Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Affect and American literature in the age of neoliberalism
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.slu.edu/english-department/faculty/rachel-greenwald-smith-phd * https://muse.jhu.edu/article/603058
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.:
n 2014060596
LCCN Permalink:
https://lccn.loc.gov/n2014060596
HEADING:
Smith, Rachel Greenwald
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1_ |a Smith, Rachel Greenwald
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__ |f Saint Louis (Mo.) |2 naf
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__ |a American literature–History and criticism |2 lcsh
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__ |a St. Louis University. Department of English |2 naf
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__ |a English teachers |2 lcsh
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__ |a female
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__ |a Affect and American literature in the age of neoliberalism, 2015: |b ECIP title page (Rachel Greenwald Smith, St. Louis University) data view, etc. (B.A., Sarah Lawrence College; Ph.D., Rutgers University; assistant professor of English at Saint Louis University)
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__ |a Saint Louis University, Department of English website, viewed August 5, 2015: |b link to Faculty page (Rachel Greenwald Smith, Ph.D.; research interest: twentieth and twenty-first century American literature) |u http://www.slu.edu/english-department/faculty/rachel-greenwald-smith-phd
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__ |a Neoliberalism and contemporary literary culture, 2017: |b ECIP t.p. (Rachel Greenwald Smith) data view (b. 1979; professor, Department of English, Saint Louis University)
PERSONAL
Born in 1979.
EDUCATION:Sarah Lawrence College, B.A.; Rutgers University, M.A., Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Saint Louis University, St. Louis, MO, assistant professor of English.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to periodicals, including American Literature, Twentieth-Century Literature, Mediations, Account, and Modern Fiction Studies.
SIDELIGHTS
Rachel Greenwald Smith is assistant professor of English at Saint Louis University. She specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first century American literature and culture, intersections between aesthetics and politics, ecocriticism and environmental literature, aesthetics, theories of emotion, materialist approaches to literature, and critical theory. She writes about these topics for academic journals, such as American Literature, Twentieth-Century Literature, Mediations, and Modern Fiction Studies. Smith earned a Ph.D. from Rutgers University.
In 2015, Smith published Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism, which examines the relationship between American literature and politics in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. Drawing on scholarly works by Paul Auster, Karen Tei Yamashita, and others, Smith contends that the representation of emotions in contemporary fiction emphasizes the personal lives of characters, a misplaced focus on individuality in American life, and feelings that challenge the neoliberal notion that emotions are the property of the self.
Dispelling the belief that we read fiction so we can identify or sympathize with the personal experience of other individual human beings, thus becoming better individuals ourselves, Smith explores how there are other feelings that literature can provoke, such as the permeation of economic values into our lives so we feel like a corporation of one, a consumer seeking satisfaction and value. Diana Filar described the book’s theme in PostModern Culture, saying, “Each chapter’s structure—a presentation of one complicity neoliberal novel countered by another that better represents impersonal feelings—highlights Smith’s hopes for contemporary literature’s political potential.”
Writing online at Saint Louis Public Library Scribbler, E.P. Lundgren, commented: “It strikes me as a hopeful project: this study of mixed modes and genres, and the ways that literature performs emotion in unexpected ways that unsettles us. In this sense Greenwald Smith descends from radical literary thinkers such as Victor Shklovsky and Berthold Brecht.” Alexander Moran noted on US Studies Online: “This monograph is consistently persuasive, and forthrightly argues for an important role for literature in critiquing neoliberal assumptions.”
In 2017, Smith partnered with Mitchum Huehls, associate adjunct professor of English at the University of California–Los Angeles, to edit Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture. The book presents a scholarly conversation about the relationship of contemporary literature and other arts to neoliberalism’s economic, social, and cultural ascendance. Essays from literary scholars discuss neoliberalism’s influence on literary theory and methodology, literary form, literary representation, and literary institutions. This influence takes the form of literary developments in realism, memoir, New Materialist theory, aesthetic autonomy, and neoliberalism’s expansion into the cultural sphere. Contributors include Jennifer Egan, Ben Lerner, Gillian Flynn, Teju Cole, and Jonathan Franzen.
BIOCRIT
ONLINE
PostModern Culture, https://muse.jhu.edu/ (September 2014), Diana Filar, review of Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism.
Saint Louis Public Library Scribbler, https://slplscribbler.wordpress.com/ (July 15, 2015), E.P. Lundgren, review of Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism.
U.S. Studies Online, http://www.baas.ac.uk/ (February 10, 2016), Alexander Moran, review of Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism.*
Associate Professor
rgsmith(at)slu.edu
Adorjan 223
314.977.7130
Rachel Greenwald Smith specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century American literature with an emphasis on intersections between aesthetics and politics. She is the author of Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism (Cambridge University Press, 2015), which examines the parallels between the emergence of neoliberalism as an economic, political, and cultural dominant during the turn of the twenty-first century and critical appraisals of the literature of the period that see the transmission of emotion as fundamental to aesthetic experience.
She currently at work on two scholarly collections: American Literature in Transition: 2000-2010, currently under contract at Cambridge University Press, and Neoliberalism and Literature, which she is co-editing with Mitchum Huehls. She was recently awarded an ACLS Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship to support her second monograph, tentatively titled "Compromise Aesthetics: Literature After Experimentalism," which will examine the fate of radical form in a period that many critics see as post-experimental.
EDUCATION
B.A., Sarah Lawrence College
M.A., Rutgers University
Ph.D. Rutgers University
RESEARCH AND TEACHING INTERESTS
Twentieth and twenty-first century American literature and culture, ecocriticism and environmental literature, aesthetics, theories of emotion, materialist approaches to literature, and critical theory.
COURSES TAUGHT
Graduate
Contemporary American Literature: Feeling and Form (Fall 2011)
Contemporary American Literature: What Now? What Next? (Summer 2014)
Twentieth Century American Literature: Nature and Its Discontents (Spring 2014)
Literary Theory (Spring 2013)
Undergraduate
Senior Seminar: Why Literature? (Spring 2013)
Post-War Forms (Fall 2015)
Contemporary American Literature (Spring 2015, Spring 2012, Fall 2010)
Twentieth Century Literature (Spring 2010)
Manifestoes (Spring 2015)
Science Fiction (Fall 2015)
Literature and Nature (Spring 2010, Fall 2014)
Literature of the Natural World (Fall 2011, Fall 2010)
Nature, Ecology, and Literature (Fall 2014)
Introduction to the Novel (Spring 2012, Spring 2014)
PUBLICATIONS
Monographs
Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2015.
Compromise Aesthetics: Literature After Experimentalism, in progress.
Edited Collections
American Literature in Transition: 2000-2010, under contract, Cambridge University Press.
Neoliberalism and Literature, ed. with Mitchum Huehls, in progress.
Selected Essays
"Six Propositions on Compromise Aesthetics," The Account, Fall 2014.
"Postmodernism and the Affective Turn," Twentieth-Century Literature 57:3 & 57:4 (Fall/Winter 2011): 423-446.
"Materialism, Ecology, Aesthetics," Mediations: Journal of the Marxist Literary Group 25:2 (Winter 2011): 61-78.
"Organic Shrapnel: Affect and Aesthetics in September 11 Fiction," American Literature 83:1 (March 2011): 153-174.
"Ecology Beyond Ecology: Life After the Accident in Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis Trilogy," Mfs: Modern Fiction Studies55:3 (Fall 2009): 545-565.
"Grief Time: The Crisis of Narrative in Don DeLillo's The Body Artist," Polygraph: An International Journal of Culture and Politics 18 (2006): 99-110.
PRESENTATIONS
Invited Lectures and Symposia
"Compromise Aesthetics," invited contribution to the Northeast Americanist Collective Colloquium, sponsored by Post45, Brown University, June 2014.
"Personal and Impersonal," invited lecture, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Americanists Group, April 2014.
"Impersonal Feelings," invited contribution to the Post45 Symposium, Stanford University, November 2012.
"Neoliberalism and the Aesthetics of Self-Care," invited lecture, University of Missouri Department of English Research Symposium, Columbia, MO, September 2011.
"Anatomy Lessons: Affect, Aesthetics, and September 11 Fiction," invited keynote address for The Annual Humanities Symposium, Point Park University, Pittsburgh, PA, April 2010.
Selected Conference Presentations
"Neorealism and Compromise Aesthetics," The Modern Language Association, Vancouver, CA, January 2015.
"Neoliberalism and Literary Form," The American Comparative Literature Association, NYU, April 2014.
"Notes on Compromise Aesthetics," The Association for the Study of Arts of the Present, Detroit, MI, October 2013.
Moderator, "Ecology without Nature, Cities without Architecture, Art without Artists, or the Aesthetic Politics of Going "OOO," The Association for the Study of Arts of the Present, Detroit, October 2013.
Moderator, "Towards a Literary History of Neoliberalism," The Association for the Study of Arts of the Present, Detroit, October 2013.
"Disowning Feelings: Ecopoetics, Affect, Neoliberalism," The Conference on Ecopoetics, Berkeley, CA, February 2013.
"The Subject of Fiction: Affect and Narrative Form," The American Comparative Literature Association, Brown University, Providence, RI, April 2012.
"Neither Here Nor There: Distributed Affects, Narrative Form, and Neoliberalism," The International Conference on Narrative, Las Vegas, NV, March 2012.
"Pushing the Limits: Aesthetics in the Age of Neoliberalism," Association for the Study of Arts of the Present, Pittsburgh, PA, October 2011.
"Biologizing Postmodernism," Post45 Conference, Cleveland, OH, April 2011.
"Narrative Migration: Repetition, Affect, and Ecological Kinship in Richard Powers' The Echo Maker," The International Conference on Narrative, Washington University in Saint Louis, April 2011.
"Life After Humanism," Theories of Life in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, Rutgers University, February 2011.
"After the Land Ethic: Affect, Aesthetics, and Ecology," Contingent Communities, University of Minnesota, October 2010.
"From Abstraction to Affectus: Notes on Form," American Comparative Literature Association Conference, New Orleans, LA, April 2010.
4/12/17, 10)45 PM
Print Marked Items
Role of a Lifetime
American Theatre.
16 (July 1999): p60. From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Role of a Lifetime." American Theatre, July 1999, p. 60. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA34889447&it=r&asid=a5a4afdbbe2720f16106d2beeef92c11. Accessed 12 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A34889447
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4/12/17, 10)45 PM
Smith, Rachel Greenwald: Affect and American literature in the age of neoliberalism
G. Grieve-Carlson
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 53.10 (June 2016): p1477. From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Grieve-Carlson, G. "Smith, Rachel Greenwald: Affect and American literature in the age of neoliberalism."
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June 2016, p. 1477+. PowerSearch,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA454942699&it=r&asid=2c17928a8efa6f12d7c95a21af573401. Accessed 12 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A454942699
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Novel Feelings: Rachel Greenwald Smith on Emotion and US Fiction
Posted on July 15, 2015 by eplundgren
Here at Central Library we’ve recently received our copy of Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism, the first book by Rachel Greenwald Smith, an assistant professor at St. Louis University. It was published by the prestigious Cambridge University Press this past spring. The title is a mouthful, printed in caps on the funereal all-black jacket, but don’t let that fool you: from what I’ve read so far, this looks to be a compelling and accessible work that explores a fascinating topic: the nature of the feelings that literature evokes, and how those feelings relate to the political and natural climates around us.
Woman_reading,_1930s
(Woman Reading, c. 1930. Seattle Municipal Archives)
The book has a provocative thesis: Greenwald Smith builds an argument against what she calls the “affective hypothesis,” namely the idea that we read fiction because it allows us to identify with the personal experience of other individual human beings — the basic trope of “sympathizing with characters” — a process that makes us more empathetic, and teaches us how to become better individuals ourselves.
(It has been interesting to read parts of Affect and American Lit alongside Robert Silverberg’s 1972 novel Dying Inside, which chronicles the erosion of a telepath’s powers. Protagonist David Selig’s telepathy is an obvious metaphor for fictional creation, but the book finds those powers failing: a midlife crisis novel with a supernatural glow, and one that acknowledges the limits of fiction.)
My first contact with Greenwald Smith’s work was her brilliant essay “Six Propositions on Compromise Aesthetics.” In it she presented a portrait of the contemporary fiction scene that feels intuitively right to me: one in which the disruptive postmodern aesthetics of the 1960s and 70s have been fused with the more traditional, linear, character-based forms favored by commercial publishers and many MFA programs. Avant-garde techniques (once associated with the radical left’s critique of mainstream society) are still deployed by many prominent writers for stylistic or thematic purposes, but fused with more traditional elements, such as intimate characterization and linear narration, to make the work more palatable and marketable.
“Compromise Aesthetics” uses Rachel Kushner as its main example, although one could include any number of current writers under this label, for example Ben Marcus’s recent novel The Flame Alphabet, which adopted the experimental language play of his early work (as a corrosive language virus) in the service of a thriller-like plot. I certainly think of my own fiction writing as these terms, hoping to appeal to adventurous, intellectual readers without alienating others who are strongly drawn to character and narrative. The idea of “compromise aesthetics” could also be helpfully applied to the collapse of the distinction between literary and genre fiction among 21st century writers: I hope that Greenwald Smith will explore this in her new book, an expansion on the ideas laid out in this essay.
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These kinds of compromises seem inevitable in what Greenwald Smith calls the neoliberal era, when market values have seeped into every aspect of our lives, and the individual is encouraged to think of herself as a corporation of one (and a novelist files as a small business on his taxes). Affect and American Lit shows how a novel like Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections adopts these economic metaphors for emotional life, so that one of the characters, Gary Lambert, tracks his own feelings as if they were stock indicators.
This brings to mind how the language of economics permeates the writing workshop, as we talk about scenes being “earned,” becoming “invested” in characters, the “payoff” of a climactic scene. Even the notions of “growth” and “development” in characters start to have a Morgan Stanley ring after you’ve spent a while with Greenwald Smith’s book. Literary character, conventionally defined, reflects and reinforces the economic structures around us. In this model the reader also approaches the text as a consumer, seeking pleasure, satisfaction, value, takeaway.
Greenwald Smith persuasively argues that there are other, stranger feelings that literature can evoke in us, feelings that we haven’t yet named, which might help us to re-conceive our relations to each other and the nonhuman parts of the environment around us. She gives a striking example: the grieving protagonist of Paul Auster’s Book of Illusions playing with his dead children’s Legos. The image is emotional, but in an unclear way, and with a undercurrent of queasiness. We don’t quite know how to label this feeling or where to store it. Greenwald Smith seeks out these “impersonal feelings” or “ugly feelings” in a number of contemporary works such as Ben Marcus’s bizarre and disorienting, but also rigorous and logical, story collection The Age of Wire and String.
It strikes me as a hopeful project: this study of mixed modes and genres, and the ways that literature performs emotion in unexpected ways that unsettles us. In this sense Greenwald Smith descends from radical literary thinkers such as Victor Shklovsky and Berthold Brecht. Her ideas are similar to Shklovsky’s concept of “defamiliarization” which has been tossed around in fiction writing circles for a while, but Greenwald Smith looks to restore its political edge: the underlying sense that the world has not been fully documented and understood, that our familial and cultural systems are still mutable, and that written language can still expand to depict emotional states for which we haven’t yet found the names. For truly novel feelings, which “index the possibility of change itself.” To evoke such feelings and perceptions is, I think, the ambition of the fiction writers I most respect. My college days are over, but I kind of wish I could take Greenwald Smith’s class at SLU, because she offers here a rich and invigorating framework to talk about what literature does to us, and where it might go next.
Book Review: Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism by Rachel Greenwald Smith
BY ALEXANDER MORAN FEBRUARY 10, 2016 BOOK REVIEWS, REVIEWS
Rachel Greenwald Smith Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015) 189 pp. £49.50/$99.00
9781107095229 (1)Rachel Greenwald Smith’s fascinating monograph argues against what she terms ‘the affective hypothesis’: the belief that literature should offer, and is most meaningful, when it transmits, ‘the emotional specificity of personal experience’ (1). She contends that the affective hypothesis functions invisibly, moving interchangeably between all aspects of the literary marketplace (1). She establishes a binary between what she coins ‘personal feelings’ and ‘impersonal feelings.’ Works that reflect how ‘emotions are increasingly understood as resources to develop and manage, rather than as instances of authentic experience’ are those she sees as evoking personal feelings (4). Smith venerates art that questions ‘our economic, political, and social convictions,’ which she states solicit impersonal feelings (4). An aesthetic of impersonal feelings is valuable, for Smith, because it does not conform to a market model that emphasises the reader’s ability to manage their ‘emotional portfolio’ (8).
In setting up this division between personal and impersonal feelings, each chapter places a series of contemporary texts in opposition. By establishing this binary, Smith does not allow for the possibility that a work can evoke both impersonal and personal feelings. However, this methodology does allow for a focused and informative discussion, and does not distract from the strength of her conclusions.
In her first chapter, Smith contends that Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is ‘exemplary of the primary quality critics attribute to contemporary aesthetics,’ that is, it is defined by personal feelings (48). The Road demonstrates a compromise between recognising ‘the materiality of language’ and yet managing ‘to convey a crushing sense of emotional urgency’ (48). In comparison to The Road, she turns to Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions, and interestingly demonstrates the ‘typical,’ binary assumptions of the affective hypothesis through Brooke Allen’s review of Auster’s novel: ‘head versus heart; emblems versus people; allegory versus emotional affect’ (49). Counter to this, for Smith The Book of Illusions suggests how affective connections may be impersonal and contingent, ‘and distributed throughout social systems and environments in ways that fall outside wilful entrepreneurial investment’ (55). The Road and The Book of Illusions are so emblematic of her argument, that at the end of this chapter she provides a table in which she compares how the two texts elicit personal and impersonal feelings (58).
extremely loud and incredibly closeIn assessing the personal feelings that define Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Smith contends that the trauma of 9/11 is used to assert ‘U.S. centric values,’ mirroring how, for David Harvey, neoliberal States use catastrophes to form new forms of authority (66). Smith contrasts Foer’s mawkish novel with Laird Hunt’s The Exquisite, which she situates as impersonal because it undermines ‘any clear isolated view of catastrophe’ (75). Hunt’s novel therefore complicates interpretations of the trauma of September 11th, and the ‘incomprehensibility’ of 9/11 must instead be seen ‘as part of a complex system of interactions’ (75). This discussion of September 11th has wide-reaching implications – about periodization, for instance – and is something that bears further analysis.
After giving a wonderfully clear description of the distinctions between liberalism and neoliberalism (81), Smith argues that works like Dave Eggers A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius are ‘able to function as they do because they are so sensitively aimed at the affective needs of a new generation of young adults who were largely raised under neoliberal assumptions’ (89). She compares the personal feelings Eggers’ novel evokes with the impersonal aesthetics of Ben Marcus’s collection, The Age of Wire and String. She asserts the structure of Marcus’s work, like Hunt’s novel, emphasises the destabilising process of what sociologist Bruno LaTour calls ‘tracing.’ As tracing associations always lead to the recognition of yet further connections, Marcus’ collection reflects LaTour’s idea, that mapping social connections undercuts the possibility of complete understanding, what Smith calls ‘mastery’ (93).
Her final chapter situates Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker as a ‘human-centered narrative,’ but one in constant interaction with the nonhuman – ‘other narratives with other centers’ (122). She contrasts the impersonal, ecological structure of Powers’s novel with Lydia Millett’s How the Dead Dream, postulating that the latter turns to ‘physical immediacy as a transformative force’ (105). She argues that this turn to the physical is not just politically questionable, but results in a novel that descends into ‘silliness’ (109). As with the chapter regarding trauma, this chapter is a fascinating and provocative addition to ecological criticism.
She concludes by arguing that literature should be seen as part of our ecosystem; literature can extend how Bruno Latour wishes to renew critique (99), and it can do so because ‘in its capacity to intensify affective connections to strangers, both human and nonhuman, that it can be understood to be socially and ecologically relevant’ (126). This monograph is consistently persuasive, and forthrightly argues for an important role for literature in critiquing neoliberal assumptions.
Feeling, Form, Framework: A Review of Rachel Greenwald Smith’s Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism
Diana Filar
From: Postmodern Culture
Volume 25, Number 1, September 2014
10.1353/pmc.2014.0025
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
Feeling, Form, Framework:
A Review of Rachel Greenwald Smith’s Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism
Diana Filar (bio)
Greenwald Smith, Rachel. Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism. Cambridge UP, 2015.
In recent scholarship about contemporary literature, it has become in vogue to declare the death of postmodernism as an appropriate periodizing break for thinking of the contemporary as a unique, twenty-first-century category. In her first monograph, Rachel Greenwald Smith contributes to this conversation about “the contemporary,” but unlike some, she offers up the economic (and therefore, political and social) practices of neoliberalism as the parameters for defining contemporary literature and its various forms. Smith further defines neoliberalism with respect to affect, namely, that neoliberalism’s relationship to affect presents much more starkly than affective conditions in other periods precisely because of the unprecedented expansion of privatization, free market ideology, and individualism that has infiltrated both the external economy and the internal lives of its subjects. Many scholars of contemporaneity have connected neoliberalism to affect; however, Smith highlights the productivity of literary “feelings that are not as easily identifiable as such to readers trained to look for emotional payoff for their readerly investments” (33). In so doing, Smith maintains that in contemporary literature, there are affective modes that cannot be reduced to entrepreneurial individualism.
In Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism, Smith argues convincingly against the “affective hypothesis” popular in literary studies. Smith defines this trend in literary criticism as “the belief that literature is at its most meaningful when it represents and transmits the emotional specificity of personal experience,” a theory Smith decidedly opposes, arguing that we do not require the presence of affect in literary texts in order to learn to be unique human beings, but instead, we need it so that we – as readers, subjects, citizens – can recognize neoliberalism’s impact on the human condition more collectively (1).
Smith explains that the prevalence of the affective hypothesis in criticism has surged under neoliberalism, not only because of the corresponding resurgence of books representing common personal feelings (such as fear, grief, happiness, hope, disappointment, and sadness) alongside the exponential rise of neoliberal policies, but also because of the spread of the neoliberal market mindset into everyday lives. In the lived neoliberal experience, “feelings frequently become yet another material foundation for market-oriented behavior: emotions are acquired, invested, traded, and speculated upon” (6). Throughout her study, Smith’s smart and consistent deployment of the vocabulary of economic policy when describing emotions enhances her argument structurally, bolstering the connections between economics and literature. The way to combat this neoliberal, investment-oriented attitude toward feelings, Smith proposes, is via the writing and subsequent reading of literary works that employ what she terms “impersonal feelings.” Importantly, “impersonal feelings” are still feelings (and implied here is that Smith sees feelings as essential to literature to some degree), but feelings which are less recognizable, more complex, and difficult to assign individually, thereby challenging neoliberalism’s hegemony in our contemporary moment. These impersonal feelings are what allow novels to move away from the model of reader-character identification, instead providing a space for a wider range of affects.
Subsequently, the first chapter dives much deeper into case studies of both personal (Cormac McCarthy’s The Road) and impersonal feelings (Paul Auster’s Book of Illusions), the literary difference between them, and the reasons for Smith’s reliance on this terminology. Before she does so, however, Smith recalls the recent debates about novelistic experimentation between Jonathan Franzen and Ben Marcus and posits that experimental form on its own is not enough to disturb the neoliberal model, and that recent tendencies toward formal experimentation are not “merely a result of the march of literary history, but rather [they reflect] the growth of neoliberalism during the period” (33). However, Smith maintains hope for formal innovation and even for novels more generally. In fact, each chapter’s structure – a presentation of one complicitly neoliberal novel countered by another that better represents impersonal feelings – highlights Smith’s hopes for contemporary literature’s political potential. Ultimately, this lack of doom and gloom strengthens her work. Because neoliberalism holds so tightly...