{"title":"Mitchum Huehls","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"neoliberalism-and-contemporary-literary-culture-book-mitchum-huehls-9781421423104","title":"Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture","description":"Neoliberalism has been a buzzword in literary studies for well over a decade, but its meaning remains ambiguous and its salience contentious. In  Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture, Mitchum Huehls and Rachel Greenwald Smith offer a wide-ranging exploration of contemporary literature through the lens of neoliberalism's economic, social, and cultural ascendance. Bringing together accessible and provocative essays from top literary scholars, this innovative collection examines neoliberalism's influence on literary theory and methodology, literary form, literary representation, and literary institutions. A four-phase approach to the historical emergence of neoliberalism from the early 1970s to the present helps to clarify the complexity of the relationship between neoliberalism and literary culture. Layering that history over the diverse changes in a US-Anglo literary field that has moved away from postmodern forms and sensibilities, the book argues that many literary developments-including the return to realism, the rise of the memoir, the embrace of New Materialist theory, and the pursuit of aesthetic autonomy-make more coherent sense when viewed in light of neoliberalism's ever-increasing expansion into the cultural sphere.  The essays gathered here engage a diverse range of theorists, including Michel Foucault, Wendy Brown, Giorgio Agamben, Bruno Latour, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gary Becker, and Eve Sedgwick to address the reciprocal relationship between neoliberalism and conceptual fields such as biopolitics, affect, phenomenology, ecology, and new materialist ontology. These theoretical perspectives are complemented by innovative readings of contemporary works of literature by writers such as Jennifer Egan, Ben Lerner, Gillian Flynn, Teju Cole, Jonathan Franzen, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Salvador Plascencia, E. L. James, Lisa Robertson, Kenneth Goldsmith, and many others. Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture is essential reading for anyone invested in the ever-changing state of literary culture.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49633566556433,"sku":"GOR009261746","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49730013823249,"sku":"NGR9781421423104","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50529250738449,"sku":"CIN1421423103VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1421423103.jpg?v=1751427609"},{"product_id":"after-critique-book-mitchum-huehls-9780190067830","title":"After Critique","description":"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.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50316180848913,"sku":"GOR013924031","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":50999598711057,"sku":"NIN9780190067830","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52475611185425,"sku":"NLS9780190067830","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0190067837.jpg?v=1751388726"},{"product_id":"art-theory-revolution-book-mitchum-huehls-9780814215241","title":"Art, Theory, Revolution","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50363971928337,"sku":"CIN0814215246G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52434137514257,"sku":"NLS9780814215241","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0814215246.jpg?v=1750915003"},{"product_id":"qualified-hope-book-mitchum-huehls-9780814257272","title":"Qualified Hope","description":"\u003cdiv\u003eWhat 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 \u003ci\u003eQualified Hope: A Postmodern Politics of Time\u003c\/i\u003e, 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 \u003ci\u003eQualified Hope\u003c\/i\u003e identifies more complicated--and thus more productive--ways to think about the time-politics relationship.   \u003ci\u003eQualified Hope\u003c\/i\u003e 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.    \u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51274508960017,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51274511778065,"sku":"NIN9780814257272","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52429577355537,"sku":"NLS9780814257272","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0814257275.jpg?v=1751233663"},{"product_id":"after-critique-book-mitchum-huehls-9780190456221","title":"After Critique","description":"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.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52488715567377,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52488716321041,"sku":"NLS9780190456221","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780190456221.jpg?v=1759875527"},{"product_id":"art-theory-revolution-book-mitchum-huehls-9780814258460","title":"Art, Theory, Revolution","description":"\u003cdiv\u003eCan form be political? Do specific aesthetic and literary forms necessarily point us toward a progressive or reactionary politics? Artists, authors, and critics like to imagine so, but what happens when they lose control of the politics of their forms? 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On the surface, these ideas seem conservative--family, tradition, history, the land, autonomy, private property--but they can be deployed to achieve radical ends--antiracism, anticapitalism, inclusion, solidarity, diversity, and climate repair.   Radical Conservatism reintroduces these mutually inclusive ideas and thinks beyond the rigid polarities that define political thought today. Radically conservative thought offers a provocative critique of the liberal-capitalist status quo, but it does so in a way that is neither left-collectivist nor right-populist. Rather, radically conservative ideas are classically conservative, but given our contemporary political climate, they register as remarkably radical.  To do this conceptual work, Radical Conservatism turns to a rich vein of twentieth and twenty-first-century U.S. literature. This repertoire is generally hostile to the status quo liberalisms that have shaped normative U.S. political thought for centuries. 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