This dissertation explores the literary and intellectual history of “spontaneity” in twentieth-century art and social theory. It argues that there is an underappreciated formal “kinship” between the ideal of freedom embodied by avant-garde artistic experiments in spontaneous self-creation and the neoliberal intellectual project that simultaneously grew up in response to the rationalized structures of the “organized society.” Each chapter draws out this underlying kinship by reading the artistic valorization of spontaneous freedom in cultural works from the late 1960s and 1970s across different media forms alongside the elevation of kosmos or “spontaneous order” in the writings of F. A. Hayek, the leading theorist of the neoliberal intellectual project. Chapter 1, “Neo-HooDoo Economicus: A Genealogy of Jes Grew,” turns to fiction, exploring the valorization of spontaneous order in Ishmael Reed’s novel Mumbo Jumbo (1972). Chapter 2, “The Sound and the Theory: Jacques Attali and the Cunning of Spontaneous Aesthetics,” turns to music by reexamining Jacques Attali’s poststructuralist work of musicology, Noise (1977), in light of its author’s political involvement in the neoliberal policy shift in the early 1980s. Chapter 3, “‘Aesthetic of Chance’: Easy Rider and the Road to Neoliberal Order,” turns to New Hollywood cinema, exploring the spontaneous vision of freedom embodied by Easy Rider (1969; dir. Dennis Hopper), the film that signaled the death of the Hollywood studio system. Together, these chapters suggest the (often unwitting) role played by artists across different mediums in modeling the kind of open-ended freedom that would come to characterize social life in the neoliberal age, where the purposively constructed structures of the postwar order give way to the spontaneous order of the market.

My dissertation investigates the American WWII homefront and its commitment both to war production and leisure consumerism. A look at literature of the period shows that rationing did not produce a straightforward repression of desires; wartime restrictions and price controls resulted instead in multiplying forms of desire, and an increase in societal and individual attention paid to consumption choices. Since the war economy rests upon production for destruction, violence irrupts throughout the novels I examine. As more women entered industry, more energy was invested into maintaining an image of the consumer as inherently female. Meanwhile, the underlying social scripts for the eventual redirection of desires toward more traditional and coherent categories were established. I argue that postwar `reconversion' signals broader sociocultural changes rather than relatively limited industrial shifts. Wartime advertisements marketed bright futurity, promoting faith in the idea that hardship now would be transformed into peace and prosperity later, both for you and your progeny. I contend that skepticism toward such highly publicized myths emerges in tropes of childlessness or perverse children, which I examine in each of the novels here.

In my chapter on Saul Bellow's first novel Dangling Man (1944), I argue that his protagonist should be viewed not as an existential hero but as a lens on the homefront economy and its psychic repercussions. As Joseph's life begins to revolve around consumption and frustration, he projects blame outward with violent results. Next I turn to two authors who worked for the WPA in the 1930s and defense plants in the 1940s, before becoming hard-boiled crime fiction writers in the 1950s. Chester Himes and Jim Thompson engage directly with the war economy through their early semi-autobiographical novels, contributing essential voices of dissent in an enforced atmosphere of consensus. Yet both displace industrial violence onto the women in their lives. Finally, Norman Mailer's political allegory of the postwar period critiques the amnesia involved in maintaing an economy based on war. In 'The Postwar Tomorrow', I contend that the wartime shift toward nondurable commodities had significant ramifications for the specific forms of American consumerism appearing in subsequent decades.

Since the 1980 publication of the third edition of The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III), there has been a substantial and ongoing transformation in the way that psychiatric disorders have been classified, understood, and diagnosed. My dissertation, "Crisis Tendencies: Contemporary Fiction and the Political Economy of Mental Health After 1980" attends to these ongoing clinical transformations as features of an evolving and historically novel account of social and emotional personhood that is deeply embedded within the movements of capital– and one, I argue, that literary narrative bears the capacity to throw into relief. While earlier versions of the DSM utilized a framework of psychoanalytic and psychodynamic classifications and diagnostic assumptions about the underlying causes and trajectories of various disorders, the 1980 DSM-III marked a sharp break with its predecessors by turning to the observable and empirical, rather than the personal and subjective, symptoms of mental illness– a turn that ultimately rewrote the entire process of clinical diagnosis and that gave foothold for a highly profitable industry of psychopharmaceuticals. My project thus asserts that concomitant stylistic and narrative developments in literary fiction provide a unique and invaluable lens onto these transformations– one that not only gives insight into the private structures of experience associated with these illnesses, but also one that crucially allows us to see how the clinical history of contemporary mental illness is deeply embedded within the history of capital.

This dissertation engages in a methodological approach informed by literary history, formal and cultural analyses, and genre study in order to give a century-long account of the emergence of “Philippine reproductive fiction.” While this developing Philippine Anglophone literary archive takes on its most distinct form in the twenty-first century, this dissertation attempts to locate its historical antecedents in earlier literature about the Marcos martial law period (1972-1981) and the Philippine Commonwealth period (1935-1946). It tracks the figure of the Philippine reproductive worker through each of these political transformations and their attendant economic reconfigurations. In the historical arc this dissertation traces, the literature of overseas Philippine reproductive labor begins in the colonial domestic spaces of early twentieth-century America as the Filipino “houseboy” embodies the imperial ambiguity in being a U.S. “national” subject in the domestic home, but not of the domestic nation. Moving into the postcolonial period, the literary depiction of Philippine reproductive labor in the politically turbulent years of the Marcos dictatorship begins to allegorize the failures of social reproduction at the level of the newly-independent Philippine state. In the neoliberal era, “Philippine reproductive fiction” coheres into a clear archive that links these earlier moments of imperial and national crises to contemporary economic crises at the level of the world-system. Philippine Anglophone Literature in the Age of Reproductive Labor therefore claims that shifting aesthetic representations of Philippine reproductive labor throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries mediate expansive reconfigurations in empire, postcolonial nation-states, and the global economy.

While the discourses of the physical and social sciences gave literary naturalists a useful framework for understanding the world (how environments determined human action), those same discourses ended up calling into question the freedom—and thus the value—of artists who were themselves understood to be determined by natural and social forces. How, over time, literary naturalists frame and navigate both this issue and the larger issue of the relationship between the aesthetic and determinism furnishes the subject matter for this dissertation.

“Race Writing in the Internet Age” argues that the intensified forms of global economic integration made possible by Internet technologies have defined contemporary “postrace” narratives—narratives that, in turn, both formally embody and thematically challenge the racial ideologies that subtend this integration. The Japanese coders, South Asian hackers, “cyber coolies,” African-American app designers, Korean- and Taiwanese-American social media addicts, and Nigerian “yahoo boys” who populate the contemporary American novel elaborate key contradictions between the “postracial” world of social technology and the global wage differentials that attend and make possible the Internet itself. In novels by Teju Cole, Bharati Mukherjee, Ruth Ozeki, Ed Park, Ishmael Reed, Gary Shteyngart, Colson Whitehead, and others, race disappears into a colorblind Web run through apparently abstract software algorithms, only to reappear in the wage gap between developed and undeveloped nations. However, these novels do not simply construct race in accordance with capitalist imperatives: they also sublimate technology into form, in ways that must change inherited understandings of the contemporary novel’s relation to the information and communication technologies alongside which it came of age. Reading the “postrace” novel in light of new interdisciplinary research on the cultural implications of software systems and computer code, fresh interest in formalist analysis, and ongoing work on global political economy, “Race Writing in the Internet Age” discovers a range of contemporary writers turning to algorithmic forms—computational techniques for market forecasting, models of viral transmission and social networking, the underlying principles of Web browsing and search—as a way of illustrating race’s reconfiguration within the tech-integrated global market.