An Allegory of Value: American Literature within Neoliberalism

Abstract

This thesis offers an allegorical reading of contemporary American literature’s critical response to neoliberalism’s reshaping of cultural and social value. Focusing on four literary recipients of the MacArthur Foundation fellowships, it argues that the institutional narrative guiding the “genius grant” program symptomatically expresses the dominant neoliberal sociology of knowledge. Specifically, this study focuses on the work of William Gaddis, Colson Whitehead, David Foster Wallace, and George Saunders. In the prose fiction herein discussed, each author dramatizes a constituent feature of the neoliberal sociology of knowledge to which the MacArthur Foundation subscribes, namely involuntary competition, human capital, and the price mechanism. These three features transmogrify the themes of capital, labour, and rent that underlie Marxist critiques of capitalism. The ordering principle for the study obeys the Foundation’s rationale for the “genius grants”: from the philanthropic bequest that established the program, through the interpellation of recipients as creative labourers and “string-free” subjects, to the monetary reward itself. The introductory chapter establishes the narrative logic of the fellowship and a theoretical framework for what follows. Chapter two treats Gaddis’ J R (1975) as a tonic to the market propaganda that emerges in biographical accounts of John MacArthur and the Foundation’s origins. Chapter three examines Whitehead’s demystification of creativity and creative labour in John Henry Days (2001) and Apex Hides the Hurt (2006). Chapter four demonstrates that David Foster Wallace’s celebrity and work exemplify the debts that govern in a toxic social environment, paying particular attention to the essays and fictions from his middle period. Chapter five explores the economic winners-and-losers template that animates George Saunders’ first four short fiction collections. Saunders documents how the collective quality of the class struggle is delegitimized through the individualizing effects of entrepreneurship and consumer culture. The concluding chapter reflects on the value of allegory as a method and the significance of literature as a medium for exposing the commitments and consequences of neoliberal ideology.