Edinburgh University Press Failure and Ethics in Contemporary American Literature

Offers a compelling new study of failure and neoliberalism in contemporary American literature Breaks new critical ground in studies of failure and neoliberalism Reveals connective avenues between continental philosophy and contemporary American literature Provides fresh readings of such critically acclaimed writers as Don DeLillo, Tony Kushner, Rachel Kushner, Karen Tei Yamashita, Claudia Rankine, and Quiara Alegría Hudes Makes a series of polemical claims about the importance of deconstructive method and of literature as resources for contesting neoliberalism Failure and Ethics in Contemporary American Literature contends that failure is both a response to the social and economic conditions of neoliberalism and a site of ethical imagining where alternative modes of being and being together are proposed. Daniel Dufournaud capaciously construes failure to include performing badly, unhappiness and dysphoria, family dysfunction, and formal discontinuity. He contends that the function of failure in contemporary American literature resonates with the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. For Levinas, the self emerges as a conscious subject only through the imposition of the Other, a preconscious sequence that installs responsibility for others at the heart of selfhood. Levinas frames the suspension of egoism and the self’s concomitant awareness of its constitutive responsibility as an ethical interruption. Similarly, this study’s primary texts treat failure as an interruption that forces the self to acknowledge its foundational sociality, an acknowledgement that contests neoliberalism’s individualist protocols.