Disintegration Narratives: Crisis and Transition in the Literary 1970s

Abstract

This dissertation considers the crisis of industrial manufacturing and onset of protracted economic stagnation in the 1970s as a problem of political and narrative form. The onset of what economic historian Robert Brenner calls “the long downturn” in 1973 marks the end of modern economic growth and the closure of political horizons premised on the expansion of industrial capital. Drawing on social movement history and recent developments in Marxist literary theory, I consider a series of novels by politically committed U.S. authors who return to the epochal break of the 1970s to narrate the emergence of our historical present. Examining novels by Leslie Feinberg, John Edgar Wideman, and Rachel Kushner alongside other novels and cultural artifacts of the long 1970s, I find that they delimit the terrain of the present by staging the onset of deindustrialization as the exhaustion of earlier genres of political literature and modes of organization.