| I argue that literary texts---in particular, the novels of Joseph Heller, Bret Easton Ellis, and Dennis Cooper---exemplify the conditions in which the experience of contemporary cynicism thrives. I argue that today cynicism has undergone both a quantitative increase and a qualitative intensification, a set of related transformations in form and function that have raised it to the predominant sentiment of everyday life. Such transformations are above all particular to the integration of cynicism into the patterns of operation of post-Fordist capitalism: in other words, no longer a response or reaction to alienated existence, I argue that cynicism has been put to work . For its part, contemporary literature exemplifies---at times in accordance with, as a resistance to, and in excess of---the conditions and experiences of cynical, post-Fordist life. In other words, Capital Cynicism aims to produce both a concept of contemporary cynicism as well as a concept of contemporary literature, and insists that, in order to do so, it is also necessary to produce a concept of post-Fordism. These three concepts---post-Fordism, cynicism, literature---constitute at once the terrain as well as the object of my inquiry. |
