Neoliberal Trauma in Contemporary American Fiction

Abstract

The cultural dominant that is neoliberalism has invariably influenced the field of contemporary American literature. Criticism on literature engaged with neoliberalism, including two prominent collections by Kenney and Shapiro and Huehls and Greenwald Smith, tends to employ a market-oriented lens that both assumes a specific corpus of literature (i.e., novels with white, male, middle-class, postmodern characters) and organizes itself around a specific set of themes (i.e., rising middle-class precarity, American global hegemony, human capital and biopolitical narratives, and the increase in individual perspectives). This dissertation intervenes in the field by offering a new approach to reading literature engaged with neoliberalism through the lens of trauma. Specifically, I analyze the traumatic impact of neoliberal social transformations, including the spread of surveillance technology, border trade policy, and war, in Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story (2010), Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders (2005), Ana Castillo’s The Guardians (2007), and Mario Acevedo’s The Nymphos of Rocky Flats (2006). I show how in these novels, characters who face an existential struggle to survive these neoliberal initiatives are forced through traumatic experiences to acquiesce to the demands of a neoliberal world in ways that permanently damage their psychological health. This trauma-informed approach takes as its critical point of departure Naomi Klein’s political argument that violence is the ubiquitous precursor to the creation of a neoliberal world and neoliberal subjects. Unlike most other scholars of neoliberalism and literature, I pay special attention to authors and characters of Latinx and other marginalized backgrounds because their novels better represent the vulnerable communities most impacted by neoliberal initiatives. This dissertation thus invites readers to understand that the literature of neoliberalism is considerably less white and less literary than many have previously believed.