Reading the Global City: New York, London and the Capitalist World-System in the Late Neoliberal Novel

Abstract

This thesis examines works of fiction written in the wake of the 2008/11 financial crash which take the global city as a setting from which to interrogate capitalist relations of combined and uneven development and the cultural, ideological and spatial means through which these relations are obscured. These novels mediate critical responses to Fredric Jameson’s concept of “cognitive mapping,” which calls for a pedagogical aesthetic that would “enable a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to… the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole” (1991: 51). I contend that this preoccupation represents a characteristic current of critique in the “late neoliberal novel,” in which crisis precipitates the (re-) emergence of the horizon of totality in cultural productions. The thesis is divided into four chapters. The first analyses Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island (2015) as a work thematising the ideological, mediatory role played by particular forms of urban and global space in the (re-) production of “false consciousness” in post-Fordist cores, while the second examines Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014) in relation to its pursuit of an immanent form of cognitive mapping that seeks to overcome these epistemological and ideological conditions. In Chapter Four, Teju Cole’s Open City (2011) is analysed in relation to its counterhegemonic readings of urban space, revealing the repressed violence – past and present, local and global – in which the global city is implicated. Finally, Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers (2014) is analysed as an engagement with the ascent of neoliberalism and its attendant cultural logic in 1970s New York, addressing the structural role played by artists in the resolution of Fordist crisis in both concrete urban and broad cultural terms in order to address the dialectical entanglements of subjectivity, art, space and totality