| My dissertation attempts to trace developments in U.S. literary production over the last two decades. I posit that the fall of the Berlin Will and the rise to dominance of neoliberal globalization caused a shift in the structure of feeling that has characterized the educated U.S. classes. While the Cold War produced a certain apocalyptic anxiety, the hegemony of global capital engenders uneasiness precisely because the problems it produces seem endless and intractable without anything to oppose it. Consumerism, corporatism, atomizing individualisms, gentrification, legacies of violence and inequality abetted by neoliberalism: the contemporary U.S. intellectual has no answer to these issues.;In bringing together a group of authors usually considered separately, I demonstrate how these anxieties are reflected in this literature&;In readings of major contemporary novels by David Foster Wallace, Richard Powers, Marilynne Robinson, Dinaw Mengestu, and Junot Diaz, my dissertation provides a much-needed political and economic context absent from other criticism on contemporary fiction. The study disputes the charge that contemporary literature lacks political content and has little regard for traditional humanistic concerns. In discerning the consistent ideological underpinnings across a disparate group of writers, Necessary Fictions takes an important step toward defining the literature that appears to be succeeding postmodernism. |
