Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism

Cambridge University Press | 2015

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.

Praise for Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism

“Affect and American Literature . . . deftly portrays and classifies contemporary literature’s engagements with affect under neoliberalism..” — Diana Filar, Postmodern Culture

“Smith’s study of affectivity and its political valences is intellectually ambitious and provocative. It encourages us to see our emotions in a new and challenging light through close textual readings of often complex novels... this study shows how narratives encode political ideologies in subtle and unexpected ways.” — Jerry Varsava, American Political Thought

“Inventive and adventurous . . . Among the first sustained literary investigations of neoliberalism at the level of form.” — Leigh Claire La Berge and Quinn Slobodian, American Literary History

“Vital reading for its inventive exploration of neoliberalism as a formal problem.” — Joe Rollins, Criticism

“This work teaches us to recognize and assess conventional feelings produced by narratives of a heroic critical resistance to stale orthodoxy and treat with some skepticism claims to have discovered a triumphant freedom—including freedom lying beyond the shores of critique.” — Caren Irr, American Literature