Novel Shocks - by Myka Tucker-Abramson (Paperback)

About the Book

"Novel Shocks: Urban Renewal and the Origins of Neoliberalism traces the political and cultural origins of neoliberalism to the large-scale suburbanization and urban renewal programs of the 1950s and early 1960s, and places the Cold War novel at the center of this story. Throughout the 1950s, a coalition of developers, politicians and planners, bulldozed vast areas of land deemed "slums" or "blighted" to make way for freeways to the new suburban developments, public and private housing projects, medical centers, skyscrapers, and even the new United Nations headquarters. While the program was national, New York was ground zero, and like Haussman's creative destruction of Paris a century before, the demolition and monumental reconstruction of New York created a distinctive, and soon to be global, urban sensorium, one rooted in the new segregated landscapes of prosperous white private space and poor black public space" --

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

Myka Tucker-Abramson reinterprets twentieth century American urbanism and political economy through provocative, original readings of postwar writers including James Baldwin, Patricia Highsmith, William Burroughs, Ayn Rand, and Sylvia Plath. She traces the path to neoliberalism through literary encounters with urban renewal and dispossession, the suburban 'frontier, ' and globalism. Few books so effectively bridge literary and urban studies.---Thomas J. Sugrue, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History, New York University

...Novel Shocks remains a necessary intervention into the field of urban literary studies, one that extends, deepens, and revises the work of critics like Carlo Rotella, Thomas Heise, and Catherine Jurca. The book illustrates how, at the moment of their separation, the urban cores and suburban peripheries of US cities were complexly intertwined, and how writers helped bring neoliberalism into being by exploring the material and affective links between these spaces.-- "American Literary History Online Review"

Tucker-Abramson's book earns high praise: it dwells persuasively in its details, while theorizing its political and aesthetic findings in ways that make shock an unavoidable topic of midcentury US empire.-- "Modern Philology"

About the Author

Myka Tucker-Abramson is Assistant Professor in American Literature at the University of Warwick.