Mitchum Huehls

After Critique identifies an ontological turn in contemporary U.S. fiction that distinguishes our current literary moment from both postmodernism and so-called post-postmodernism. This turn to ontology takes many forms, but in general After Critique highlights a body of literature--work from Colson Whitehead, Uzodinma Iweala, Karen Yamasthia, Helena Viramontes, Percival Everett, Mat Johnson, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Tom McCarthy--that favors presence over absence, being over meaning, and connection over reference. These authors' interest in producing literary value ontologically rather than representationally stems from their sense that neoliberalism's capacious grasp on contemporary language and discourse--its ability to control both sides of a conceptual debate or argument--has made it nearly impossible to write beyond neoliberalism's grip. This is particularly distressing for authors invested in contemporary politics as neoliberalism renders any number of political problems circularly undecidable. Taking up four different political themes--human rights, the relation between public and private space, racial justice, and environmentalism--After Critique suggests that the ontological forms emerging in contemporary U.S. fiction articulate a version of politics that might successfully evade neoliberal appropriation. This is a politics which replaces critique and its reliance on representation with ontology and its ever-shifting configurations and assemblages.

Twenty-first-century Fiction in a Neoliberal Age

After Critique

Periodizing contemporary fiction against the backdrop of neoliberalism, After Critique identifies a notable turn away from progressive politics among a cadre of key twenty-first-century authors. Through authoritative readings of foundational texts from writers such as Percival Everett, Helena Viramontes, Uzodinma Iweala, Colson Whitehead, Tom McCarthy, and David Foster Wallace, Huehls charts a distinct move away from standard forms of political critique grounded in rights discourse, ideological demystification, and the identification of injustice and inequality. The authors discussed in After Critique register the decline of a conventional leftist politics, and in many ways even capitulate to its demise. As Huehls explains, however, such capitulation should actually be understood as contemporary U.S. fiction's concerted attempt to reconfigure the nature of politics from within the neoliberal beast. While it's easy to dismiss this as post-ideological fantasy, Huehls draws on an array of diverse scholarship--most notably the work of Bruno Latour--to suggest that an entirely new form of politics is emerging, both because of and in response to neoliberalism. Arguing that we must stop thinking of neoliberalism as a set of norms, ideological beliefs, or market principles that can be countered with a more just set of norms, beliefs, and principles, Huehls instead insists that we must start to appreciate neoliberalism as a post-normative ontological phenomenon. That is, it's not something that requires us to think or act a certain way; it's something that requires us to be in and occupy space in a certain way. This provocative treatment of neoliberalism in turn allows After Critique to reimagine our understanding of contemporary fiction and the political possibilities it envisions.

Twenty-First-Century Fiction in a Neoliberal Age

Rachel Greenwald Smith

Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture is essential reading for anyone invested in the ever-changing state of literary culture.

Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture

What is the political value of time, and where does that value reside? Should politics place its hope in future possibility, or does that simply defer action in the present? Can the present ground a vision of change, or is it too circumscribed by the status quo? In Qualified Hope: A Postmodern Politics of Time, Mitchum Huehls contends that conventional treatments of time's relationship to politics are limited by a focus on real-world experiences of time. By contrast, the innovative literary forms developed by authors in direct response to political events such as the Cold War, globalization, the emergence of identity politics, and 9/11 offer readers uniquely literary experiences of time. And it is in these literary experiences of time that Qualified Hope identifies more complicated--and thus more productive--ways to think about the time-politics relationship. Qualified Hope challenges the conventional characterization of postmodernism as a period in which authors reject time in favor of space as the primary category for organizing experience and knowledge. And by identifying a common commitment to time at the heart of postmodern literature, Huehls suggests that the period-defining divide between multiculturalism and theory is not as stark as previously thought.

Mitchum Huehls

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