Fictions Of Finance At The End Of An American Century

Fictions of Finance at the End of an American Century explores how an economy determines the language of those who live among its imperatives—and how it makes available to them the stories that they can and cannot tell, and the manner of their telling. Read closely, fictional narrative may expose the historical structures that determine literary language use, and that of language more generally. The study, the fourth in a quartet of studies addressing the emergence and decline of a Fordist regime of capitalist accumulation, offers an account of 'the sub-semantic whispering' that haunts the literature of the financial turn—which is to say, an account of how the complexities of words and their histories register an expanding industrial economy's organizing contradictions and failures. Reading in the light of deindustrialization and the rise of US finance capital after 1973, it deploys and elaborates on a materialist theory of language that explains how syntactic as well as semantic structures register a financializing economy's core contradictions, those associated particularly with debt, risk, and volatility. The volume listens for the under-heard syntactical breaks that punctuate language under the global hegemony of finance, breaks that express the unuttered in all utterance, taking as its exemplary texts primarily works by Bret Easton Ellis, Jayne Anne Phillips, and David Foster Wallace.

Fictions of Finance at the End of an American Century explores how an economy determines the language of those who live among its imperatives--and how it makes available to them the stories that they can and cannot tell, and the manner of their telling. Read closely, fictional narrative may expose the historical structures that determine literary language use, and that of language more generally. The study, the fourth in a quartet of studies addressing the emergence and decline of a Fordist regime of capitalist accumulation, offers an account of 'the sub-semantic whispering' that haunts the literature of the financial turn--which is to say, an account of how the complexities of words and their histories register an expanding industrial economy's organizing contradictions and failures. Reading in the light of deindustrialization and the rise of US finance capital after 1973, it deploys and elaborates on a materialist theory of language that explains how syntactic as well as semantic structures register a financializing economy's core contradictions, those associated particularly with debt, risk, and volatility. The volume listens for the under-heard syntactical breaks that punctuate language under the global hegemony of finance, breaks that express the unuttered in all utterance, taking as its exemplary texts primarily works by Bret Easton Ellis, Jayne Anne Phillips, and David Foster Wallace.

*Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography* *Winner of the Los Angeles Times Prize for Biography* *Winner of the 2019 Hitchens Prize* "Portrays Holbrooke in all of his endearing and exasperating self-willed glory...Both a sweeping diplomatic history and a Shakespearean tragicomedy... If you could read one book to comprehend American's foreign policy and its quixotic forays into quicksands over the past 50 years, this would be it."--Walter Isaacson, The New York Times Book Review "By the end of the second page, maybe the third, you will be hooked...There never was a diplomat-activist quite like [Holbrooke], and there seldom has been a book quite like this -- sweeping and sentimental, beguiling and brutal, catty and critical, much like the man himself."--David M. Shribman, The Boston Globe Richard Holbrooke was brilliant, utterly self-absorbed, and possessed of almost inhuman energy and appetites. Admired and detested, he was the force behind the Dayton Accords that ended the Balkan wars, America's greatest diplomatic achievement in the post-Cold War era. His power lay in an utter belief in himself and his idea of a muscular, generous foreign policy. From his days as a young adviser in Vietnam to his last efforts to end the war in Afghanistan, Holbrooke embodied the postwar American impulse to take the lead on the global stage. But his sharp elbows and tireless self-promotion ensured that he never rose to the highest levels in government that he so desperately coveted. His story is thus the story of America during its era of supremacy: its strength, drive, and sense of possibility, as well as its penchant for overreach and heedless self-confidence. In Our Man, drawn from Holbrooke's diaries and papers, we are given a nonfiction narrative that is both intimate and epic in its revelatory portrait of this extraordinary and deeply flawed man and the elite spheres of society and government he inhabited.

Speculative Time examines how a climate of financial and economic speculation and disaster shaped the literary culture of the United States in the early to mid-twentieth century. It argues that speculation's risk-laden and crisis-prone temporalities had major impacts on writing in the period, and on important aspects of visual representation.

When Henry Luce announced in 1941 that we were living in the "American century," he believed that the international popularity of American culture made the world favorable to U.S. interests. Now, in the digital twenty-first century, the American century has been superseded, as American movies, music, and video games are received, understood, and transformed. How do we make sense of this shift? Building on a decade of fieldwork in Cairo, Casablanca, and Tehran, Brian T. Edwards maps new routes of cultural exchange that are innovative, accelerated, and full of diversions. Shaped by the digital revolution, these paths are entwined with the growing fragility of American "soft" power. They indicate an era after the American century, in which popular American products and phenomena—such as comic books, teen romances, social-networking sites, and ways of expressing sexuality—are stripped of their associations with the United States and recast in very different forms. Arguing against those who talk about a world in which American culture is merely replicated or appropriated, Edwards focuses on creative moments of uptake, in which Arabs and Iranians make something unexpected. He argues that these products do more than extend the reach of the original. They reflect a world in which culture endlessly circulates and gathers new meanings.

Postmodernism’s ‘end’ is a complex and contentious topic. Yet, one overarching consensus emerges: the postmodern has been surpassed. This book poses a thought experiment challenging this position – what if postmodernism persists within the twenty-first century? Rather than designate a new epoch or coherent movement, this book interrogates the fragmented, contradictory, and counterintuitive endurance of postmodern aesthetics within post-Cold War America. An alternative use of postmodern aesthetics becomes possible when they are decoupled from their twentieth-century historical location. Collectively, these repetitions posit a postmodern continuum, contrasting the widely called-for succession of postmodernism via this decoupling. When postmodern aesthetics are no longer unconsciously repeated within their cultural moment, this emergent shift within a period ‘after’ postmodernism presents an alternative historical positioning and use. After their cultural vanguard, postmodern aesthetics become a confrontation of the chaotic realism of an inescapable post-Cold War capitalism, tapping into this cultural zeitgeist through literature.

The award-winning historian delivers a “brilliant and deeply informed” analysis of American power from the Spanish-American War to the Trump Administration (New York Journal of Books). In this sweeping and incisive history of US foreign relations, historian Alfred McCoy explores America’s rise as a world power from the 1890s through the Cold War, and its bid to extend its hegemony deep into the twenty-first century. Since American dominance reached its apex at the close of the Cold War, the nation has met new challenges that it is increasingly unequipped to handle. From the disastrous invasion of Iraq to the failure of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, fracturing military alliances, and the blundering nationalism of Donald Trump, McCoy traces US decline in the face of rising powers such as China. He also offers a critique of America’s attempt to maintain its position through cyberwar, covert intervention, client elites, psychological torture, and worldwide surveillance.

Examining novels by celebrated authors, some neglected and some brand new texts, Arin Keeble offers a detailed analysis of the ways novels from around the world have represented terrorism in the early twenty-first century. Over five chapters, he uncovers a movement away from event-based narratives toward depictions of terrorism as a violent symptom or feature of twenty-first century world-systems and neoliberalism. Beginning with the early literary response to 9/11 and the 9/11 novel genre, the book moves through more recent depictions of the endless 'war on terror', state terror, white nationalist terror and historical narratives of terror that resonate in the current political climate. In doing so, it examines the changing ways literature has sought to make sense of both the reasons why terrorism occurs and the effects it has on victims, survivors and international and intercultural relations.

This book explores the ways in which a range of recent American novelists have handled the genre of the 'coming-of-age' novel, or the Bildungsroman. Novels of this genre characteristically dramatise the vicissitudes of growing up and the trials and tribulations of young adulthood, often presented through depictions of immediate family relationships and other social structures. This book considers a variety of different American cultures (in terms of race, class and gender) and a range of contemporary coming-of-age novels, so that aesthetic judgements about the fiction might be made in the context of the social history that fiction represents. A series of questions are asked:* Does the coming-of-age moment in these novels coincide with an interpretation of the 'fall' of America?* What kind of national commentary does it therefore facilitate?* Is the Bildungsroman a quintessentially American genre?* What can it usefully tell us about contemporary American culture? Although the focus is on the conte

After the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act loosened discriminatory restrictions, people from Northeast Asian countries such as South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and eventually China immigrated to the United States in large numbers. Highly skilled Asian immigrants flocked to professional-managerial occupations, especially in science, technology, engineering, and math. Asian American literature is now overwhelmingly defined by this generation’s children, who often struggled with parental and social expectations that they would pursue lucrative careers on their way to becoming writers. Christopher T. Fan offers a new way to understand Asian American fiction through the lens of the class and race formations that shaped its authors both in the United States and in Northeast Asia. In readings of writers including Ted Chiang, Chang-rae Lee, Ken Liu, Ling Ma, Ruth Ozeki, Kathy Wang, and Charles Yu, he examines how Asian American fiction maps the immigrant narrative of intergenerational conflict onto the “two cultures” conflict between the arts and sciences. Fan argues that the self-consciousness found in these writers’ works is a legacy of Japanese and American modernization projects that emphasized technical and scientific skills in service of rapid industrialization. He considers Asian American writers’ attraction to science fiction, the figure of the engineer and notions of the “postracial,” modernization theory and time travel, and what happens when the dream of a stable professional identity encounters the realities of deprofessionalization and proletarianization. Through a transnational and historical-materialist approach, this groundbreaking book illuminates what makes texts and authors “Asian American.”