As the world has been reshaped since the 1970s by economic globalization, neoliberalism, and financialization, writers and artists have addressed the problem of representing the economy with a new sense of political urgency. Anxieties over who controls capitalism have thus been translated into demands upon literature, art, and mass media to develop strategies of representation that can account for capitalism鈥檚 power.
Reading Capitalist Realism presents some of the latest and most sophisticated approaches to the question of the relation between capitalism and narrative form, partly by questioning how the 鈥渞ealism鈥 of austerity, privatization, and wealth protection relate to the realism of narrative and cultural production. Even as critics have sought to locate a new aesthetic mode that might consider and move beyond theorizations of the postmodern, this volume contends that narrative realism demands renewed scrutiny for its ability to represent capitalism鈥檚 latest scenes of enclosure and indebtedness.
Ranging across fiction, nonfiction, television, and film, the essays collected here explore to what extent realism is equipped to comprehend and historicize our contemporary economic moment and what might be the influence or complicity of the literary in shaping the global politics of lowered expectations. Including essays on writers such as Mohsin Hamid, Lorrie Moore, Jess Walter, J. M. Coetzee, James Kelman, Ali Smith, Russell Banks, William Vollmann, and William Gibson, as well as examinations of Hollywood film productions and The Wire television series, Reading Capitalist Realism calls attention to a resurgence of realisms across narrative genres and questions realism鈥檚 ability to interrogate the crisis-driven logic of political and economic 鈥渃ommon sense.鈥
鈥淭his volume鈥檚 conceptualization of cultural developments through the framework of 鈥榗apitalist realism鈥 will be welcomed by many who seek after the social relevance of literature at a time when the humanities are disappearing (as a result of the very fiscal austerity that the volume calls out) and when we seem to have surrendered the methodological tools for doing so.鈥濃擟olleen Lye, associate professor of English, University of California, Berkeley
鈥淎t a time when, as Jameson famously put it, 鈥榠t is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,鈥 we lose our ability to distinguish capitalism from reality itself. The essays gathered here perform the vital service of restoring capitalism to visibility, enabling us to see how it shapes our literary representations of the ordinary and the everyday, how it guides contemporary narratives of 鈥榬eal life.鈥 This is high-caliber, committed criticism, asserting once more the power and usefulness of Marxist method in literary studies.鈥鈥James F. English, University of Pennsylvania
