she locates some of her own work. Smith’s
sense of the genre-in-crisis is just one of many reflections on the state of
the novel that index anxieties about what cultural forms mean today,
how we ought to study them, and the relationship of both to current econ-
omic rationalities. More to the point for our purposes here is the analogous
way in which Smith’s description of the ‘persistence’ of the lyrical realist
novel echoes the oft-heard assertion of neoliberal capital’s ubiquity and
teleological inevitability.
The novel has long been considered a thoroughly sociable genre,
mapping the worlds in which we live, the symbolic forms by which we
abide, the maturation of subjects, and the land and property on which
they subsist. It has also been prominently connected with the rise of
liberal capitalism – most prominently in Ian Watt’s The Rise of the
Novel and Georg Lukács’ The Historical Novel – so it is not surprising
that the novelistic form typically associated with the rise of the genre
(the realist novel) is referenced, here by Smith, in the same totalising
and universalising way we often speak about capitalism. But we would
like to assert that it is this very sociability, and specifically sociability
under capital, that renders the novel such an appropriate venue for the
interrogation of what Smith calls ‘our condition’ under neoliberal ortho-
doxy – and this is nothing less than the ‘condition’, as the essays collected
here elaborate, of our bodies, lived environments, labour, temporality and
collective institutions. And these conditions – what we focus on here as
those tied to the policies and ideologies of neoliberalism – are not the
same as those of the liberal, classical capitalism that Watt, Lukács and
others connect to the novel’s historical rise.
It is now fairly routine to note that neoliberal capitalism, or neoliber-
alism plain and simple, is a notoriously slippery and capacious signifier.3
Jeremy Gilbert is right in asking in the title of his introduction to a
recent special issue of New Formations on ‘Neoliberal Culture’, ‘What
Kind of Thing Is “Neoliberalism”?’4 Gilbert then proceeds to expand
upon a number of political, intellectual and historical manifestations
that we might designate ‘neoliberal’; without replicating Gilbert’s
project, it seems worthwhile to briefly (and thus necessarily only partially)

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 Emily Johansen and Alissa G. Karl Introduction

identify some key valences and historical developments by which

the ‘neoliberal’ turn of the past forty or so years is constituted. We can
speak, then, of neoliberalism as an economic dogma and political rationale
that holds that free markets and competition will produce the best out-
comes for the most people. This tenet often presumes and produces scen-
arios of radical individualism and self-proprietorship that are predicated
upon this competitive ethos. ‘Neoliberalism’ also often refers to specific,
state policy interventions in the economy such as the privatisation of
state or public resources, the curtailment of state welfare provisions, dereg-
ulation of trade and labour markets, and state initiatives to weaken organ-
ised labour. Such state-sponsored measures are also enforced around the
world via international bodies such as the International Monetary Fund
and World Bank. Often coordinated with such governmental policies is
neoliberalism’s corporate variant, under which firms and finance have
renovated labour pacts and financial transactions across the globe. Often
in collaboration with governments, corporations engage in a ‘race to the
bottom’ seeking the least expensive, just-in-time and flexible labour
arrangements, the lowering of trade barriers and avoidance of corporate
regulation and tax liability – all of which are rationalised by the presump-
tion that more (and hypothetically, but often not practically, more com-
petitive) market activity will make everyone better off.
The term ‘neoliberalism’ thus evinces an overlap of policy and para-
digm – indeed, an inextricability of the two that, we claim, is not as per-
vasive under other recent economic orthodoxies (say, those of welfare
capitalism or Keynesianism). The final valence of the neoliberal desig-
nation that we will note here addresses this particular overlap in that it
names a saturation of all spheres of human activity by a market logic; as
Wendy Brown puts it, ‘[n]eoliberal rationality . . . involves extending and
disseminating market values to all institutions and social action’.5 While we
might support or contest individual initiatives that smack of a neoliberal
valorisation of ‘competition’ (NAFTA, the privatisation of your local
water authority, or the US tournament for educational funding under
No Child Left Behind), the imagination of social life as a market is
likely not an ideological position that any of us have formally validated
or rejected. And while the contributors to this issue elaborate upon
various of the aforementioned senses of ‘neoliberalism’, this last one –
the ubiquity of a market logic – might be that which provokes the afore-
mentioned proclamations of a neoliberal telos. Indeed, as Fredric Jameson
has noted, and as some of our essays repeat, ‘it seems to be easier for us
today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of
nature than the breakdown of late capitalism’.6
Although the designation ‘neoliberal’ covers such a broad field, we
follow Gilbert’s refutation of the claim that neoliberalism cannot be

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used as an analytical optic because it is ‘an incoherent concept with no

objective referent’.7 And while the essays in Gilbert’s ‘Neoliberal Cultures’
volume certainly provide a wide-ranging explication of the above-named
vectors of neoliberalism, we propose the novel as one historically specific
means of interrogating and understanding neoliberalism in its various
manifestations. Specifically, we hold that the novel’s imbrication in and
contiguity with the history of capitalism provides a unique occasion to
similarly uncover and historicise the economic paradigms of the present
– particularly as neoliberalism is notoriously good at hiding behind a
‘common sense’ ethic of competition and individualism, and exploiting
a commonplace historical association of market capitalism with represen-
tative democracy and other widely acknowledged public ‘goods’.
Our aim, however, is twofold, because even while we stake out the
novel as an especially useful analytical object, we also ask what the con-
ditions of neoliberalism mean for the novel as a genre and as a set of cul-
tural forms. If the characteristics we associate with the genre emerged, to
use Foucauldian categories, under the disciplinary episteme, how is the
novel different in the transition to neoliberal biopower? Have particular
generic changes emerged? Or has the transformation been more invisible,
re-framing existing characteristics in ways that reinforce the assumptions of
neoliberal capital? The essays in this special issue collectively posit that
there has, in fact, been a variety of both formal and thematic changes in
the genre that speak to the epistemic changes under capital in its current
incarnation, and that these produce new relations between subject and
genre, materiality and form. We would therefore answer Zadie Smith’s
query about whether we have a novelistic form appropriate to our
contemporary conditions in the affirmative, but how exactly the novel
models, integrates, or interrupts the social and ideological norms of the
neoliberal present remains an open question (and indeed a source of
anxiety for the genre-in-crisis crowd) that this special issue begins to
address.

The Contemporary novel and Enmeshed critique

Smith asserts that the novel’s interruption of present social norms comes
from the resolute immanence of works such as Tom McCarthy’s Remain-
der while contributor Pieter Vermeulen has elsewhere posited the disrup-
tive potential of texts such as David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten, with its
‘depiction of our globalised contemporaneity [that] rigorously refuses a
privileged perspective or a unifying voice’.8 Both modes echo Jacques Ran-
cière’s claim that the politics of literature is that which ‘intervenes in the
relationship between practices and forms of visibility and modes of

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 Emily Johansen and Alissa G. Karl Introduction

saying that carves up one or more common worlds’, redistributing the per-
ceptible.9 Under such a paradigm, the novel seems to be, almost necess-
arily, a document of social resistance. As we have seen, however, one of
the most characteristic elements of neoliberalism is its seemingly mono-
lithic ability to encompass and appropriate nearly all aspects of everyday
life. It is potentially naı̈ve, then, to assume that the novel somehow
avoids recapitulating the ideologies in which it is necessarily enmeshed.
This tension between the contestatory, political possibilities of the novel
and its aestheticisation of ‘the twenty-first-century bourgeois’s political
apathy’10 undergirds the examination of the novel in this special issue.
In designating the ‘neoliberal novel’, we thus attempt to conceptualise a
body of writing not fully accounted for by oversimplified models of resist-
ance or capitulation, or by models of national or diasporic literature. We
follow, then, from Rita Barnard’s call for the identification of the ‘emer-
gent fictions of the global . . . where we might find a new kind of plot,
with new coordinates of time and space that may serve as a corollary to
the brave neo world of millennial capitalism’. For Barnard, this means
moving away from forms already theorised: ‘the novel of transnational
migration . . . and the colonial bildungsroman [which] seem to have
become rather stale today, as have the usual ways of accounting for
them’.11 This very staleness might be linked to the ubiquity of vague asser-
tions about the globalised nature of contemporary life that circulate widely,
both inside and outside of academic criticism. We offer the pairing of
neoliberalism and the novel as a way of specifying and thus reinvigorating
the study of the novel of the present, and interrogating the economic ration-
alities by which it is suffused and naturalised. This is not to say, then, that the
neoliberal novel is characterised by a radical break in form and content;
rather, the neoliberal novel signals an attention to the way novels circulate
in an economic and geopolitical field and a consideration of the apparatus
that structures the exchange and distribution of texts. This is arguably true
of all books: not just fiction and not just the novels that seem to reference
or recapitulate neoliberal values. The designation of the neoliberal novel
also, then, contains within itself a sense of the criticism it requires.
This critical attention to the economic vectors shaping the genre dis-
tinguishes the neoliberal novel from two other prominent ways of classify-
ing the contemporary transnational Anglophone novel: the novel of
globalisation and the cosmopolitan novel. Susanne Rohr suggests that
the novel of globalisation depicts a ‘fictional reality of disorientation, inse-
curity and imbalance within the bounds of a seemingly known and familiar
world’;12 such a novel illustrates forms of alienation that are neither the
‘wild modernist aesthetic experiment nor . . . anarchic post-modernist play-
fulness’.13 James Annesley similarly indexes the descriptive potential of the
novel of globalisation to its political possibility: the extent to which a text

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can be read as a ‘novel of globalization’ depends on whether ‘the text can be

said to reflect known conditions but [also] on [the] analysis of the extent to
which it adds to knowledge about and understanding of the discourses and
debates around globalization’.14 Annesley goes on to distinguish between a
‘novel of globalization’ and a ‘novel about globalization’15 – a distinction
that centres on a text’s explicit articulation of a ‘dialectical relationship with
the conditions of globalization’.16 Both Rohr and Annesley designate the
‘novel of globalization’ as that which somehow reproduces the everyday
realities of globalised life. This is to, perhaps, return mimetic realism to
the forefront of discussions of the novel’s interactions with global
systems and rationalities. Under this rubric, the novel reflects upon and
recognises – critically or not – the everyday experience of globalisation
through its realistic depiction of the global connections that structure con-
temporary experience in a variety of ways.
A related category is that of the ‘cosmopolitan novel’. Berthold
Schoene theorises the contemporary cosmopolitan novel as the updated
version of Benedict Anderson’s national novel, suggesting ‘it is the contem-
porary . . . novel as tour du monde, as a practice of communal world-narra-
tion . . . Nothing less, in fact, than the world as a whole will do as the
imaginative reference point, catchment area and addressee of the cosmopo-
litan novel’.17 The formal elements that Schoene identifies posit a different
form of globalised mimeticism:

cosmopolitan narration assembles as many as possible of the count-

less segments of our being-in-common into a momentarily compo-
site picture of the world [and] proceeds without erasing the
essential incongruousness or singularity of these individual segments,
which are left intact, even though they remain subject to continual
re-assessment.18

Schoene’s affinity with Rohr’s and Annesley’s theorisation of the novel of

globalisation is clear; however, what distinguishes his vision of the contem-
porary novel is its explicit planetarity, its transparent geographical incor-
poration of the globe as a whole. Spatiality, rather than temporality,
becomes key, then, in this vision of the contemporary novel and
mimesis;19 but as some of the essays that follow in this collection make
clear, an attentiveness to the logics of neoliberalism opens up an additional
set of parameters for thinking spatiality (as, for example, Alissa Karl’s essay
here demonstrates).
Such designations of the contemporary novel as globalised or cosmo-
politan make important claims about what the novel does – or can do – in
its current incarnations and conditions. Yet, outside of their careful initial
theorisations, these categories can too easily be used to translate market

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values into cultural norms when broadly and indiscriminately applied; this
is to say that the economic imperatives that celebrate and encourage the
global circulation of texts and people become coded as cultural heterogen-
eity. Both the globalised and the cosmopolitan novel are framed as forms of
critique, but this can paradoxically obscure their own internalisation of the
values of their particular socio-historical moment. As Jeffrey Nealon pithily
observes, the relation between the realms of postmodern cultural and
neoliberal economic production is ‘one logic, smeared across a bunch of
discourses’.20 This ‘smearing’ makes ‘neoliberal’ a useful category and
optic for analysis because the term reminds us that cultural forms generated
under its auspices are predicated upon and presume the tropes of today’s
dominant political economy, without necessarily submitting to them.
We furthermore venture that the related terminologies of cosmopolitan-
ism, globalism, transnationalism and the state, while highly useful, do
not constitutively presume this same imbrication that results in overlap-
ping thematic and formal negotiations with the economic present. In
other words, what we might specify as ‘neoliberal’ about our approach
to recent novels is our awareness of such texts’ self-conscious reliance on
the conditions that the texts might themselves trouble. This volume thus
attempts to use such historical self-consciousness as a platform for what
Nealon calls ‘periodizing the present – construct[ing] a vocabulary to
talk about the “new economies” . . . and their complex relations to cultural
production in the present moment, where capitalism seems nowhere near
the point of its exhaustion’.21 Nealon thus articulates a critical develop-
ment that, while it might incorporate the priorities of cosmopolitan, trans-
national, global and nation-state studies, probes the enmeshment of culture
and economics in a way that these fields as yet have not. Put another way,
the neoliberal novel is as much (if not more) about methods and priorities
of reading as it is about mimesis, thematics or content – methods and pri-
orities upon which transnational and cosmopolitan studies touch, but that
are not fully central to their analysis.

The novel and the neoliberal state

If, on one hand, the neoliberal novel and criticism of it expose its enmesh-
ment in the transformation of neoliberal economic policies into cultural
norms (and thus suggest links between economics and culture), it is also
implicated in the forms of power and the consent they require. This is
to recognise, then, the interplay between particularly statist forms of coer-
cion and consent; we might specify such an interplay between the subject
and the state, or ask whether the capitulation to economic logics and their
social rationales is inevitable or not. In his account of neoliberalism, David

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Harvey follows Antonio Gramsci’s articulation of ‘common sense’ and its

role in the creation of consent, and observes that ‘once the state apparatus
made the neoliberal turn it could use its powers of persuasion, co-optation,
bribery, and threat to maintain the climate of consent necessary to perpe-
tuate its power’.22 Harvey posits that such consent ‘required both politi-
cally and economically the construction of a neoliberal market-based
populist culture of differentiated consumerism and individual libertarian-
ism’.23 This creation of interconnected consent by governmental and cul-
tural means points to the oscillating tension under neoliberalism between
the state and the individual.
Yet, as Wendy Brown observes, state sovereignty in the forms that
Harvey identifies with the policies of the Thatcher and Reagan regimes
has decayed in a variety of ways:

nation-state sovereignty has been undercut . . . by neoliberal ration-

ality, which recognizes no sovereign apart from entrepreneurial
decision makers (large and small), which displaces legal and political
principles (especially liberal commitments to universal inclusion,
equality, liberty, and the rule of law) with market criteria, and
which demotes the political sovereign to managerial status.24

Brown goes on to note that ‘what appears at first blush as the articulation of
state sovereignty [the building of border walls] actually expresses its dim-
inution relative to other kinds of global forces – the waning relevance
and cohesiveness of the form’.25 While Brown does not suggest that the
state-as-form has ceased to mediate between the subject and collective,
she and others including Colin Crouch do point out – tellingly in the
post-2008 economic crash moment – the ways in which the state has
become an increasingly ambiguous and ambivalent point of articulation
for subject formation in response to neoliberal hegemony. As commenta-
tors have observed, the global economic crisis of 2008 pointed to a
moment where one might have expected a re-thinking of neoliberal con-
sensus but a further affirmation and commitment to this consensus
occurred instead.26 As Emily Davis’s contribution to this issue illustrates,
neoliberalism has long been tied to anxious connections between subject
and state, self and group. In her reading of Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny
Boy, Davis argues that the novel carefully links neoliberal commodities
and programmes of ‘structural adjustment’ with modalities of identity
such as sexuality, gender, ethnicity and class. The displacement of neoliberal
rationalities by identity politics, Davis suggests, obscures the perpetuation of
neoliberal consensus in its focus on hyper-individualised narratives of self-
actualisation.

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 Emily Johansen and Alissa G. Karl Introduction

Careful consideration, then, of the cultural forms of consent and

dissent become increasingly urgent under a neoliberalism that shifts away
from the state towards more ephemeral forms of sovereignty. Matthew
Hart and Jim Hansen’s recent special issue of Contemporary Literature on
‘Contemporary Literature and the State’ notably explores this very matter
– or how transnational dynamics such as labor mobility and finance co-
exist with ‘imperialist states and nationalist insurgencies’.27 Indeed, the
essays collected here demonstrate how an inquiry into neoliberalism is not
about sounding the state’s death knell, but about understanding its altered
functions and, more broadly, the status of sovereignty, consent and
dissent in our economic present. And where Hart and Hansen’s volume
‘challeng[es] the seeming necessity of the opposition between monolithic
state and individual artist’,28 the essays here offer neoliberal initiatives as a
useful analytical node for complicating this very dichotomy. For instance,
Chris Vials’ essay for this volume demonstrates how the state occupies an
ambivalent position in Margaret Atwood’s recent dystopic depictions of a
world thoroughly partitioned, and unfortunate subjects reduced to con-
ditions of bare survival, by neoliberal market forces. Where the recession
of a centralised state has authorised these forces to take on a totalitarian char-
acter, Vials demonstrates that Atwood’s novels make us wonder whether the
state protects liberal freedoms, exposes its citizenry to harsh market con-
ditions, or indeed provides a model of repression and control that can be
replicated by the market. Similarly, Kit Dobson’s essay queries neoliberal
discourses on the human, suggesting that some bodies count as more
human than others. The uneven humanity Dobson demonstrates in Rawi
Hage’s Cockroach undercuts triumphalist notions of neoliberal individuality
as the telos of liberal freedoms and the liberal state, arguing, instead, that
neoliberalism exacerbates already classed and racialised disjunctures
between the subject and the state. Our essays thus account for neoliberalism
as a primary condition for the ironic status of the state (as diminished by, but
as a primary enabler of neoliberal policy and practice), both in geopolitical
affairs and in the form of the novel, whose fate and development have been
linked to that of the state.29
All of this is to say that compliance, allegiance and resistance are today
cast in terms of a formulation of the market as, in Brett Levinson’s words, ‘a
way of comprehending, of knowing the globe . . . that threatens to bring
knowledge, even the need and desire for knowledge, to an end’.30 As Levin-
son notes, the market as the epistemological engine for neoliberal consensus
relies on processes of reification that obscure the market as a contingent
source of meaning. Levinson argues that ‘resistance to the market and to
the ends that this market spells – to history, politics, human relations, ideol-
ogy, activism – hinges largely on the maintenance of language. It turns on a
certain “speaking up” that consensus . . . strives to rub out’.31 While

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Levinson proceeds through an interrogation of the linguistic turn under

deconstruction, this special issue is similarly invested in the forms of ‘speak-
ing up’ that the neoliberal novel allows for – or not. So, as Pieter Vermeu-
len’s essay for this volume demonstrates via his notion of ‘reading alongside
the market’, neoliberal novels disappoint readers’ expectations for character
affect and investment in a way that ultimately distorts the economic forces in
which they are enmeshed. Emily Johansen’s essay similarly points out the
ways in which recent novels fail to deliver upon promises of global inte-
gration and community and offer instead a ‘banal conviviality’ that makes
visible the stark economic hierarchies by which such purported conviviality
is foreclosed. And as Matthew Christensen demonstrates in his reading of
contemporary African detective novels, neoliberal compulsions towards
transparency and self-improvement become visible sites of tension and dis-
continuities. Even in novels that seem, on the surface, to replicate neoliberal
values, Christensen argues that the precarity endemic to the detective novel
illustrates the unevenness of neoliberal consent.
The novel can thus ruminate upon the mechanisms by which neolib-
eral logics solicit consent. It can and does also formalise the economic
present in a way that makes visible its development and stakes. So, when
Mathias Nilges points out in his essay here that ‘the novel from its incep-
tion . . . traces time as a form of thought, subject to historical modification
and change, through the history of the relation between subject and world’,
he reminds us of the novel’s distinctive usefulness. Nilges argues that we
need to reject the ‘subsumption’ thesis that holds that literary and cultural
productions necessarily replicate the logics of capital. He proposes instead a
reading of contemporary novelistic temporality that lays bare neoliberal-
ism’s ‘epistemological and formal limits’ – namely, that they press
against the temporal ‘immanence’ and collapsed temporal dimensions
brought about by neoliberalism’s time horizons (which include, but are
not limited to, the temporal imaginaries of high finance, the untethering
of time from production processes, communicative speed and forms of
time not quantifiable by wages). Alissa G. Karl’s contribution also
probes temporal form by linking the contemporary novel’s formalisation
of time (or, rather, the re-formulation of time and space) with neoliberal
protocols of labour and spatial mobility. Karl demonstrates what she
calls an ‘evacuated temporality’ and an emphasised spatiality that are a
function of the neoliberal labouring body’s literal attenuation as a series
of discrete skills and capacities to be cultivated and discarded at will.
The contributions to this special issue explicate the myriad ways in
which the tensions around enmeshment, critique, the state, and consent
outlined in this introduction are illustrated in the contemporary novel.
The analytic methodologies of these contributions – and the archive of
texts these essays begin to construct – contradict claims like Zadie

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 Emily Johansen and Alissa G. Karl Introduction

Smith’s about the crisis in the contemporary novel. Instead, they suggest
the vitality and urgency that suffuses examinations of, to borrow from
Anthony Trollope, ‘the way we live now’. Indeed, the very sense of crisis
that seems so pervasive in humanist study highlights the necessity of this
study in the first place. Which is to say that claims of the novel’s irrelevance
in a neoliberal world are premature, as the form itself points to methods of
critique not always visible in other genres. What the articles in the special
issue illustrate are the many and varied ways that novel form exposes
neoliberal orthodoxies and provides moments where we might learn to
read the world in a new way. Rather than seeing the multiple paths of
the contemporary novel as signs of its superfluity or its capitulation to
capital, this special issue attends to how this multiplicity of purpose
demonstrates a response to the capacious mobility of neoliberalism itself.
a
Texas A&M University
b
State University of New York, Brockport

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 This special issue emerged out of our conversations with Berthold Schoene at
the 2012 Society of Novel Studies conference. His initial contributions to this
issue were immeasurable and central to its conceptualizations. We greatly
appreciate his assistance throughout this process.
2 Zadie Smith, ‘Two Paths for the Novel’, The New York Review of Books, 20
November 2008.
3 As Jane Elliott and Gillian Harkins note in the introduction to their recent
Social Text special issue on ‘The Genres of Neoliberalism’, neoliberalism is
‘in danger of becoming an evacuated term – like postmodernism and globa-
lization before it – whose use now signals the absence of a specific political
economic, historical, or cultural critique rather than a precise engagement
with the conditions of late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries’ (p. 2).
Like Elliott and Harkins, we want ‘to retain neoliberalism [considering]
how the concept . . . is used to synthesize or even resolve the diagnostic pro-
blems associated with postmodernism . . . and globalization’ (p. 2). And
where Elliott and Harkins’ issue interrogates the links between neoliberalism
and a variety of contemporary written and visual genres, this volume examines
a more focused generic category. Jane Elliott and Gillian Harkins, ‘Introduc-
tion: Genres of Neoliberalism’, Social Text, 31.2 (2013).

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4 Jeremy Gilbert, ‘What Kind Of Thing Is “Neoliberalism”?’, New Formations,

80/81 (2013), p. 7
5 Wendy Brown, ‘Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy’, in Edge-
work: Critical Essays in Knowledge and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 2005), pp. 39– 40. Emphasis in original.
6 Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press,
1994), p. xxi.
7 Gilbert, ‘What Kind of thing is “Neoliberalism”?’, p. 7.
8 Pieter Vermeulen, ‘David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten and the “Novel of Globali-
zation”: Biopower and the Secret History of the Novel’, Critique: Studies in
Contemporary Fiction, 53.4 (2012), p. 382.
9 Jacques Rancière, ‘The Politics of Literature’, trans. Julie Rose (Malden, MA:
Polity Press, 2011), p. 4.
10 Smith, ‘Two Paths for the Novel’, n.p.
11 Rita Barnard, ‘Fictions of the Global’, Novel, 42.2 (2009), p. 208.
12 Susanne Rohr, ‘“The Tyranny of the Probable”—Crackpot Realism and
Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections’, Amerikastudien/American Studies, 49.1
(2004), p. 99.
13 Ibid., p. 98.
14 James Annesley, ‘Market Corrections: Jonathan Franzen and the “Novel of
Globalization”’, Journal of Modern Literature, 29.2 (2006), p. 113.
15 Ibid., p. 124. Emphasis added.
16 Ibid., p. 124.
17 Berthold Schoene, The Cosmopolitan Novel (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2009), pp.12 –13.
18 Ibid., p. 27.
19 Rebecca Walkowitz envisions another form of the cosmopolitan novel which
shifts away from realist and spatial forms of mimesis, to consider the perspec-
tival forms that structure cosmopolitan responses: her ‘emphasis on analytic
strategies has led [her] to privilege different postures of cosmopolitanism,
such as naturalness and evasion, rather than different experiences of cosmopo-
litanism, such as travel and migration’ (p. 29). The modernist cosmopolitan
novel – understood as occurring across a broader historical continuum than
has typically been the case – does not, here, mimetically represent the globa-
lized experience of contemporary life, but, instead, represents the interpretative
frames that emerge out of this experience. See Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style:
Modernism Beyond the Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
20 Jeffrey T. Nealon, Post-Postmodernism: or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time
Capitalism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), p. 23. This par-
allels Walter Benn Michaels’ argument about the neoliberal novel, a genre
that he suggests ‘represents an economic issue as a cultural one’ (p. 1023).
He argues that neoliberal novels

should . . . be understood as elements in a larger discursive structure, one in

which increasing appreciation of the values of identity is accompanied by
increasing hostility against identities, and in which the appreciation and

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the hostility are both accompanied by indifference to the increasing econ-

omic inequality that has been the hallmark of American society since the
mid-1970s (the beginning, according to economists, of American neoliber-
alism). (p. 1027)

Walter Benn Michaels, ‘Model Minorities and the Minority Model – the
neoliberal novel’, in Leonard Cassuto, Claire Virginia Eby, and Benjamin
Reiss (eds.), The Cambridge History of the American Novel (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 1016 – 30.
21 Nealon, Post-Postmodernism, p. 15.
22 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005), p. 40.
23 Ibid., p. 42.
24 Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (Brooklyn: Zone Books,
2010), p. 22.
25 Ibid., p. 24. Colin Crouch makes a similar observation, noting that ‘the fact
[is] that actually existing, as opposed to ideologically pure, neoliberalism is
nothing like as devoted to free markets as is claimed. It is, rather, devoted to
the dominance of public life by the giant corporation’. See Crouch, The
Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2011), p. viii.
26 See, for instance, Jeffrey Nealon’s suggestion that, post-2008 crisis,

the nation-state, which looked like it was becoming an anachronism in the

world of triumphant global corporatization, is back – and in a big way,
though none of the things that progressives might like about the nation-
state, such as a widespread entitlement programs, seem to have much
chance of returning with it. (p. 11)

Ulrich Beck offers another instance of this post-2008 examination of the

nation-state form in his linking of the European economic crisis to, what he
terms, ‘cosmopolitization’. Beck, optimistically, sees the moment of crisis as
providing an opportunity to develop a new European social contract. See
Beck, ‘The European Crisis in the Context of Cosmopolitanization’, trans.
Ciaran Cronin, New Literary History, 43.4 (2012), pp. 653– 61.
27 Matthew Hart and Jim Hansen, ‘Introduction: Contemporary Literature and
the State’, Contemporary Literature 49.4 (2008), p. 511.
28 Ibid., p. 493.
29 On the corroboration of nation-state and novel, we refer for instance to Ben-
edict Anderson’s famous assertion that the novel is a technology that enables
readers to envision and position themselves within an imagined national com-
munity (Imagined Communities, London: Verso, 1991); to Franco Moretti’s
correlation of national geographies and narrative structures in The Atlas of
the European Novel (London: Verso, 1999); and to Nancy Armstrong’s
claim that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels develop protagonists
in accordance with the individual and property rights of the state (see How

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Novels Think: The Limits of British Individualism from 1719 – 1900, New York:
Columbia University Press, 2005).
30 Brett Levinson, Market and Thought (New York: Fordham University Press,
2004), p. 1.
31 Ibid., p. 9.

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