Pub Date : 2018-12-04DOI: 10.5422/fordham/9780823282708.003.0004
Myka Tucker-Abramson
Naked Lunch opens with drug use in Washington Square station and concludes with a drug deal gone. In between is a proliferation of shocking and lascivious scenes of drug use, deals, trafficking, and control, that travel from New York to Mexico to Tangier to the laboratories of Dr. Benway. Challenging readings that align Naked Lunch’s drug use with an aesthetics of shock, this chapter argues that drugs provide a lens through which the novel starts to map the new domestic and international geographies of US empire. This chapter argues that in linking together urban renewal projects at home and modernization and development projects such as Truman’s Point Four plan abroad, Naked Lunch focalizes the nascent political, economic, aesthetic, and psychological transformations that occur as a new system of US global hegemony was forged.
{"title":"Naked Lunch, Or, the Last Snapshot of the Surrealists","authors":"Myka Tucker-Abramson","doi":"10.5422/fordham/9780823282708.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823282708.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Naked Lunch opens with drug use in Washington Square station and concludes with a drug deal gone. In between is a proliferation of shocking and lascivious scenes of drug use, deals, trafficking, and control, that travel from New York to Mexico to Tangier to the laboratories of Dr. Benway. Challenging readings that align Naked Lunch’s drug use with an aesthetics of shock, this chapter argues that drugs provide a lens through which the novel starts to map the new domestic and international geographies of US empire. This chapter argues that in linking together urban renewal projects at home and modernization and development projects such as Truman’s Point Four plan abroad, Naked Lunch focalizes the nascent political, economic, aesthetic, and psychological transformations that occur as a new system of US global hegemony was forged.","PeriodicalId":202297,"journal":{"name":"Novel Shocks","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128553732","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-12-04DOI: 10.5422/fordham/9780823282708.003.0002
Myka Tucker-Abramson
Shortly after Ralph Ellison’s protagonist arrives in New York, he encounters Peter Wheatstraw, a man wearing Charlie Chaplin pants, “pushing a cart piled high with rolls of blue paper,” and singing a blues song that reminds the protagonist of home. Often read as a carrier of blues and vernacular traditions within the novel, Wheatstraw is also a literal carrier of building plans, all of which point to the ascendancy of Robert Moses and his New York City Slum Clearance Committee under the aegis of the Federal Housing Act of 1949. This chapter reads Ellison in relation to this emergent regime of post-war planning to suggest we think about Invisible Man not as a novel about a Jim Crow system passing into history, but about the tensions between the emergent racial regime of racial liberalism and white flight out of which neoliberalism would emerge.
{"title":"Blueprints: Invisible Man and the Great Migration to White Flight","authors":"Myka Tucker-Abramson","doi":"10.5422/fordham/9780823282708.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823282708.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Shortly after Ralph Ellison’s protagonist arrives in New York, he encounters Peter Wheatstraw, a man wearing Charlie Chaplin pants, “pushing a cart piled high with rolls of blue paper,” and singing a blues song that reminds the protagonist of home. Often read as a carrier of blues and vernacular traditions within the novel, Wheatstraw is also a literal carrier of building plans, all of which point to the ascendancy of Robert Moses and his New York City Slum Clearance Committee under the aegis of the Federal Housing Act of 1949. This chapter reads Ellison in relation to this emergent regime of post-war planning to suggest we think about Invisible Man not as a novel about a Jim Crow system passing into history, but about the tensions between the emergent racial regime of racial liberalism and white flight out of which neoliberalism would emerge.","PeriodicalId":202297,"journal":{"name":"Novel Shocks","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125651982","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-12-04DOI: 10.5422/fordham/9780823282708.003.0006
Myka Tucker-Abramson
Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar centers on two shock-fueled transformations: New York’s transformation from the nineteenth-century industrial city of slums, tenements, and factories to a shiny new metropolis and Esther’s transformation from an anxious, sick, and needy tenderfoot into a seemingly independent, liberated, and autonomous subject. Reading Esther’s psychic transformation against its geopolitical and spatial markers of renewal—the slumified lower east side of the Rosenbergs, the newly built glass-sheeted office buildings where the protagonist Esther works, and the newly constructed UN headquarters that hangs in Esther’s hotel window—the chapter challenges dominant readings of the novel, which often forefront how the double bind of consumer mass culture and patriarchal 1950s values trap and confine women. The chapter suggests the novel is less about the entrapment of women than it is about the formation of the woman we assume to be trapped. Specifically, it argues that the novel’s celebrated critique of the repressive, patriarchal state ultimately leads not to a more progressive position, but rather to the formation of a lactified, suburbanized, and entrepreneurial female subjectivity.
{"title":"Fallen Corpses and Rising Cities: The Bell Jar and the Making of the New Woman","authors":"Myka Tucker-Abramson","doi":"10.5422/fordham/9780823282708.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823282708.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar centers on two shock-fueled transformations: New York’s transformation from the nineteenth-century industrial city of slums, tenements, and factories to a shiny new metropolis and Esther’s transformation from an anxious, sick, and needy tenderfoot into a seemingly independent, liberated, and autonomous subject. Reading Esther’s psychic transformation against its geopolitical and spatial markers of renewal—the slumified lower east side of the Rosenbergs, the newly built glass-sheeted office buildings where the protagonist Esther works, and the newly constructed UN headquarters that hangs in Esther’s hotel window—the chapter challenges dominant readings of the novel, which often forefront how the double bind of consumer mass culture and patriarchal 1950s values trap and confine women. The chapter suggests the novel is less about the entrapment of women than it is about the formation of the woman we assume to be trapped. Specifically, it argues that the novel’s celebrated critique of the repressive, patriarchal state ultimately leads not to a more progressive position, but rather to the formation of a lactified, suburbanized, and entrepreneurial female subjectivity.","PeriodicalId":202297,"journal":{"name":"Novel Shocks","volume":"58 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115311016","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-12-04DOI: 10.5422/fordham/9780823282708.003.0003
Myka Tucker-Abramson
Price of Salt begins in the tradition of the naturalist lesbian pulp novel before veering sharply into the genre of the Western mid-way through. But it is a Western with a difference. While Highsmith’s characters follow the Western’s arc, in which the neurasthenic urban subject goes West, encounters a danger that cures and strengthens her, and ultimately returns home prepared to do the work of urban (and metonymically national) renewal, Highsmith changes the protagonist from a professional man into a working class, homosexual woman, and she expands the Western’s scope from the urban core to the metropolitan region as a whole. This chapter argues that through the novel’s radical revision of the Western to include two queer characters, The Price of Salt cleaves apart the Lavender Scare from the Red Scare and constructs a Red Scare defense of lesbianism in which lesbianism becomes a tool for subjective, urban, and national renewal—and, in turn, the attainment of sexual rights and freedoms becomes linked with the construction of a thoroughly-capitalist subjectivity organized around individual freedom, private property, and entrepreneurialism.
{"title":"The Price of Salt Is the City: Patricia Highsmith and the Queer Frontiers of Neoliberalism","authors":"Myka Tucker-Abramson","doi":"10.5422/fordham/9780823282708.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823282708.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Price of Salt begins in the tradition of the naturalist lesbian pulp novel before veering sharply into the genre of the Western mid-way through. But it is a Western with a difference. While Highsmith’s characters follow the Western’s arc, in which the neurasthenic urban subject goes West, encounters a danger that cures and strengthens her, and ultimately returns home prepared to do the work of urban (and metonymically national) renewal, Highsmith changes the protagonist from a professional man into a working class, homosexual woman, and she expands the Western’s scope from the urban core to the metropolitan region as a whole. This chapter argues that through the novel’s radical revision of the Western to include two queer characters, The Price of Salt cleaves apart the Lavender Scare from the Red Scare and constructs a Red Scare defense of lesbianism in which lesbianism becomes a tool for subjective, urban, and national renewal—and, in turn, the attainment of sexual rights and freedoms becomes linked with the construction of a thoroughly-capitalist subjectivity organized around individual freedom, private property, and entrepreneurialism.","PeriodicalId":202297,"journal":{"name":"Novel Shocks","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130077077","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-12-04DOI: 10.5422/fordham/9780823282708.003.0005
Myka Tucker-Abramson
Naomi Klein opens The Shock Doctrine by comparing the psychological hypothesis that an array of shocks “could unmake and erase faulty minds” with Milton Friedman’s economic hypothesis that a course of painful policy shocks could return society to “pure capitalism.” Klein’s book raises the question, why did shock become the dominant metaphor for economic and psychological modernization? This chapter suggests that Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged provides one answer, revealing how shock’s emergence as a form of neoliberal subject-making is rooted in the white flight anxieties about racializing and decaying urban cores that emerged in the post-war period. Reading Atlas Shrugged in relation to the debates surrounding the future of America’s cities at a time when the often-opposing forces of urban sprawl, suburbanization, urban decay, and urban renewal were making that future increasingly uncertain, this chapter argues that Atlas Shrugged simultaneously acts as an origin story for the emergence of the entrepreneurial subject and reveals the racialized and revanchist urban processes that helped create and shape these seemingly objective economic narratives and subjectivities.
{"title":"Shock Therapy: Atlas Shrugged, Urban Renewal, and the Making of the Entrepreneurial Subject","authors":"Myka Tucker-Abramson","doi":"10.5422/fordham/9780823282708.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823282708.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"Naomi Klein opens The Shock Doctrine by comparing the psychological hypothesis that an array of shocks “could unmake and erase faulty minds” with Milton Friedman’s economic hypothesis that a course of painful policy shocks could return society to “pure capitalism.” Klein’s book raises the question, why did shock become the dominant metaphor for economic and psychological modernization? This chapter suggests that Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged provides one answer, revealing how shock’s emergence as a form of neoliberal subject-making is rooted in the white flight anxieties about racializing and decaying urban cores that emerged in the post-war period. Reading Atlas Shrugged in relation to the debates surrounding the future of America’s cities at a time when the often-opposing forces of urban sprawl, suburbanization, urban decay, and urban renewal were making that future increasingly uncertain, this chapter argues that Atlas Shrugged simultaneously acts as an origin story for the emergence of the entrepreneurial subject and reveals the racialized and revanchist urban processes that helped create and shape these seemingly objective economic narratives and subjectivities.\u0000","PeriodicalId":202297,"journal":{"name":"Novel Shocks","volume":"85 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130044494","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-12-04DOI: 10.5422/fordham/9780823282708.003.0007
Myka Tucker-Abramson
Warren Miller’s Siege of Harlem is a strange and vexing novel that draws on the “internal colony” thesis of black power thinkers and imagines Harlem’s secession from the United States. It is also a novel that marks the end of the era of urban renewal and the passing from the era of Robert Moses to that of Jane Jacobs. This concluding chapter suggests that Siege can help us refuse the forced choices between Moses and Jacobs, or the planners and the walkers, that dominate conversations about post-war planning. Siege does so, the conclusion argues, by offering a different trajectory of urban thinking and politics, one that stretches from the multicultural and often Communist-led left in the 1930s and 1940s, to the working class, Puerto Rican, and black urban revolts of the 1960s, which put forward a militantly socialist, internationalist, and anti-imperialist urban vision. It is this form of urbanism, the conclusion suggests, that we need to return to today.
沃伦·米勒(Warren Miller)的《围攻哈莱姆》(Siege of Harlem)是一部奇怪而令人烦恼的小说，它借鉴了黑人权力思想家的“内部殖民地”理论，并想象了哈莱姆区与美国的分离。这也是一部标志着城市更新时代的结束和从罗伯特·摩西时代过渡到简·雅各布斯时代的小说。这一结束语表明，《围城》可以帮助我们拒绝在摩西和雅各布斯之间，或规划者和步行者之间的被迫选择，这些选择主导着战后规划的讨论。结论认为，《围城》通过提供不同的城市思想和政治轨迹做到了这一点，从20世纪30年代和40年代的多元文化和共产主义领导的左翼，延伸到20世纪60年代的工人阶级、波多黎各人和黑人城市起义，他们提出了一个激进的社会主义、国际主义和反帝国主义的城市愿景。结论表明，我们今天需要回归的正是这种形式的城市主义。
{"title":"The Siege of Harlem and Its Commune","authors":"Myka Tucker-Abramson","doi":"10.5422/fordham/9780823282708.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823282708.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"Warren Miller’s Siege of Harlem is a strange and vexing novel that draws on the “internal colony” thesis of black power thinkers and imagines Harlem’s secession from the United States. It is also a novel that marks the end of the era of urban renewal and the passing from the era of Robert Moses to that of Jane Jacobs. This concluding chapter suggests that Siege can help us refuse the forced choices between Moses and Jacobs, or the planners and the walkers, that dominate conversations about post-war planning. Siege does so, the conclusion argues, by offering a different trajectory of urban thinking and politics, one that stretches from the multicultural and often Communist-led left in the 1930s and 1940s, to the working class, Puerto Rican, and black urban revolts of the 1960s, which put forward a militantly socialist, internationalist, and anti-imperialist urban vision. It is this form of urbanism, the conclusion suggests, that we need to return to today.","PeriodicalId":202297,"journal":{"name":"Novel Shocks","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130818699","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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