Untangling the knot: the theory generation, irony, and neoliberalism
Abstract
Significant typological work has been done in cataloging forms of life, literature, and culture in the alleged aftermath of the epoch of postmodernism, but recent critical works invite deeper considerations of the political valences of formal interventions made by authors writing at a specific mid-aughts moment of potential torch-passing. These works help not to strike down this or that form as complicit nor make sweeping claims as to the features of the current moment, but to critique more deeply the relationships these novels have to the proliferating discourses of postmodernity, irony, and an economic order that ostensibly began as an elitist, revanchist endeavor but transformed into what Mitchum Huehls and Rachel Greenwald Smith dub its "ontological phase," from which they emerged. Reconsidering a sample of novels diverse in their approaches to fiction in the light of equally diverse critical interventions united in their attention to politics and aesthetics seems a necessary counter-hegemonic project allowing for unique insights at a time when the discourses surrounding these novels and critical interventions have only become more complex.
Degree
M.A.