The Pivotal Decade Revisited, or the Contemporary Novel of the Seventies

This paper takes up the recent turn in the contemporary novel to the aesthetic and economic debates of the 1970s as ways of thematizing their own aesthetic and political ambitions. Turning to art’s legibility within a matrix of global economic relations, I argue for the political importance of two recent novels — Percival Everett’s So Much Blue and Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers — that not only dramatize a particular moment of economic violence in the 1970s (the expansion of US hegemony via financial instruments), but formalize the era’s aesthetic upheaval (the turn from modernism to postmodernism). In doing so, they offera vision of the politics of literature not dependent on our experience of capitalism but which looks instead to the formation of a political and economic regime that has come to govern the world system under capitalism in the twenty-first century.