Abstract First World Problems: Neocolonial
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ABSTRACT FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS: NEOCOLONIAL DISCOURSE IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE Tracy Stephens, PhD Department of English Northern Illinois University, 2017 Kathleen Renk, Director This dissertation argues that contemporary American literature has a tendency to represent the problems of American life in a manner that mystifies the operation of the global economy and thus perpetuates the American exceptionalist disavowal of US imperialism. I look at a specific set of “first-world problems” described by cultural theorists and depicted within American fiction from 1985 to the present, describing the representation of each problem in multiple texts to emphasize the general trend. These novels focus on first-world experiences and perspectives in isolation from the rest of the world, they decontextualize problems within the US from the neocolonial practices from which they are born, and they contribute to a longstanding narrative of the US as the victim of globalization by focusing on how the American characters’ material privilege negatively impacts them. Each chapter focuses on one first-world problem, examining how each operates within the chosen texts and how in each case the treatment of that particular problem engages the effects of globalization and American economic privilege while divorcing those effects from the operation of the global economy. These chapters discuss, in order, spatial organization, mobility, hyperreality, consumerism, and a supposed literary “retreat” into the domestic sphere. The corpus includes Don DeLillo’s White Noise and Cosmopolis, Paul Auster’s Sunset Park, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, and Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible. This project extends Edward W. Said’s Culture and Imperialism and its exploration of colonial discourse in British cultural works to consider US imperialism and acknowledge American neocolonial discourse as a separate form of cultural justification for empire rooted in the logic of American exceptionalism. It is the first concerted attempt to articulate neocolonial discourse as a discrete and definite discursive field. This work seeks to establish a new subfield of postcolonial studies that addresses neocolonialism as an ongoing economic practice rather than a cultural legacy of earlier colonial exploitation, to invite greater attention to America as an imperial power, and to begin the task awaiting both postcolonial and American literary criticism of exploring the role of American cultural works in voicing neocolonial discourse. NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY DE KALB, ILLINOIS MAY 2017 FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS: NEOCOLONIAL DISCOURSE IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE BY TRACY STEPHENS © 2017 Tracy Stephens A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH Doctoral Director: Kathleen Renk ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I need to acknowledge and express my gratitude for the efforts and support of my extraordinary committee, Dr. Tim Ryan and Dr. Mark Van Wienen, and especially the work of my director Dr. Kathleen Renk, who provided prompt and invaluable feedback, much-needed guidance, and faith in me and enthusiasm for this project that kept me motivated. Thanks as well to my fellow dissertators and other peers and friends in the English department. Finally, thank you to the NIU Graduate School for the Dissertation Completion Fellowship they awarded me for 2015-2016, which gave me vital time to write. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page 1. INTRODUCTION: FIRST-WORLD-PROBLEMS DISCOURSE AND THE DISAVOWAL OF US IMPERIALISM ..................................................................... 1 A Gap in Literary Criticism and Postcolonial Theory ................................... 6 Neocolonialism and Globalization ................................................................. 11 Outlining the Project ...................................................................................... 26 2. CHAPTER ONE: SPATIAL ORGANIZATION AND NAVIGATION ..................... 32 Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy and Postmodern Urban Space ............. 34 Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis: The Loss of Exteriority ..................................... 50 Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves and the Spatial Uncanny ............... 63 Conclusion ..................................................................................................... 78 3. CHAPTER TWO: PROBLEMS WITH MOBILITY ................................................ 80 William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition and Tourism .................................... 81 Auster’s Sunset Park and Homeless Tourism ................................................ 96 Cosmopolis and Digital Mobility ................................................................... 111 Conclusion ..................................................................................................... 124 4. CHAPTER THREE: TELEVISION CULTURE, HYPERREALITY, AND SOCIAL FRAGMENTATION .................................................................................................. 126 DeLillo’s White Noise: Television Culture Explained ........................................................... 130 David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: Irony and Mass Customization ................................... 142 iv Chapter Page Jess Walter’s The Zero: Fragmented Consciousness, Simulated Reality ...... 160 Conclusion ..................................................................................................... 171 5. CHAPTER FOUR: CONSUMER SOCIETY AND AFFLUENZA .......................... 173 Pattern Recognition: Branding and Commodification .................................. 177 Jay McInerney’s The Good Life: Materialism and Narcissism ...................... 190 Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club: Consumerism’s Threat to Agency and Affective Relationships .................................................................................. 204 Conclusion ..................................................................................................... 215 6. CHAPTER FIVE: GLOBAL INTERCONNECTIVITY AND AMERICAN LITERATURE’S DOMESTIC RETREAT ................................................................ 218 The Good Life: The Post-9/11 Domestic Retreat ........................................... 221 Walter’s The Financial Lives of the Poets: The Global Financial Crisis ...... 235 Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible: Neodomestic Fiction ............ 249 Conclusion ..................................................................................................... 266 7. CONCLUSION: AMBIVALENCE WITHIN AND SITES OF RESISTANCE TO NEOCOLONIAL DISCOURSE ................................................................................ 268 WORKS CITED .............................................................................................................. 276 INTRODUCTION: FIRST-WORLD-PROBLEMS DISCOURSE AND THE DISAVOWAL OF US IMPERIALISM Users of social media may be familiar with a hashtag, #firstworldproblems, used to complain about the petty inconveniences of life in a wealthy, industrialized society while at the same time satirizing first-world privilege.1 Weird Al Yankovic’s song “First World Problems”2 from his 2014 album Mandatory Fun offers a long list of such complaints, including having too many groceries to fit them all in the refrigerator and having only large bills that cannot be used in a vending machine.3 Subtextually, the phrase “first-world problems” acknowledges the fact of global inequality and carries with it assumptions about differences in material conditions between rich and poor countries. However, those assumptions remain both unstated and untested, and the target of the satire is not the fact of inequality, nor any specific and verified sites, effects, or causes of disparities in material conditions, but rather first-world attitudes of entitlement and lack of perspective and gratitude for socioeconomic privileges and democratic institutions.4 In 1 The First World/Third World labels, which arose when there was still a Second World represented by the Soviet Union, are no longer the preferred terms within the social sciences. I use “first world,” not as a proper noun, because of the hashtag, but I use “neocolonized world” rather than “Third World,” which has become a pejorative. 2 Note that his song title reflects the popular usage of the phrase, which lacks the hyphen. So too does my title. 3 See also Streeter Seidell’s satirical White Whine: A Study of First-World Problems, and Robert Curry Chandler’s “Meme World Syndrome: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the First World Problems and Third World Success Internet Memes,” a thesis which is as yet the only academic study on the term and which addresses the visual rhetoric of memes using the phrase. 4 This explains why the phrase has been co-opted as justification for dismissing the concerns of first-world feminists 2 other words, the phrase points primarily to a problem in the culture of first-world countries, the symptoms of a cultural pathology. The result is that what is intended as a widening of perspective to recognize if not interrogate global inequality instead maintains a narrow preoccupation with the conditions of first-world life. In short, satirizing complaints about first- world problems means complaining about another kind of first-world problem—not the inconveniences inherent to our lifestyle, but the sickness of our culture. The discourse of first- world problems, then, is characterized by the narrow