This thesis constitutes the first sustained attempt to locate twenty-first-century Anglo-American fiction in relation to Marxist literary criticism, resulting in a solid set of original-reference material for those undertaking work on writers Jonathan Lethem, Dana Spiotta, China Miéville, Thomas Pynchon, and Kim Stanley Robinson, or more generally on the intersections between literature, Marxist critical theory, and philosophy. The project uncovers the topics, concerns, and forms of a collection of contemporary cross-genre narratives that I take to instantiate a new political designation (...) occurring after post-Marxism. Moving from the collapse of “actually existing socialism” to the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, the study identifies five authors who demonstrate a willingness to forge fresh dialogues with Marx, Marxism, and left radical politics. Envisioning how society is shaped by the interaction of subjects operating within the capital relation, the selected fictions of these authors set out to recuperate and regenerate the Marxist intellectual tradition through an unashamedly anti-capitalist approach to the post-millennial world. In focusing upon British and American narrative, the study will redress the current disparity within the Marxist critical tradition between the pervasiveness of critical political economy and the relative lack of scholarly attention to Marxist literary criticism, and the contemporary novel in particular. In addition, it argues the contemporary moment offers an opportunity for the development of a more critical and rigorous Marxist conceptual knowledge that exists beyond the boundaries of postmodern epistemology. The imperative to pursue Marxist readings of contemporary literature has been undertaken by a small group of critics in recent years, and this study will seek to make a significant contribution to this emerging field of scholarly endeavour. (shrink)

The crisis and collapse of Marxism as the dominant paradigm of left intellectual thought undoubtedly remains one of the most seismic shifts in the ideological history of the late twentieth century. With the collapse of actually existing socialism in the Soviet Union, the pressure of postmodern concepts, and the rise of new social protest movements in the spheres of race, gender, and sexual orientation, Marxism came to appear the ‘signifier par excellence of theoretical hubris, redundancy and error’. In the twenty-first (...) century however, precipitated by the succession of economic and ecological crisis scenarios, Marxist criticism has experienced a critical resurgence. Alongside soaring sales of Volume 1 of Capital, Fredric Jameson, David Harvey, and Alex Callinicos have provided new formal readings of Marx’s seemingly ‘inexhaustible’ text. In contemporary literary study, Emily Johansen and Alissa G. Karl have distinguished a subset of fictions termed the ‘neoliberal novel’ which, in its focus on time, temporality, and zero-hour work practices, is ‘particularly attuned to the economic rationalities of its time’. Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism and John Holloway's Crack Capitalism have sought out more viable projects of critique by exposing capitalism’s false closures and fault lines. In gender theory Nina Power has read female emancipation outside the ideological climate of consumerism where female desire is routinely rendered as an ‘apparent abdication of any systematic political thought’, while in sociology Frédéric Lordon has affirmed the need for ‘a structuralism of relations and an anthropology of passions’ to properly understand class domination, and our willingness to work for others. Largely moving away from the post-structuralist concerns of identity, difference, representation, and language, the ‘economic turn’ in contemporary thought has reintroduced a host of ‘real-world’ materialisms, and a new receptivity to theories of gender, ecology, and revolution. Accompanying the apparent epistemological exhaustion of post-structuralist approaches, it remains the task of a Marxist criticism to draw practical conclusions about its current intellectual and political mission. Following on from the success of the conference What’s Left? Marxism, Literature and Culture in the Twenty-first Century, held at the University of Lincoln in July 2016, articles were invited for this Special Collection that examined Marxist approaches to the following: science fiction and utopias, apocalyptic fictions and dystopias, comics, graphic novels, contemporary film, marginal forms, ecology and the Anthropocene, the possibility of literature as praxis and theory, protests, political movements, manifestos, the question of dialectics and totality in the 21st century, and Marxism's relationship with feminism, psychoanalysis and queer theory. Edited by: Andrew Rowcroft Featured image by Robert Diedrichs under a CC BY-SA license. (shrink)

What does it mean to care about an object? And is this different to caring for an object? The Blindfold poses these questions and reveals, to borrow Sara Ahmed’s phrase, a ‘queer phenomenology’ where the apparent ephemera of a dead girl’s life: a cotton ball, a glove - ‘[seem] charged with a kind of power’. In the novel, Iris Vegan/Davidsen takes a job, ostensibly as a research assistant, for Mr. Morning who has found himself ‘in possession of a number of (...) [the dead girl’s] things’ [13]. He asks Iris to take these possessions home, one at a time, and to record herself describing them. She is then to return the object and recording to Mr. Morning, whereupon he gives her another. This paper takes as its own object of enquiry Mr Morning’s collection of objects in The Blindfold, objects that he has gathered, he tells Iris: ‘[f]or a kind of biography. […] For a project about life’s paraphernalia, its bits and pieces, treasures and refuse’ [13]. Reading this collection, which Morning describes as ‘[a]n anthropology of the present’, our attention is drawn to objects that are ‘lost, abandoned, speechless, but not dead’ [13]. In laying out these as objects for the reader and Iris’ attention, Hustvedt imagines a form of caring for and about objects that often go uncared for. In this, I will argue, her work posits a queer phenomenology which, as Ahmed envisages it ‘might start by redirecting our attention toward different objects, those that are ‘less proximate’ or even those that deviate or are deviant’ [2006, 3]. Doing so, the novel privileges the kind of intense care towards objects that Morning practices, both in and of itself as a committed and meaningful way of being in the world [although this does not go without critique in the novel] and as a route in to imagining new constellations of human-human and human-object contact. (shrink)

Feeling intimate? Reading Anaïs Nin in the 1970s.