Abstract
This article considers what we might mean by ‘the neoliberal novel.’ While it reviews historical, political, and economic approaches to this notion, the article develops a philosophical understanding of the neoliberal novel as capturing what Jason Read (following Michel Foucault) has understood to be neoliberalism’s “new production of subjectivity.” The article ties this understanding to existing theories of the neoliberal novel (Benn Michaels, Williams, Greenwald Smith, Huehls, Brouillette) and grounds this conversation through a focus on finance (LaBerge, Kornbluh, McClanahan) as well as an analysis of autofiction (Lerner, Heti) as a genre where neoliberalism’s widespread influences in contemporary fiction are played out.
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Notes
- 1.
As further evidence for this claim, consider the 2007–2008 bank and financial institutions bailout in the US, which shows neoliberalism using the state (and, specifically, tax-payer dollars) to maintain artificial market conditions.
- 2.
I leave out here the “families” that Thatcher also added. On that last count, however, see Cooper (2017).
- 3.
The uncorrected page proofs with which I am working are numbered 277–90. Here 278.
- 4.
See, for example, Johansen and Karl (2017). This book was first published as a special issue of the journal Textual Practice, vol. 29, no. 2 (2015). One can also think of the “Genres of Neoliberalism” special issue of Social Text, vol. 115, no. 31 (2013), to give one other often mentioned example.
- 5.
The pun occurs at other moments in the book as well, but in the quoted instance it introduces a series of chapters that deal with neoliberalism and reference the self-help genre.
- 6.
The sentence is repeated on page 109.
- 7.
It is worth noting that a large part of the book is about the narrator’s attempt to conceive a child with one of his close friends. Although Lerner thus does not adopt Lee Edelman’s queer politics against the future, the particular future he imagines is quite queer nevertheless.
- 8.
The story is first offered in 10:04 as the motto of the book, and Lerner acknowledges that while he came across it in Giorgio Agamben’s The Coming Community, “[i]t is typically attributed to Walter Benjamin” (Lerner 2014, 244).
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De Boever, A. (2019). What Is ‘the’ Neoliberal Novel? Neoliberalism, Finance, and Biopolitics. In: Baumbach, S., Neumann, B. (eds) New Approaches to the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32598-5_9
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