White, C orcid.org/0000-0003-3338-6010 (2022) ‘Deskless, commuteless, and theoretically omnipresent’: work, global violence, and capitalist realism in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. Textual Practice, 36 (9). pp. 1481-1499. ISSN 0950-236X
Abstract
This essay examines how, through narrating the white-collar workplace, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) engages with structural concerns of contemporary capitalism, global violence, postcolonial oppression, and contemporary technologies as a text written in the wake of the 2007/8 financial crisis. Alongside these concerns and through reading two chapters of Egan’s novel, ‘Selling the General’ and ‘Pure Language’, this article also examines how fictional representation more broadly operates as both an aesthetic mode and as an active component of a political-economic sensibility that is necessary to upholding the capitalist status quo in the contemporary moment: this is, as Mark Fisher describes, capitalist realism. By bringing these critical strands in dialogue with one another, not only does this enable a nuanced reading of how the novel understands and charts the relations between these structural concerns, but it also facilitates a furthering of capitalist realism as a critical framework.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
---|---|
Authors/Creators: | |
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2021 The Author. Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Keywords: | Jennifer Egan; A Visit from the Goon Squad; work; global violence; capitalist realism; neoliberalism |
Dates: |
|
Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of English (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 01 Sep 2021 13:55 |
Last Modified: | 26 Feb 2023 01:13 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Taylor & Francis |
Identification Number: | 10.1080/0950236x.2021.1971748 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:177546 |