Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism

Bibliographic Data

ID23498082
AuthorsRachel Greenwald Smith (0000-0003-2918-8361, Saint Louis University, corresponding author)
Year2015
Publication date2015-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueAffect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherCambridge University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1017/cbo9781316155035
OpenAlexW4300520701
ISBN9781316155035
Open LibraryOL34722869M
LanguageEN
Citations received23

Rachel Greenwald Smith's Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism examines the relationship between American literature and politics in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. Smith contends that the representation of emotions in contemporary fiction emphasizes the personal lives of characters at a time when there is an unprecedented, and often damaging, focus on the individual in American life. Through readings of works by Paul Auster, Karen Tei Yamashita, Ben Marcus, Lydia Millet, and others who stage experiments in the relationship between feeling and form, Smith argues for the centrality of a counter-tradition in contemporary literature concerned with impersonal feelings: feelings that challenge the neoliberal notion that emotions are the property of the self.

Aesthetics · Affect · Affect (linguistics) · American literature · Art · contemporary fiction · emotion representation · emotions in fiction · Feeling · Individualism · Karen Tei Yamashita · Literature · literature and politics · Neoliberalism · Neoliberalism (international relations) · Paul Auster · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Representation (politics) · Social science · Sociology · American Literature and Culture · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Gender Studies · History · Law · Modernist Literature and Criticism · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics · Psychology · Social Psychology · 20th century · 21st century · Affect (Psychology) in literature · American · American literature, history and criticism · Emotions in literature · History and criticism · Liberalism · Literary Criticism · Literature and society