Novel Shocks

Myka Tucker-Abramson

Description

Throughout the 1950s, a coalition of developers, politicians, and planners bulldozed vast areas of land deemed "slums" or "blighted" to make way for freeways, public and private housing projects, cultural centers, and skyscrapers. While the program was national, New York was ground zero, and the demolition and monumental reconstruction of the city created a distinctive urban sensorium, rooted in the new segregated landscapes of prosperous white private space and poor black public space.Novel Shocks situates these landscapes at the center of the midcentury novel, arguing that James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Patricia Highsmith, Ayn Rand, William Burroughs, Sylvia Plath, and Warren Miller all registered these new urban spaces as traumatic "shocks" that required new aesthetic forms. Rejecting older shock-based modernisms, these novelists forged a new modernism, which reimagined shock as a therapeutic force that would create a more flexible, self-reliant, and resilient subject that would nourish neoliberalism's roots. In offering a cultural prehistory of neoliberalism, Novel Shocks resituates the Cold War novel as a key archive for understanding neoliberalism's emergence and offers a more materialist and historically grounded account of neoliberalism's subjective, affective, and ideological structures.

Sujets

• USA
• United States of America
• Ethnic studies
• États-Unis

Informations

• Publié par: Fordham University Press
• Date de parution: 04 décembre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780823282746
• Langue: English

Extrait

N o v e l S h o c k s

Novel Shocks Urban Renewal and the Origins of Neoliberalism

Myka TuckerAbramson

f o r d h a m u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s New York 2019

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Tucker-Abramson, Myka, author. Title: Novel shocks : urban renewal and the origins of neoliberalism / Myka Tucker-Abramson. Other titles: Urban renewal and the origins of neoliberalism Description: First edition. | New York : Fordham University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers:lccn2018024887 |isbn9780823282708 (cloth : alk. paper) |isbn9780823282692 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects:lcsh: American fiction—20th century— History and criticism. | Urban renewal in literature. | Discrimination in literature. | Neoliberalism—United States—History—20th century. Classification:lccps374.u74t83 2018 | ddc813/.54093581—dc23 lcrecord available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018024887

Printed in the United States of America 21 20 19 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

c o n t e n t s

Introduction 1. Blueprints:Invisible Manand the Great Migration to White Flight 2. The Price of Salt Is the City: Patricia Highsmith and the Queer Frontiers of Neoliberalism 3.Naked Lunch, Or, the Last Snapshot of the Surrealists 4.ShocTkherapy:Atlas Shrugged, Urban Renewal, and the Making of the Entrepreneurial Subject 5. Fallen Corpses and Rising Cities:The Bell Jar and the Making of the New Woman Conclusion:The Siege of Harlemand Its Commune

Acknowledgments Notes Works Cited Index

v

2

1

5

46 63

8

4

104 125

139 143 163 185

N o v e l S h o c k s

Introduction

In James Baldwin’s 1962 novelAnother Country, Eric Jones returns to New York City after spending three years in Paris to find his city suddenly for- eign. “It might,” he muses, “for strange barbarity of manner and custom, for the sense of danger and horror barely sleeping beneath the rough, gre- garious surface, have been some impenetrably exotic city of the East” (230). Eric’s experience of the postwar city as foreign was a common one among New Yorkers in the early 1960s. In the preceding decade, New York had been ground zero for a nationwide experiment, later termed urban re- newal, that aimed to respond to what planners, politicians, and downtown business interests worried was an irreversible urban decline resulting from the interconnected processes of a great migration of blacks, Latinos, and Puerto Ricans into the city and the flight of industry, commerce, and the white tax base into the suburbs. Empowered by the Housing Act of 1949, the first national policy designed to deal with overcrowding and urban blight, New York bulldozed its slums to make way for modern housing and cultural complexes, freeways, public and private housing projects, medical centers, and commercial skyscrapers, all of which promised to restore prof- itability and order to a decaying downtown core. Taken together, these

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