Abstract

Readers primarily trained in literary studies will find the chapters accessible, with many focusing on how elements of narrative, such as voice, perspective, plot trajectory, and metaphorical language, reify or intimate a resistance to the excesses of neo-liberalism. In addition, two chapters on the neo-liberal depersonalization of subjectivity by David Hartley and Mathias Nilges helpfully connect further theorizing on neo-liberalism with a cultural studies approach. A culture of discontent forms the third focus of this collection, where essays are variously concerned with how literary writing reflects the gradual degradation of societies and people. In her chapter, Kerstin Oloff views the recent spike in zombie culture as an offshoot of Puerto Rico’s neoliberal energy and food-supply dependency on the US. In such zombie literature, “figurations of the human-as-waste and food-as-horror paint a slow apocalypse unevenly unfolding across the world-system” (79), undergirded by a deep-seated disruption of the relation between labouring body and the land as site of food production. Core countries are not spared from such critique: in Richard Godden’s chapter, the military labour value of the GI’s body invisibly underwrites the expansionist ambitions of the US as the corollary to dollar-dominated global flows. Whether or not such literary texts are able to go beyond neo-liberalism’s long shadow is a question left unresolved by this volume. Nonetheless, the book’s nuanced commentaries on the ever-pernicious effects of capital, in an age where culture itself reproduces the inequalities of capital accumulation, reveals the limitations of locating literary studies solely within the realm of cultural production.