Novel shocks : urban renewal and the origins of neoliberalism / Myka Tucker-Abramson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Tucker-Abramson, Myka, author.

Series:

Fordham scholarship online.

Fordham scholarship online

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Discrimination in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (209 pages)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Fordham University Press, [2019]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Throughout the 1950's, a coalition of developers, politicians, and planners bulldozed vast areas of land deemed “slums” or “blighted” to make way for freeways, public and private housing projects, cultural centers, and skyscrapers. While the program was national, New York was ground zero, and the demolition and monumental reconstruction of the city created a distinctive urban sensorium, rooted in the new segregated landscapes of prosperous white private space and poor black public space. Novel Shocks situates these landscapes at the center of the midcentury novel, arguing that James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Patricia Highsmith, Ayn Rand, William Burroughs, Sylvia Plath, and Warren Miller all registered these new urban spaces as traumatic “shocks” that required new aesthetic forms. Rejecting older shock-based modernisms, these novelists forged a new modernism, which reimagined shock as a therapeutic force that would create a more flexible, self-reliant, and resilient subject that would nourish neoliberalism’s roots. In offering a cultural prehistory of neoliberalism, Novel Shocks resituates the Cold War novel as a key archive for understanding neoliberalism’s emergence and offers a more materialist and historically grounded account of neoliberalism’s subjective, affective, and ideological structures.

Contents:

Front matter

contents

Introduction

chapter 1. Blueprints: Invisible Man and the Great Migration to White Flight

chapter 2. The Price of Salt Is the City: Patricia Highsmith and the Queer Frontiers of Neoliberalism

chapter 3. Naked Lunch, Or, the Last Snapshot of the Surrealists

chapter 4. Shock Therapy: Atlas Shrugged, Urban Renewal, and the Making of the Entrepreneurial Subject

chapter 5. Fallen Corpses and Rising Cities: The Bell Jar and the Making of the New Woman

Conclusion: The Siege of Harlem and Its Commune

acknowledgments

notes

works cited

index

Notes:

This edition previously issued in print: 2018.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780823286195

0823286193

9780823282715

0823282716

9780823282746

0823282740

OCLC:

1059450753