| My dissertation examines the relationship between contemporary American fiction and what Mary Gaitskill, in her 1991 novel Two Girls, Fat and Thin, describes as the nation's "frantic twist to the right," or what has come more recently to be known as the neoliberal turn. At the heart of this new orthodoxy is a commitment to the primacy of "human capital," a discourse which figures society as a marketplace of individual entrepreneurs rather than a space of structural antagonisms like the relationship between labor and capital. I argue that this same discourse tends to guide the formal choices and thematic concerns of millennial American fiction, which imagines worlds constituted by "inner experience" and personal choice (Gaitskill); by families and family values (Ben Marcus, Jonathan Franzen, and Jeffrey Eugenides); by "stakeholders" in multinational corporations (Richard Powers); and by subjects with the symbolic-analytic skills -- "human capital" as a contemporary economist would define it - necessary to navigate a world of transnational complexity (Karen Tei Yamashita). "Feel Your Pain" thus makes a periodizing claim, differentiating this generation of writers -- mostly born in or around the 1960s -- from their postmodern predecessors, whose work was guided by an interest in impersonal systems of power, language, and technology. I show how the discourse of human capital generates not just new political logics but new literary forms, from Franzen's Clintonian version of the "big social novel" to (in a more resistant mode) Sesshu Foster's reinvention of the "alternative history" genre. In examining the neoliberal novel, my project contributes, then, to a history of both political thinking and aesthetic practice, histories which intersect in these books and which are made clearer, in my view, by being told together. |
