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Bearing the Bad News
Contemporary American Literature and Culture
Sanford Pinsker
University of Iowa Press, 1990
For a number of years Sanford Pinsker has been one of our most incisive and spirited observers of contemporary American literature. His books have been widely and enthusiastically reviewed and his essays have appeared regularly in such intellectual quarterlies as the Georgia Review, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and the Gettysburg Review.
Now Pinsker focuses on the current American world of letters in this volume of essays to explore what literary culture in America was and what it too often has become, the ways in which cultural politics shapes our sense of contemporary values, and how the resources of American humor and the work of our best writers can help us maintain our equilibrium in “what can only be described as a bad cultural patch.”
The eleven essays in this insightful volume take on such subjects as the decline and fall of "formative reading"; the difficulties of identifying themes that unify American literature; the cultural value of such humorists as Robert Benchley, Lenny Bruce, and Woody Allen; versions of cultural politics—from the rise of the neoconservatives to the steady course held by social critics such as Irving Howe; and the place of the college novel in American literature. Pinsker concludes with some sobering thoughts about the current state of American intellectuals.
Ultimately, Bearing the Bad News reaffirms certain principles that have come under powerful attack during the last few decades—for example, that literature is a human and humanistic enterprise, one which speaks both to individual moral value and to our larger cultural health. It reflects Pinsker's commitment to the clarity and significance of the literary essay and his belief that what we read, and what we say about what we read, matters deeply.
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front cover of Hope Isn't Stupid
Hope Isn't Stupid
Utopian Affects in Contemporary American Literature
Sean Austin Grattan
University of Iowa Press, 2017
Hope Isn’t Stupid is the first study to interrogate the neglected connections between affect and the practice of utopia in contemporary American literature. Although these concepts are rarely theorized together, it is difficult to fully articulate utopia without understanding how affects circulate within utopian texts. Moving away from science fiction—the genre in which utopian visions are often located—author Sean Grattan resuscitates the importance of utopianism in recent American literary history. Doing so enables him to assert the pivotal role contemporary American literature has to play in allowing us to envision alternatives to global neoliberal capitalism.

Novelists William S. Burroughs, Dennis Cooper, John Darnielle, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, and Colson Whitehead are deeply invested in the creation of utopian possibilities. A return to reading the utopian wager in literature from the postmodern to the contemporary period reinvigorates critical forms that imagine reading as an act of communication, friendship, solace, and succor. These forms also model richer modes of belonging than the diluted and impoverished ones on display in the neoliberal present. Simultaneously, by linking utopian studies and affect studies, Grattan’s work resists the tendency for affect studies to codify around the negative, instead reorienting the field around the messy, rich, vibrant, and ambivalent affective possibilities of the world. Hope Isn’t Stupid insists on the centrality of utopia not only in American literature, but in American life as well. 
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front cover of Neoliberalism and Contemporary American Literature
Neoliberalism and Contemporary American Literature
Edited by Liam Kennedy and Stephen Shapiro
Dartmouth College Press, 2019
Please Does it make sense to speak of an “American” literature in neoliberal times? Can literature function as either a neutral category or a privileged narrative of national imagination in a time when paradigms of the nation-state and of liberal capitalism are undergoing a prolonged shift? In the United States, as elsewhere, the association between the nation-state, liberal capitalism, and literary form has a long history, reflecting determinate relations between writer and reader within an imagined national community. As this community loses its symbolic efficiency in the age of neoliberal capital, the boundaries and possibilities of literary production and representation shift. This collection of essays examines how American literature both models and interrogates the neoliberal present. Has literary realism been exhausted as a narrative form? Can contemporary literature still imagine either the end of capitalism or an alternative to it?fill in marketing copy
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