Poetics of Politics

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sebastian m. herrmann carolin alice hofmann katja kanzler · stefan schubert herrmann · hofmann · kanzler frank usbeck Editors schubert · usbeck (Eds.)

Poetics of Politics herrmann hofmann Textuality Poetics his volume proposes the ‘poetics of politics’ as an T kanzler and Social Relevance analytic angle to interrogate contemporary cultural schubert in Contemporary of production in the United States. As recent scholar- usbeck American Literature ship has observed, American literature and culture (Eds.) and Culture Politics around the turn of the millennium, while still deeply informed by the textual self-consciousness of postmodernism, are marked by a rekindled interest in American Studies ★ A Monograph Series matters of social concern. This revived interest in politics is frequently read as a ‘grand epochal transiti- Volume 258 Druckfarben Poetics on.’ Sidestepping such a logic of periodization, this cyan of magenta book points to the interplay between the textual and gelb the political as a dynamic—always locally speciﬁc— Politics schwarz that affords unique insights into the characteristics of the contemporary moment. The sixteen case studies in this book explore this interplay across a wide range of media, genres, and modes. Together, they make visible a broad cultural concern with negotia- ting social relevance and textual self-awareness that permeates and structures contemporary US (popular) culture.

Universitätsverlag winter isbn 978-3-8253-6447-2 Heidelberg american studies – a monograph series Volume 258

Edited on behalf of the German Association for American Studies by alfred hornung anke ortlepp heike paul

Poetics of Politics Textuality and Social Relevance in Contemporary American Literature and Culture

Edited by sebastian m. herrmann carolin alice hofmann katja kanzler stefan schubert frank usbeck

Universitätsverlag winter Heidelberg Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar.

This book is part of the Joint Dresden-Leipzig Research Initiative »Selbst-Bewusste Erzählungen«. For more information, please cf. www.narrativeculture.de/poetics-of-politics.

Funding for this volume was contributed in part by American Space Leipzig www.americanspace-leipzig.de.

isbn 978-3-8253-6447-2

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Den Verlag erreichen Sie im Internet unter: www.winter-verlag.de Table of Contents

SEBASTIAN M. HERRMANN, KATJA KANZLER, STEFAN SCHUBERT Introduction: The Poetics of Politics 7

Film and Television

ANDREW HOBEREK Thinking Institutionally: Argo, Zero Dark Thirty, and the Politics of Contemporary Historical Films 29

FELIX BRINKER On the Formal Politics of Narratively Complex Television Series: Operational Self-Reflexivity and Audience Management in Fringe and Homeland 41

ELEONORA RAVIZZA The Politics of Melodrama: Nostalgia, Performance, and Gender Roles in Revolutionary Road 63

MICHAEL BUTTER American Basterds: The Deconstruction of World War II Myths in Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German and Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds 81

DOROTHEA GAIL, RAY CANOY The Last Days of American Civilization: The Poetics of Righteous Violence in Bob Goldthwait’s Black Comedy God Bless America 101

Nonfiction

BRUNO ARICH-GERZ Poetics of Disaster: Filmic Elements and Traces of Fiction Literature in the 9/11 Commission Report: Frames and Functions of a Generic Hybrid 121

SEBASTIAN M. HERRMANN Foggy Realisms? Fiction, Nonfiction, and Political Affect in Larry Beinhart’s Fog Facts and The Librarian 133

CAROLIN ALICE HOFMANN Testifying by Proxy: A Trauma Studies Approach to The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks 153 vi Table of Contents

‘Literature’

KATJA KANZLER Post-Race Ideology and the Poetics of Genre in David Mamet’s Race 175

HANS FRESE The Great American Novel and Beyond: Jonathan Franzen and the Legacy of the Culture Wars 195

ILKA SAAL “Just as Good as the Real Thing”: Historiopoiesis in Third-Generation Narratives on Slavery 215

OLESYA BONDARENKO “Inherently Political”: Rancièrian Philosophy and Language Writing 235

SABRINA HÜTTNER Politics of Dissent: Reconsidering ‘the Political’ in Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul 249

New Media

STEFAN SCHUBERT Objectivism, Narrative Agency, and the Politics of Choice in the Video Game BioShock 271

SOPHIE SPIELER “Our Everyday Is Better Than Your Best Day”: Spectacle and the Politics of Ambiguity on the Tumblr Blog Rich Kids of Instagram 291

FRANK USBECK “The Power of the Story”: ‘Popular Narratology’ in Pentagon Reports on Social Media Use in the Military 313

Notes on Contributors 335 SEBASTIAN M. HERRMANN, KATJA KANZLER, STEFAN SCHUBERT

Introduction: The Poetics of Politics

In the introduction to his 2010 book The Passing of Postmodernism, Josh Toth speculates that “[p]erhaps the fall of George W. Bush’s cynical administration [...] and the massively popular rise of Barack Obama’s overtly ‘sincere’ administration [...] finally signals the culmination of a grand epochal transition” (2). Toth’s remarks exemplify a recurrent dynamic in scholarship on contemporary US literature and culture, a dynamic shaping much of the work done in American studies and beyond. First and fore- most, they reflect an intense desire to capture the contemporary moment as one marked by a “grand epochal transition,” an end (or ‘death’) of one period and the beginning of another. Whatever the specific terminology employed—‘post-postmodernism,’ ‘late postmodernism,’ ‘digimodernism,’ ‘metamodernism,’ ‘cosmodernism,’ or the like1—the desire to periodize the present runs strongly in contemporary scholarship. Secondly, by tying his argument to two US presidencies, Toth implies that the recent watershed in literary and cultural styles is intimately connected with the realm of politics. Like many other scholars and writers, he suggests that what distinguishes the present period from the previous one unfolds at the intersection of aesthetics and politics. Thirdly, however, he uses a conspicuously cautious language to make this point, extensively reflecting on and problematizing the very gestures of periodization on which he nonetheless builds his argument. In an ironic twist, Toth’s and other critical texts, in their desire to ‘end’ postmodernism and to discover a renewed ‘seriousness’ in contemporary texts, thus become entangled in a very postmodern quandary of periodization, diagnosed by Fredric Jameson as a “crisis” in which the concept and categories of periodization “seem to be as indispens- able as they are unsatisfactory for any kind of work in cultural study” (Political Unconscious 13).2 This volume suggests a different conceptual response to the developments in literary and cultural production observed by Toth and others, one that counters the grand récit of periodization with a ‘local’ interrogation of

1 There is a litany of different terms used to describe such an allegedly new epoch. ‘Post-postmodernism’ may be the most widely used term for this phenomenon and appears, for instance, in the studies by Robert L. McLaughlin, Jeffrey Nealon, and Nicole Timmer, but other terms include Alan Kirby’s ‘digimodernism,’ Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker’s ‘metamodernism,’ Jeremy Green’s ‘late postmodernism,’ and Christian Moraru’s ‘cosmodernism.’ 2 Iterating one of his standard moves of postmodern critique, Jameson particularly takes issue with the ‘totalizing’ effects of periodization: “[A]ny rewarding use of the notion of a historical or cultural period tends in spite of itself to give the impression of a facile totalization, a seamless web of phenomena each of which, in its own way, ‘expresses’ some unified inner truth [...]. Yet such an impression is fatally 8 Herrmann, Kanzler, and Schubert the contemporary moment. This kind of local approach to historicization— pursued by a number of recent literary histories like Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors’s New Literary History of America—programmatically re- frains from organizing historical developments into periods, i.e., clearly demarcated, coherent entities whose definitions inevitably resonate with one or the other grand narrative of history.3 Instead, it explores “points in time and imagination,” spotlights that—rather than being enlisted in linear, teleological conceptions of history—are juxtaposed in ways that aim “to set many forms of American speech in motion, so that different forms [...] can be heard speaking to each other” (xxiv). This approach, in other words, abandons the notion of bounded and homogeneous periods separated by turns in favor of a focus on moments at which particular historical dy- namisms surface.4 In this spirit, our book seeks to illuminate the contemporary moment that so many scholars agree on as marking a new period, but it does so by focusing on a particular, local dynamism that emerges at the intersections of textuality and politicality in a diverse range of ‘texts.’ It explores the potential of the ‘poetics of politics’ as a conceptual angle to understand American literature and culture around the turn of the millennium. This move circumnavigates the pitfalls of periodization both on the diachronic level (where periodization requires a teleological narrative of historical evolution that often entails highly reductive reformulations of the periods) and on the synchronic level (where periods emerge as homogeneous, ‘total’ entities).5 In addition, exploring the interplay between poetics and politics in contemporary texts encourages more variegated and complex narratives of genealogy than the notorious rhetoric of a break with or a reaction against some prior dominant. The deliberate openness of our terms, ‘poetics’ as well as ‘politics,’ also embraces diverse manifestations of this cultural dynamism—diverse in terms of political valency as well as textual properties such as medium or genre. Lastly, our approach not only affords

reductive” (Political Unconscious 12). In fact, problematizations of one’s own gestures of periodization seem to have become standard topoi in (periodizing) discussions of contemporary literature and culture. On the most self-conscious end of the spectrum, Christian Moraru, in his introduction to the American Book Review’s special issue on Metamodernism, uses an “automotive parable” to “[convey] the ongoing predicament [...] of the historian of post-Cold War literary-aesthetic traffic,” asking “if this passing equals a neatly demarcated exit and thus the end of an era” (“Thirteen Ways” 3). 3 Cf. Besserman, “Challenge” and especially Patterson for critical discussions of periodization as a method of historical inquiry. 4 Jameson himself proposes the concept of the “cultural dominant” as an alternative to the bounded and totalizing notion of the period, introducing it as “a conception which allows for the presence and coexistence of a range of very different, yet sub- ordinate, features” (Postmodernism 4). 5 The distinction of these two dimensions also owes to Jameson’s discussion of the crisis of periodization (cf. Political Unconscious 13). Introduction: The Poetics of Politics 9 these different textual forms a way of “speaking to each other” (Marcus and Sollors xxiv), it also brings together and puts into dialogue the disparate strands of scholarship that have engaged with the contemporary moment. In the following, we will briefly outline our notion of a poetics of politics before more specifically engaging these disparate strands and, finally, introducing the book’s individual contributions.

The Poetics of Politics

As an analytic focus, the poetics of politics puts front and center the crossroads of literary and political cultures, of textual aesthetics and political aspirations or effects, and these crossroads loom large in contemporary American culture. It takes its cue, on the one hand, from the many literary scholars who have argued that American fiction around the turn of the millennium has rediscovered politics and shows a renewed interest in addressing issues of social concern. These scholars typically observe that the contemporary moment is marked by an effort to “reenergize literature’s social mission, its ability to intervene in the social world” (McLaughlin, “Post-Postmodern Discontent” 55), and that this project is closely tied to questions of (literary) form. Our approach draws explorative momentum from this widespread observation while avoiding its tendency to fix the poetic dynamics of this rediscovered social role—an effort controlled by the framework of periodization that typically culminates in the question whether contemporary literature has broken with postmodernism. This explorative momentum is, on the other hand, reinforced by discussions in and of contemporary politics that reflect a new interest in matters of (meta)textuality. The field of electoral politics is only one among several political contexts that have recently hosted (self-conscious) reflections on the narrative construction and constructedness of the issues that are com- municated there.6 This resonance between a political interest in literature and a poetic interest in politics extends an invitation to broaden the scope of our explorations beyond the perimeters of narrow concepts of Literature (as in fictional writing bound to the medium of print) and Politics (as in tied to political institutions). Indeed, the politicality of texts and the poeti- cality of politics, discussed individually by so much recent scholarship, become most productive not at these narrow poles but at the crossroads of the poetic and the political, a crossroads that informs texts whose poetics

6 To give just a few examples from very different venues, cf. President Barack Obama’s observation that “the nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism” (qtd. in Boerma), Frank Rich’s discussion of the importance of the “true Katrina narrative” for the George W. Bush administration (201), or the US Army’s Counterin- surgency Field Manual’s assertion that the “most important cultural form for coun- terinsurgents to understand is the narrative” (United States, Dept. of the Army 93). 10 Herrmann, Kanzler, and Schubert cover a broad range of media and genres and whose politicality unfolds on many different levels. While suspending questions of periodization, the poetics of politics is a conceptual angle that nevertheless affords historicization. It focalizes a dynamism that marks the contemporary moment and that contours an area in which a variety of historical forces come together to fuel US cultural production around the turn of the millennium. In other words, the poetics of politics illuminates a moment at which texts across a broad cultural field (self-consciously) engage with politics and assert their own political relevance while (self-reflexively) confronting the textual boundedness and mediation of political projects and their effects. At the same time, it throws into relief the multiple ways in which contemporary engagements with the poetics of politics are deeply anchored in previous cultural traditions—traditions bound, e.g., to developments of and within particular genres or to particular modes of writing. Indeed, much of the vibrancy of contemporary culture seems to be tied to the ascendancy of particular genres or modes that, in turn, each build on specific histories. Rather than defining a break between the contemporary and what came before, and rather than delineat- ing the boundaries of some homogeneous contemporary period, the poetics of politics illuminates a quality of the contemporary moment that becomes characteristic through its very heterogeneity. Our approach, then, also brings together disparate strands of scholarship that have addressed the contemporary moment, strands that proceed from different conceptual and disciplinary vantage points and that tend to limit themselves to fairly narrow corpora of contemporary texts. Sidestepping the idea that periodization is the ‘proper’ critical response to recent developments in American literature and culture opens up a new meta- perspective on the critical moves employed by contemporary scholarship and on the resonances and convergences between them. Such a perspective can both dialogue previously isolated lines of inquiry and reflect on their respective potentials and limitations. It thus serves as a key springboard for the kind of local approach to historically sensitive scholarship this book seeks to advance. These resonances and convergences particularly emerge around the breaks or turns that scholarship invokes to draw a boundary between the contemporary and what came before, the ‘creation myths’ it employs to define the present as a period. We identify three such explana- tory narratives that run through scholarship, partly structuring its diversity but also overlapping at times in individual lines of inquiry.

Narratives of Periodization

First, there is the narrative—mostly in the context of literary studies—that developments in late-twentieth-century society and culture compel contemporary texts to (re)aspire to social relevance, to “intervene in the social Introduction: The Poetics of Politics 11 world” (McLaughlin, “Post-Postmodern Discontent” 55). Some of the scholars who advance this narrative refer to particular events—most frequently the end of the Cold War or 9/11—as triggers for this change,7 others invoke broader sociocultural developments. In Christian Moraru’s conception of cosmodernism, for instance, it is the accelerating globalization of the late twentieth century that compels changes in literary aesthetics (Cosmodernism 34); for Nicole Timmer, the watershed of post-postmodernism owes to new constellations of subjectivity that emerge at the century’s end (13). The break in literary aesthetics that is traced to these events or developments is typically described in a language that oscillates between the ethical and the political, diagnosing a new sense of ethical responsibility in literature, a new commitment to engage with and intervene in social reality. McLaughlin, as noted above, observes a “desire to recon- nect [literary] language to the social sphere [...], to reenergize literature’s social mission, its ability to intervene in the social world” (“Post-Post- modern Discontent” 55). Contemporary post-postmodern literature, he argues, coheres in an aspiration to speak to and about social reality in ways that are both truthful and sincere. Along similar lines, Moraru sees the post- 1989 literature he subsumes under the term cosmodernism characterized by a particular “ethos,” a dedication to investigate the “relational” dynamics of life in a globalized world (Cosmodernism 55). Finally, Timmer also posits a socioethical turn as foundational for post-postmodernism, describing it as “‘a turn to the human’, [...] [a] focus on ‘what it means to be human today’” (361).8 The narratives of a fundamental break in literature that this scholarship employs need a foil, and for all the scholars just discussed, this foil is postmodernism. Their efforts to define the contemporary as a literary period that is marked by an interest in societal referentiality and relevance, by an urge to sincerely speak about issues and sensibilities of contemporary concern, notably intervene in particular conceptions of postmodernism:

7 Cf. Josh Toth and Neil Brooks’s claim that “if postmodernism became terminally ill sometime in the late-eighties and early-nineties, it was buried once and for [all] in the rubble of the World Trade Center” (3). They also refer to a number of other events that “seemed to herald the end of postmodernism as the reigning epistemo- logical dominant,” such as “December 22, 1989 – the day Beckett died” or “Tom Wolfe publish[ing] his ‘Literary Manifesto for the New Social Novel’” (2, cf. also 2-3). 8 The lines of argument advanced by McLaughlin, Moraru, and Timmer reappear throughout scholarship, inflected through different methodological registers. For instance, Philip Leonard’s Literature After Globalization also delineates contemporary literature as a response to “the emergence of [a] global culture” (3). Mary K. Holland is another scholar who traces the end of postmodernism to an ethical turn in recent literature, which—she argues—“displays a new faith in language and cer- tainty about the novel’s ability to engage in humanist pursuits that have not been seen clearly since poststructuralism shattered both in the middle of the past century” (1-2). 12 Herrmann, Kanzler, and Schubert

They implicitly forge postmodernism into a period characterized by literature’s disavowal of politics and social referentiality, by writing ‘narcissistically’ concerned with itself, by writing whose pervasive irony prevents it from any serious and sincere engagement with social reality.9 Critics like McLaughlin reflect a considerable amount of unease about this retrospective (re)definition of postmodernism, caveating and qualifying it as a (necessary) generalization that threatens to gloss over many nuances in postmodern literary production.10 Still, the creation myth of post-postmodernism advanced in this scholarship inherently entails such generalizations, turning not only the contemporary moment but also the frame of reference against which it allegedly reacts into homogeneous literary systems. The homogeneity that is enforced in this case is particularly problematic because it tends to reduce postmodernism to the work of primarily white male writers who reflect an interest in poststructuralist ideas. It purges the canon of American postmodern literature, for example, of the minority writers who both partook of the postmodern literary aesthetic and pursued emphatically political projects in their writing, very much manifesting a “desire to [...] intervene in the social world” (McLaughlin, “Post-Postmod- ern Discontent” 55).11 Ironically, this purging takes place even in projects that work to criticize an alleged male white bias in postmodernism, projects that thus advance a progressive agenda but that, in doing so, homogenize postmodernism into a project it never was. The framework of periodization that controls this creation myth of the contemporary moment thus entails totalizing effects that, more often than not, work against the gist of the canon debate. What is more, it invests scholarship in erecting boundaries around the distinctiveness of the contemporary, boundaries that are frequently drawn on the basis of haphazard dichotomies—between writerly sensibilities framed as ironic vs. sincere, between self-referentiality and social referentiality. This investment in boundaries and the practices of dichotomization on which it builds not only result in fairly narrow corpora

9 It seems ironic that while Linda Hutcheon, in her seminal work on metafiction, used the term “as a defence” against precisely the notion that metafictional literature was simply self-absorbed (1), the term nevertheless has come to be appropri- ated to suggest just that. 10 In a symptomatically complicated remark, McLaughlin notes: “[P]ostmodernism, despite its wordplay for the sake of wordplay, its skepticism toward narrative as a meaning-providing structure, its making opaque the process of representation, nevertheless does not as a rule abjure literature’s potential to intervene in the social world” (“Post-Postmodern Discontent” 59). 11 For instance, Robert Rebein, when discussing the importance of minority writers for the emergence of post-postmodernism, implicitly reduces postmodernism to a predominantly white, male, poststructuralist project, noting in particular that Toni Morrison is one of the “writers we would not normally associate with literary postmodernism” (7). Along similar lines, Ramón Saldívar ‘whitens’ postmodernism in an argumentative context where he dwells on the cross-fertilizations between poststructuralist and ethnic strands in post-World War II literature (4). Introduction: The Poetics of Politics 13 of texts that fit the respective conception of the contemporary moment, they also conceal the multiple points of continuity and dialogue between supposedly postmodern and post-postmodern aesthetics and their political valency—continuities that not least reside in the poetics of politics. This fundamental drawback of periodization also informs the second creation myth that emerges in scholarship, a myth closely related to the former one and also circulating primarily in the field of literary studies. In this narrative, it is an exhaustion of literary form that causes breaks between literary periods. This aesthetic logic typically implies a teleological necessity that surfaces, for example, in how Garry Potter and José López emphasize that “a new and different intellectual direction must come after postmodernism” (4). In this line of thinking, the playful language games identified with postmodernism as much as its once “outrageous” and “radical propositions” (4) have exhausted themselves or have become com- monplace. Now that “postmodernism as a literary strategy no longer pertains in the way it once did” (Rebein 15), now that it has come to perfuse culture entirely, scholars following this logic see the need for an aesthetic mode that is sufficiently different from this cultural dominant, that has enough of a “subversive edge” (Toth and Brooks 6) to still have an aesthetic effect. Curiously, they often turn to various brands of ‘realism,’ usually inflected via an additional adjective or prefix, as the appropriate response. Whether referred to as ‘critical realism,’ ‘transcendental realism,’ ‘dirty realism,’ or ‘neo-realism,’ this new aesthetic mode, however, is diffi- cult to pin down.12 After all, ‘realism’ as a term evokes both an epoch (marked by literature’s claim to social relevance and an interest in the mundane, the bleak, the everyday) and a literary mode (marked by conven- tionalized reality effects meant to create the illusion that a story was ‘simply’ about the ‘real’ world), and it alludes to questions of representation where it denotes a (presumed) absence of mediation, a portrayal of the real as it ‘really’ is. In discussions of a new post-postmodern aesthetic, the attraction of realism, then, seems to lie precisely in the overdetermination of the term, in its quality as an alloy of these very different aspects. As Josh Toth and Neil Brooks describe it, a narrative of aesthetic succession often

12 The terminological variety used to describe this mode mirrors the various ways scholarship has devised to label the contemporary period. While Potter and López speak of a ‘critical realism’ related to an earlier ‘transcendental realism,’ Rebein focuses on a kind of ‘dirty realism,’ and Toth and Brooks mention an “apparent shift to a type of neo-realism” (8). The propensity to identify a particular type of realism as marking the contemporary runs through other scholarship as well—for instance, Saldívar “propose[s] the term ‘speculative realism’ as a way of getting at the revisions of realism and fantasy into speculative forms that are seeming to shape the invention of new narrative modes in contemporary fiction” (3), and Mark C. Taylor terms his study to “explore pressing contemporary issues that the nexus of religion, literature, and technology illuminates” in the works of contemporary American writers Rewiring the Real (5). 14 Herrmann, Kanzler, and Schubert casts postmodernism as marked by “ostentatious [...] metafiction,” a foil against which a new realism promises to be simpler, “more grounded (or ‘responsible’)” (5). There is, of course, a particular irony in how this narrative enlists, of all things, an exhaustion of literary form—an idea so fundamental to postmodernism’s beginnings—as the root cause of its demise. Yet there are other ambivalences and unspoken presuppositions in this line of thinking that come to the fore if one abandons a totalizing interest in periodization, ambivalences that stem not least from the effort this narrative expends in keeping apart an older epoch, postmodernism, from the current one. First of all, a logic in which the exhaustion of aesthetic novelty and subversion, its widespread circulation in popular culture and the everyday, necessitates a radical break in aesthetic form presupposes a notion of Art as standing apart from and complementing other forms of cultural expression. Indeed, the question of the elitism of particular aesthetic modes does figure promi- nently in these debates. Curiously, however, it most frequently makes its appearance in the allegation that postmodernism was an elitist, academic, and, ultimately, writerly project. In this sense, postmodernism often ends up being blamed for two contradictory faults: for being too widespread and popular to still be subversive and for being too elitist to matter in readers’ lives. At the same time, this rejection of the academic reader/writer seems to encourage a ‘resurrection’ of the author as a privileged and revalidated source for the kind of new realism this narrative calls for.13 Ultimately, however, it is this notion of a new realism where the ambivalences of this narrative figure most strongly. In looking for an aesthetic mode that is markedly different from postmodernism, it often glorifies realism as promising simpler, more mimetic, and more transparent representation. By implication, it characterizes postmodern writing as inherently disinterested in reality and only concerned with representing representation. In doing so, this narrative often seems to respond to and express a deeply ambivalent longing for a presumed ‘state of innocence’ before the crisis of representation that it, simultaneously, knows does not exist.14 The ambivalence of this desire is expressed in the adjectives and prefixes complicating the realism that is proposed—critical, transcendental, dirty, neo—but it ultimately

13 Cf., for example, McLaughlin’s point: “[T]he challenge of the post-postmodern author,” he expands on a remark by David Foster Wallace, “is to write within the context of self-aware language, irony, and cynicism, acknowledge them, even use them, but then to write through them, to break through the cycle of self-reference, to represent the world constructively, to connect with others” (“Post-Postmod- ernism” 215). This perspective reads literature after postmodernism as something that will come to us from the serious novels of serious writers, not from the resources of everyday, commercial, or popular culture. 14 Cf. Rebein’s praise of realism as at least “struggl[ing] for clarity and simplicity” (5). Introduction: The Poetics of Politics 15 remains unresolved: an oscillation between postmodernism and realism as a form of searching that cannot come to an end at either pole. The third creation myth takes more diverse forms and is hosted by a greater variety of disciplinary contexts, all of which define the break that demarcates their variously conceived contemporary phenomena on the basis of changes (with)in the media used for cultural expression. Evoking a historiographic model in which cultural change is not simply expressed in but driven by developments in particular media, they diagnose specific transformations in the contemporary media landscape as triggers of categorical, epochal changes in textual aesthetics. Media scholar Jason Mittell provides one example of such an effort to define contemporary textual production as a delimitable period: Focusing on the medium of television, he invokes a framework of “historical poetics” (30) to “consider the 1990s to the present as the era of television complexity” (29). In his perspective, it is especially “[t]echnological transformations” (31) that have provided the impulse for television to evolve new forms of “narrative complexity.” Such digital media “enable viewers to extend their participation in these rich sto- ryworlds beyond the one-way flow of traditional television viewing” (32), thus prompting television to develop textual strategies that (often self-consciously) play with the established conventions of TV narrative. This complexity, delineated as a response to media change, comes to define the contemporary as an “era” in Mittell’s account. Cultural scholar Alan Kirby focuses on the importance of technology and media in a similar manner in his discussion of digimodernism as “the twenty-first century’s new cultural paradigm” that “has decisively displaced postmodernism” (1). He argues that this new period of digimodernism “owes its emergence and preemi- nence to the computerization of text,” and he ties this new textuality to a number of effects, including “infantilism, earnestness, endlessness, and apparent reality” (1), that, for him, mark digimodernism as a distinct period in cultural production. This pervasive idea that the periodicity of the contemporary results from aesthetic responses to changes (with)in media also informs discussions in literary studies. Especially McLaughlin’s conception of post-postmodernism draws on it, arguing that “[b]ecause the televisual culture has co-opted postmodernism’s bag of tricks to deleterious effect, writers of fiction [...] need to find a way beyond self-referential irony to offer the possibility of construction” (“Post-Postmodern Discontent” 65). Here, too, boundaries are drawn by pointing to media developments—the new competition that television poses to the institution of literature—as triggers of categorical aesthetic change. This third narrative of contemporary periodicity, then, invokes a model akin to a base-superstructure mechanism to draw its boundaries in ways that threaten to totalize complex dynamics of change into formal responses to media-technological development. In this model, developments in the ‘superstructure’ of culture follow from changes in the technological and medial ‘base’ in an almost mechanistic manner, with one determining the 16 Herrmann, Kanzler, and Schubert other. Such models tend to overlook feedback loops between these two spheres and prevent an understanding of the relationship between them as more dialectical. Even more significantly, they often depict cultural and aesthetic development as strictly sequential, as following the more teleological progression of technological change and development. In all its diversity, this scholarship authorizes emphatically teleological depictions of cultural ‘evolution’ by anchoring aesthetic in media change: Invoking this straightforward stimulus-response model helps McLaughlin to frame the contemporary as a period in which the ostensibly old-fashioned novel ‘strikes back’ against the popular media’s incursions into its cultural territory, and it allows Mittell to depict the contemporary as a period in which television has matured to poetic sophistication. In addition, this creation myth seems to encourage a curious insularity of approach: While the change to which most of the scholars point as instigator of an aesthetic watershed is one of media convergence, to use Henry Jenkins’s term, they tend to trace it only in individual media. The inter- and transmedial dynamics of the developments they discuss drop out of sight: The new complexity that Mittell discerns in contemporary television deeply resonates with some of the properties literary scholars identify in turn-of-the-millennium literature; Kirby’s conception of digimodernism, developed on the basis of “‘reality TV’ [...][,] Hollywood fantasy blockbusters, [...] Web 2.0 platforms[,] [and] the most sophisticated videogames” (1), echoes aspects discussed in the contexts of literary post-postmodernism or new realism. Ultimately, desires closely tied to the media that these scholars discuss seem to fuel their use of this narrative of periodicity, informing the boundaries they draw around the contemporary. A broad range of scholarship has felt compelled to attend to the distinctiveness of American textual production around the turn of the millennium, a distinctiveness measured—with varying emphases and from different conceptual angles—both in how contemporary texts work and in how they speak to and about social reality, in their poetics and in their politics. The scholarship discussed above conspicuously narrates this distinctiveness in terms of a recurrent ‘master plot’ that proceeds from the idea of a categorical break with or turn against formerly dominant forms and patterns in American culture—a previous dominant chiefly identified as postmodernism. This master plot, as we suggested, controls the conceptualizations and analytic explorations undertaken in much of the existing research. The creation myths of the contemporary that it begets tend to funnel complex dynamics of change and continuity and of cause and effect in diachronic developments into rigorously bounded and teleologically framed periods. Next to effecting this general drawback of periodization, the master plot’s investment in a radical break of the present with what came before appears to be generated by the very culture it seeks to theorize. Bespeaking a desire Introduction: The Poetics of Politics 17 to ‘be done’ especially with postmodernism,15 it seems to work through a complex love-hate relationship to the postmodern condition. To pronounce American literature and culture at the threshold of some “grand epochal transition,” in Toth’s phrasing (2), seems to perform the contemporary moment more than to describe it.

Case Studies

The following contributions programmatically sidestep this quandary by focusing on the crossroads of the poetic and the political in concrete in- stances of contemporary culture—on the local dynamics of their interplay in a broad range of texts that, together, afford a diagnostic of the contemporary moment. We have organized them into four clusters based on the media they discuss, a structure that is meant not to separate or divide them but to enable dialogicity and to underscore the extent to which their shared interest in the poetics of politics crosses the boundaries of media, of genre, and of mode.

FILM AND TELEVISION Our first section focuses on the ‘classical’ media of popular culture studies: film and television. In all five case studies, four on film and one on television, the poetics of politics is intricately tied to the formal properties of the investigated texts, which typically interpellate a particularly ‘literate’ view- ership that is able to read and engage their often intricate politics. Among these formal properties, questions of mode and genre as well as of inter- and metatextuality constitute common touchstones on which many of our contributions build their argument, suggesting that contemporary audiences are aware of a canon of works and are able and willing to draw pleasure from reflecting on texts and textuality. Andrew Hoberek opens this first section with a contribution on Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty and Ben Affleck’s Argo. Both films have been extensively discussed for how they speak about the ‘war on terror,’ but Hoberek’s reading concerns a different facet of politicality: Reading both movies as films about institutions, he explores how they position state institutions—the CIA and the US military—as a possible, albeit problematic, counter position vis-à-vis the dominance of neoliberal ideology. Hoberek’s reading taps into a particular contradiction in contemporary American culture. On the one hand, he contends, neoliberalism has effected a wide-

15 In his discussion of contemporary scholarship on ‘late postmodernism,’ Jeremy Green similarly identifies a “desire to be done with postmodernism, to declare it finished and of purely historical interest, a late-twentieth-century phenomenon that can now be jettisoned” (24). 18 Herrmann, Kanzler, and Schubert spread anti-institutionalism in which institutions generally have come to be disparaged as a threat to the individual. On the other hand, neoconservative discourse during the 1980s positioned the military “as the last good organization” (39). To make this case, Hoberek focuses on the two films’ textuality and on matters of genre specifically. Thus reading Zero Dark Thirty and Argo as a police procedural and a heist movie, respectively, he identifies an ‘institutional realism’ that is “committed to exploring how institutions work” (36). He then uses the latter film to point to a distinct metatextual quality in which both genres allegorize their locus of production, Hollywood, and the film industry’s reliance on procedures to allow large numbers of people to collaborate on a joint project within an institutional framework. The two films, on the surface about foreign affairs, thus use their genre affiliation to address the domestic politics of organizing labor and of forming institutions. Felix Brinker, in turn, discusses the politics that reside in the formal strategies of contemporary narratively complex US television series. Brinker argues that such shows engage in what he calls “practices of audience management” (52) by featuring textual strategies that direct and organize the attention and activities of their viewers. He draws on Jason Mittell’s notion of ‘narrative complexity’ in contemporary TV and on the ‘operational aesthetic’ that Mittell takes from Neil Harris, extending this concept by foregrounding contemporary TV shows’ seriality: In Brinker’s understanding, the operational aesthetic is tied to textual strategies that gear viewers towards a narrative that unfolds serially, helping them to keep and focus their attention on plots that often take place over a period of months or years. In such moments, he argues, these television series also comment self-reflexively on their own seriality, suggesting a ‘preferred way’ of watching serial television. Focusing on the US series Fringe and Homeland as exemplary readings, Brinker furthermore unfolds how politics become visible in these self-referential moments of audience management: Both shows demand a particularly observant, attentive, and media-literate audience that is encouraged to keep watching numerous episodes, which ties into the commercial, capitalist logic of their serial production. In his analysis of these textual strategies, Brinker thus examines the politicality of form in relation to the shows’ spectators and traces the politics inherent in the poetics of contemporary narratively complex TV shows. Similarly interested in a moment of metatextuality, Eleonora Ravizza turns back to film to discuss the politics of nostalgia and gender in Sam Mendes’s 2008 Revolutionary Road. She argues that the film doubly invokes melodrama—as a cinematic genre and as a mode—and that this double reference is crucial to understanding the movie’s conflicted politics, which vacillate between a critique of 1950s gender ideology and a nostalgic longing for an iconic Hollywood decade. Such an ambivalent portrayal of the 1950s, Ravizza asserts, speaks to a more general trend, a “self-reflexive nostalgia” (63) that informs many contemporary portrayals of the decade. Introduction: The Poetics of Politics 19

These portrayals typically relish in the aesthetic appeals, the style, that has become tied to the 1950s, but they also express an acute awareness of the extent to which ‘the Fifties’ are a cultural construct created by all kinds of media texts. For Revolutionary Road, the particular metatextual awareness that is typical of contemporary self-reflexive nostalgia comes to the fore precisely in how the film invokes melodrama: Not only does it employ the mode in its own narrative and cinematic work, it also showcases highly gendered and gendering moments of melodramatic performance by its characters, thus revealing a self-awareness both for the politics of this mode and for the way that the mode can manufacture aesthetic responses. Ultimately, however, the film remains conflicted, Ravizza argues, as both gender stereotypes and gender criticism rely on its treatment of the melodramatic mode. The contribution by Michael Butter discusses Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German and Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds as political films that engage with mythical narratives about World War II. Analyzing the intertextual connections these films establish with previous motion pic- tures, such as the ‘propaganda films’ of classical Hollywood and the ‘dirty war films’ of the 1960s and 1970s, he argues that both films can be understood as doubly political: For one, they consciously take up and rewrite aspects of previous war films and thus engage with the political effects these representations have had. Simultaneously, though, this rewriting is used to criticize how such representations have fostered a war myth used to justify torture and the violation of human rights in the context of 9/11. While quite different on the surface, both films thus engage in surprisingly similar political and textual projects and become part of a contemporary effort to deconstruct mythical narratives of American moral superiority. Both films, Butter argues, are aware of the influence of older cinematic representations in bringing about such narratives. Butter’s comparative analysis thus accentuates how the two films mobilize their audience’s intertextual knowledge to discuss politics in subtle and complex ways, how they relate to the more concrete level of contemporary US politics, and how they metatextually speak of the discursive power of film representations. Lastly, Dorothea Gail and Ray Canoy close this section by discussing Bob Goldthwait’s film God Bless America, a black comedy centering on the killing spree of an everyman character fed up with the moral and civic decline with which he sees himself confronted. Their argument is twofold: First, they suggest that the film offers a serious and committed engagement with signs of crisis in contemporary US society, a crisis especially of the public sphere and civic interaction. Second, they outline how this engagement is uniquely enabled by the film’s recourse to the genre of black comedy, combined with elements of the ‘social problem’ film. In their contribution, Gail and Canoy thus also point to a number of earlier films and TV shows that God Bless America implicitly and explicitly references. Overall, they perform a distinctly interdisciplinary inquiry in their article: 20 Herrmann, Kanzler, and Schubert

Exploring the film’s formal strategies as well as its underlying political assumptions, they shed light on the dynamics of political commentary in Goldthwait’s satire from the combined perspectives of aesthetic and sociopolitical critique.

NONFICTION The contributions in our second section engage a diverse selection of nonfiction books, a format that seems to have a particular cultural salience in the contemporary moment. Taken together, they complicate assumptions of a straightforward politicality of nonfiction print and outline how recent texts of this genre approach their political projects with an emphatic awareness of their textual mediation. The contributions explore, in different textual environments, the poetic strategies that underwrite contemporary nonfiction’s engagement with social reality and the ways in which textual dynamics affect the politics of nonfiction narratives, thus laying bare the multiple resonances between contemporary writing in the modes of fiction and nonfiction. Bruno Arich-Gerz’s essay begins this section by addressing a truly iconic nonfiction narrative of the contemporary moment, the 9/11 Commis- sion Report. He argues that this text conspicuously diverges from the typical prose of the investigation report and instead draws on textual conventions whose sources range from literary fiction to the thriller movie. Building on previous analyses of the report that already foregrounded its literary qualities, he adds psychoanalysis and trauma theory as well as Jean Baudrillard’s concepts of simulacra and hyperreality as perspectives from which this text can be understood. Ultimately, Arich-Gerz reads the 9/11 Commission Report’s genre blurring as a self-conscious textual strategy that is tied to the heterogeneous sociocultural functions the text was meant to serve—to document the government investigation into the attacks of 9/11 but also to soothe the traumatic wounds left in the national psyche and cope with “the unbearably more-than-real character of the terrorist attacks” (122). Sebastian M. Herrmann continues by discussing two interrelated books by popular writer Larry Beinhart—the novel The Librarian and the nonfiction book Fog Facts—as paradigmatic examples of contemporary texts that negotiate a distinctly post-postmodern concern with social referentiality. The books, he argues, conspicuously labor at finding textual forms that would allow them to seriously engage with social and political reality without falling back to one-dimensional notions of realism. Contextualizing the two books in traditions of political fiction and in the recent wave of political nonfiction, Herrmann outlines how the realm of presidential politics around the turn of the millennium offers a particularly fruitful field for reflections on the political valencies of textual form, and vice versa. His reading centers on the idea of “fog facts” (136), which Beinhart’s books Introduction: The Poetics of Politics 21 jointly articulate. By theorizing and narrativizing fog facts, Herrmann suggests, this pop-cultural novel-nonfiction pair partakes in the kind of metatextual discussions and practices of realism that mark the contemporary moment. His contribution thus points out how political nonfiction self-consciously engages in post-postmodern debates and how it, in turn, complicates understandings of post-postmodernism and a high/pop culture divide in the first place. The contribution by Alice Hofmann tackles another bestselling piece of nonfiction that, unlike the texts addressed in the section’s previous two essays, locates itself outside the context of institutional politics, Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. The book discusses the case of Henrietta Lacks, an African American woman whose cells had been taken and multiplied for medical research without the knowledge and consent of either the donor or her family. Hofmann’s article explores the political and ethical stakes involved, both in the case itself and in its depiction by a professional writer in the genre of nonfiction narrative. Using trauma studies as a conceptual backdrop, she proposes to approach Skloot’s book as a testimony by proxy, a text that presents itself as an attempt to testify on behalf of an individual who cannot do so herself. Hofmann’s reading, on the one hand, discusses the formal strategies by which the book pursues its project of vicarious testimony and these strategies’ ethical implications. On the other hand, her reading unravels the political framework that the book’s poetic choices impose on the Henrietta Lacks case, a framework that individualizes questions of injustice and deflects attention from structural causes tied to race and class.

‘LITERATURE’ The third section of contributions looks at the politics of texts that have been traditionally labeled ‘literature’ proper, that is, written works from literary genres such as the novel, poetry, and drama. Through case studies and theoretical conceptualizations, the articles in this section investigate the multifaceted ways in which these ‘classical’ genres all participate in the contemporary cultural production of politically engaged texts. While it is sometimes assumed that the political relevance of ‘old’ literary genres has been challenged by the emergence of new media, the contributions in this section highlight how central politics are to contemporary novels, poems, and dramas. In the process, the articles develop methodological impulses for tracing the political, its complexities, and its (often self-conscious) textual boundedness in texts that, in various ways, exceed the period concepts of postmodernism. In the first contribution, Katja Kanzler discusses the politics of David Mamet’s play Race with regard to the genre of the legal drama. She argues that the text is marked by multiple, contradictory politics towards race: On the one hand, it seems to advocate for the (neo)conservative political dis- 22 Herrmann, Kanzler, and Schubert course of ‘post-racialism,’ while on the other hand, the play also contains a layer of meaning that exposes and deconstructs the discursive and ideological workings of post-racialism. For Kanzler, this second layer of meaning stems from the play’s affiliation with the legal drama. As a genre, the legal drama is not only concerned with the tension between law and justice; in addition, its interest in legal procedures, in trials, and in the narrative and performative work done in the courtroom also lends the genre a politically charged metatextual quality. In the case of Race, the genre’s interest in performance furthermore works to expose the constructedness of race as a social category of difference. Kanzler thus lays bare how politics in the play mainly reside at the intersection of race and textuality, and of genre specifically, and how the political poetics of genre—in this case, the legal drama—can end up complicating a text’s presumed semantic intention. In his contribution on Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections, Hans Frese tackles an author whose works have, similar to David Mamet’s, frequently served as a catalyst for discussions of post-postmodernism and the contemporary literary moment—in the case of The Corrections, the novel has often been highlighted as an example of the return of socially conscious realist fiction. Frese argues that Franzen’s disavowal of having written the ‘big social novel’ does not contradict the politicality of his work. In fact, The Corrections’ indeterminate ideological allegiance constitutes both an outcome of and a contribution to the debate around (post-)postmodern literature, hence paradoxically joining the discussion from which its author tries to detach his work. The article’s theoretical framework, which relies on concepts taken from actor-network theory, allows Frese to problematize the literary periodization that serves as a benchmark for the formulation of aesthetic and political agendas that literature is supposed to fulfill, thus shaping the discussion of the canon debate, whose effects are palpable in the reception of The Corrections. Frese calls attention to the concept of literary periodization by reading the novel’s ironic stance towards postmodernism as the author’s disenchantment with contemporary critical theory. At the same time, though, he sees The Corrections’ aesthetic innovations as challenging the scholarly engagement with contemporary texts and points out how the novel can be understood as gesturing towards new perspectives on a politically engaged postmodernism. While the contributions by Kanzler and Frese investigate the political valency of literary genres such as plays and novels through two individual case studies, the next three articles in this section operate more from a theoretical vantage point. Ilka Saal’s contribution explores how contemporary art, theater, and literature engage with the history of slavery. She contends that these recent American texts relate to the traumatic past in a different way than those by previous generations of authors, who, she posits, had a more direct ‘access’ to slavery and relied on mimetic representations. Saal forwards the term historiopoiesis to highlight the performative and self- reflexive nature of creating history through art and to draw attention to the Introduction: The Poetics of Politics 23 ways in which processes of memorizing, historicizing, and imagining merge. In this way, historiopoetic literature and art allow authors to explore a more complex notion of African American history and to recognize the multiplicity of black subjectivities. Specifically, the amalgamation of fact and fiction in third-generation texts about slavery, Saal argues, holds revisionary power and often has provocative effects that differentiate these texts from established renditions of slavery among previous generations of writers. Olesya Bondarenko’s article continues this theoretical focus by looking at conceptions of the political in contemporary poetry. Bondarenko explores the politicality of poems written by authors of the so-called Language group, who started their work in the 1970s and continue to leave their mark in the landscape of contemporary poetry. Language poetry may count as one of the schools of mid- to late-twentieth-century experimental poetry whose politics either have been ignored in purely aesthetic approaches or have been seen as exhausting themselves in forms of Althusserian ideology critique. Bondarenko argues that the politics of Language poetry are much more complex and that dialoguing the work of Language poets with philosophical writings by Jacques Rancière brings this complexity to light. Drawing on Rancière’s conception of a political aesthetic, Bondarenko outlines—in an exemplary reading of two recent poems by Rae Armantrout and Charles Bernstein—how a distinct political valency emerges from this poetry’s aesthetics. These politics, she suggests, go far beyond a critique of the current political order and encompass more variegated, even conflicted political stances and forms of engagement. Thus focalizing a branch of contemporary poetry whose roots reach back into the ‘linguistic-turn’ experiments of ‘high’ postmodernism, Bondarenko’s article highlights how the poetic self-consciousness of these texts enables distinct political potentials. Moving from poetry to theater, Sabrina Hüttner’s essay interrogates the very concept of political theater in this section’s final contribution, asking how the political needs to be reconceived in the contemporary moment. Countering perceptions of an alleged lack of politics in recent theater, she uses Tony Kushner’s drama Homebody/Kabul as a case study to outline the contours of a distinctly contemporary model of political theater. Against the backdrop of a critical survey of approaches to politicality in theater practice and scholarship, Hüttner theorizes Kushner’s version of political art as a ‘politics of dissent,’ as criticizing important issues of the time while at the same time self-consciously acknowledging that such art is always deeply rooted in the culture it criticizes. As Hüttner demonstrates in her reading of Homebody/Kabul, theater that revolves around the politics of dissent neither offers grand political narratives nor aims for direct agitation; rather, it seeks to mobilize critical thinking and to open up spaces for dialogue and exchange. Hüttner’s article thus offers a way of conceiving politicality in contemporary American theater in subtler and more subdued ways. 24 Herrmann, Kanzler, and Schubert

NEW MEDIA The final section of case studies turns to texts that immediately emerge from the ‘media revolution’ that has shaped the contemporary cultural moment in such notable ways. Presenting three case studies of digital media culture, the contributions probe into the often ambiguous political valencies of new-media texts. Their discussions highlight not only the extent to which politics in these texts are tied to formal dynamics but also how US culture self-consciously deals with these formal features and their political implications. This concluding set of essays, then, integrates the newest of genres into lines of inquiry revolving around the poetics of politics and the contemporary dynamism they focalize. Stefan Schubert sets off this section with an article that explores an exemplary video game, BioShock. He locates the game’s cultural work in its ethico-political engagement with choice and agency on the levels of content as well as form. Schubert’s reading interrogates both levels along with their interdependencies—on the one hand, the game’s intertextual dialogue with Ayn Rand’s conception of individualism and its notion of ‘rational self-interest,’ and on the other hand, its simultaneous exploitation and metatextual thematization of the video game’s media-specific narra- tivity, which revolves around the ‘illusion’ of choice and narrative agency. Emphasizing how BioShock politicizes its media-specific narrative dynamics by tying them to Rand’s political philosophy, the article unravels the game’s complex meditations on the inherent politicality of choice and on the ways in which choice and individualism are inevitably situated in contexts of narrative. In Schubert’s analysis, BioShock thus stands as a prominent example of how this popular ‘new’ medium can invite its audience to reflect on notions of choice and agency in video games and beyond. The remaining two essays address the new-media format of the blog in two very different iterations. Sophie Spieler’s contribution analyzes the political valencies of the Tumblr blog Rich Kids of Instagram (RKOI), which collects and reframes digital images that have been uploaded to the photo- sharing website Instagram, presumably by affluent users for the express purpose of staging their wealth. Spieler is particularly interested in the political ambivalence that results from the blog’s semantic openness: RKOI’s potential to encourage a sincere debate about inequality and social distinction, she contends, becomes obstructed by the formal features of the medium and by the irony on which the blog builds its work. Thus ap- proaching this blog from a perspective of notably ‘post-postmodern discontent,’ her essay investigates the media-specific dynamics that fuel the blog’s evacuation of its own political potential. In this way, Spieler questions the stereotypical new-media ‘mantra’ that the medium of the blog inherently encourages participation and debate, pointing out how RKOI’s poetics complicate its presumed political project. Introduction: The Poetics of Politics 25

Frank Usbeck, finally, presents a case study of how the US military has responded to the emergence of digital media and the Internet, focusing on the discussion of soldier blogs in military circles. Military reports and memos, he argues, conspicuously work with concepts of narrative to engage with the political opportunities offered by the new medium, with its potential to construct and spread a specific ‘army story’ that could help to further military interests. Usbeck’s article outlines how these official army texts discuss stories as powerful political instruments, how they reflect on the constructedness and construction of stories in ways that amount to a practice of ‘popular narratology,’ and how this practice is embedded in military politics. Overall, his contribution reveals changes within military structure and strategy that, to a large degree, were brought about by the emergence of new media and the Internet, emphasizing the impact of new textualities on ‘traditional’ politics and pointing to a deliberate use of poetic strategies in contemporary US political discourse.

Our sixteen contributions, covering poetry, blogs, drama, nonfiction, video games, novels, films, and TV, give evidence of how pervasively the question for the poetics of politics structures the current moment in US culture. Moreover, by spotlighting a widespread cultural concern with the political effects of texts and textuality, they do indeed form a local interrogation of the contemporary moment. Taken together, they do not point to some grand epochal shift but, instead, in the breadth of their explorations and in their dialogicity, demonstrate the value of historicizing the contemporary moment without periodizing it.

Works Cited

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Kirby, Alan. Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure Our Culture. New York: Continuum, 2009. Print. Leonard, Philip. Literature After Globalization: Textuality, Technology and the Nation- State. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. Print. Marcus, Greil, and Werner Sollors, eds. A New Literary History of America. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2009. Print. McLaughlin, Robert L. “Post-Postmodern Discontent: Contemporary Fiction and the Social World.” symploke 12.1-2 (2004): 53-68. Print. ---. “Post-Postmodernism.” The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature. Ed. Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons, and Brian McHale. Abingdon: Routledge, 2012. 212- 23. Print. Mittell, Jason. “Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television.” Velvet Light Trap 58 (2006): 29-40. Print. Moraru, Christian. Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2011. Print. ---. “Thirteen Ways of Passing Postmodernism.” Introduction. American Book Review 34.4 (2013): 3-4. Print. Nealon, Jeffrey. Post-Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Just-In-Time Capitalism. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2012. Print. Patterson, Lee. “The Place of the Modern in the Late Middle Ages.” Besserman, Challenge 51-66. Potter, Garry, and José López. “After Postmodernism: The New Millennium.” Introduction. After Postmodernism: An Introduction to Critical Realism. Ed. López and Potter. London: Continuum, 2001. 3-16. Print. Rebein, Robert. Hicks, Tribes, and Dirty Realists: American Fiction After Postmodernism. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2001. Print. Rich, Frank. The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth in Bush’s America. New York: Penguin, 2006. Print. Saldívar, Ramón. “The Second Elevation of the Novel: Race, Form, and the Postrace Aesthetic in Contemporary Narrative.” Narrative 21.1 (2013): 1-18. Print. Taylor, Mark C. Rewiring the Real: In Conversation with William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo. New York: Columbia UP, 2013. Print. Timmer, Nicoline. Do You Feel It Too? The Post-Postmodern Syndrome in American Fiction at the Turn of the Millennium. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010. Print. Toth, Josh. The Passing of Postmodernism: A Spectroanalysis of the Contemporary. Albany: State U of New York P, 2010. Print. Toth, Josh, and Neil Brooks. “A Wake and Renewed?” Introduction. The Mourning After: Attending the Wake of Postmodernism. Ed. Brooks and Toth. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. 1-13. Print. United States. Dept. of the Army. The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007. Print. Vermeulen, Timotheus, and Robin van den Akker. “Notes on Metamodernism.” Journal of Aesthetics and Culture 2 (2010): n. pag. Web. 9 Sept. 2014. FILM AND TELEVISION

ANDREW HOBEREK

Thinking Institutionally: Argo, Zero Dark Thirty, and the Politics of Contemporary Historical Films

Abstract: This paper reads two recent films, Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty and Ben Affleck’s Argo, against the backdrop of a neoliberal anti-institutionalism that has surged in American culture since the 1980s. While both films have predominantly been read for how they speak about US global military power, my argument focuses on a different aspect of their politics: the way that they both imagine state institutions—the CIA and the US military—as realms that allow for well-organized collaborations of large numbers of people. In their positive portrayal of such cooperative labor, both films envision these institutions as possible, albeit problematic, al- ternatives to the individualism championed by neoliberalism.

The most controversial film nominated for a 2013 Best Picture Oscar was easily Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, depicting the US Central Intel- ligence Agency’s search for and eventual assassination of Osama bin Laden. A raft of commentators—film critics, journalists, filmmakers, and even US senators—criticized Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal for two main issues: for crafting a narrative that, supposedly, endorses torture as an intelligence gathering technique and for allowing their filmmaking choices to be shaped by the CIA in return for access not usually granted to Holly- wood. Glenn Greenwald, then working for the Guardian, was among the film’s most outspoken critics. Greenwald slammed Zero Dark Thirty even before it appeared, arguing on the basis of advance reviews that Bigelow’s movie “glorifies torture by depicting it as crucial to getting bin Laden” and thereby advances the Obama-CIA party line despite the fact that “the film’s glorifying claims about torture are demonstrably, factually false” (“Zero Dark Thirty: New Torture-Glorifying Film”). In a subsequent column written after he had actually seen the film, Greenwald responded to critics of his earlier piece by citing as evidence for his initial claims a website listing quotes from other “reviewers and commentators who made this factual statement definitively about the film – that it depicts torture as valuable in finding bin Laden.” Greenwald then went on to describe the film’s support of torture as a “key factual question” and noted that the reviewers who argued that the film endorses torture were making “factual claims” and not “value judgments” (“Zero Dark Thirty: CIA Hagiography”). While Greenwald in this later column was clearly reacting to critics of his decision to write about Zero Dark Thirty without first having seen it, his (very Greenwaldian) doubling down on his claim provides us with a useful baseline version of what it means to read a text politically. For Greenwald, 30 Andrew Hoberek the film’s depiction of torture as part of the process that led to the assassination of the mastermind behind 9/11 constitutes an a priori endorsement of this strategy. Given the “sacred status” of bin Laden’s killing “in American political lore,” Greenwald argues, Zero Dark Thirty’s glorification of torture is reducible to a mathematical formula: “to depict X as valuable in enabling the killing of bin Laden is – by definition – to glorify X” (“Zero Dark Thirty: CIA Hagiography”). This reading of the film goes beyond arguing that it propagandizes for torture to claim that any representation of torture as part of the manhunt necessarily constitutes such propaganda. This is not even, then, really a reading, since it produces a claim that one can make—as Greenwald, in fact, did—without seeing the film. However, one might argue that the relevant distinction in assessing the politics of a work of the imagination is not between facts and value judgments but between facts and interpretations. Evidence that Zero Dark Thirty’s representation of torture does not necessarily constitute propaganda for torture is provided both by others’ arguments against this equation (cf. Sullivan; Moore) and even more convincingly by the fact that Greenwald himself feels called upon, later in his column, to produce an account not only of what Bigelow’s movie shows but of how it shows it. He notes, for instance, that “key evidence – the identity of bin Laden’s courier – is revealed only after a detainee is brutally and repeatedly abused” and that “the film’s pure, saintly heroine – a dogged CIA agent who sacrifices her entire life and career to find bin Laden – herself presides over multiple torture sessions” (“Zero Dark Thirty: CIA Hagiography”). These claims, so far from being factual, rest upon our learned (if often unstated) understanding of how narrative texts work: what is implied when events follow each other in sequence, for instance, or what it means when a character with whom readers or viewers identify participates in an action. Even with this qualification, though, we still remain at a relatively su- perficial level of political analysis, one concerned with the way in which a work of the imagination can be understood as taking an explicit and more or less readily discernible position on some issue that it depicts. Similar, but more muted, criticisms greeted the other 2012 film involving the CIA nominated for an Oscar (and the eventual winner), Ben Affleck’s Argo. For instance, Kevin B. Lee argued that Argo glorifies the CIA’s role in rescuing a group of US diplomats from the Canadian embassy following the 1979 takeover of the US embassy while disregarding the way the agency “helped create this mess in the first place” and (perhaps the most frequently re- peated criticism of the film) treating “oppressed Iranians as a raging, zombie-like horde.” Such debates can be interesting, and in the case of Zero Dark Thirty and Argo, they extend into questions raised by the cooperation offered to filmmakers by the US military and intelligence services. Affleck, for instance, received rare permission to film some scenes at the CIA’s Langley, Virginia, headquarters (Nashawaty). Yet even in this regard, Thinking Institutionally 31 the interest lies in what kind of quid pro quo occurred, which is to say, what kind of influence on the film’s messages such cooperation procured. In what follows, I suggest a somewhat different approach to the politics of Bigelow’s and Affleck’s films, one that depends on at least initially bracketing their relationship towards the historical events with which they are explicitly concerned. In this regard, I am influenced by Adolph Reed’s account of another 2012 film nominated for the 2013 Best Picture award, Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. Reed argues that it is necessary to look beyond the film’s obvious critique of antebellum slavery—a critique whose indisputability might begin to suggest part of the problem with it— and, instead, to focus on the defense of contemporary neoliberal capitalism it projects backward onto its seeming subject. As I will discuss at greater length below, this defense of neoliberalism depends on an individualist ethos committed to the critique not of certain kinds of institutions but of institutions per se. With this in mind, I will argue that Zero Dark Thirty and Argo, despite their support of and by problematic institutions of US state power, stage a residual defense of institutional membership that runs counter to the taken-for-granted tenets of dominant neoliberal ideology. This does not wholly obviate the issues raised by the movies’ intimacies with the national security state, but it does allow us to understand these issues in a more complicated fashion.

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In his analysis of Django Unchained, Reed takes to task academic and popular critics who praise Tarantino’s film for its affirmative depiction of black agency, contending that the individualist way in which the film frames its protagonist’s agency is in keeping with the distinctly unlibera- tory politics of neoliberal capitalism. Grouping Django Unchained with Tate Taylor’s 2011 The Help, Reed argues that both movies “dissolve political economy and social relations into individual quests and interper- sonal transactions and thus effectively sanitize, respectively, slavery and Jim Crow by dehistoricizing them.” Depicting slavery not as a means of profiting from unpaid labor but as a framework for perversion and brutality, Tarantino also renders Jamie Foxx’s character Django as someone who transcends this system through a triumphant individualism: He cares only about his own wife (Kerry Washington) and pointedly refuses to help another slave being torn apart by dogs because that might compromise his attempt to rescue her. “[D]isplac[ing] a politics challenging social structures that reproduce inequality with concern for the feelings and characteristics of individuals and of categories of population statistics reified as singular groups that are equivalent to individuals,” the movie’s “generic story of individual triumph over adversity” effectively reproduces the ideology at the heart of contemporary neoliberal capitalism: 32 Andrew Hoberek

[T]he imagery of the individual overcoming odds to achieve fame, success, or recognition also maps onto the fantasy of limitless upward mobility for enterprising and persistent individuals who persevere and remain true to their dreams. As such, it is neoliberalism’s version of an ideal of social justice, legit- imizing both success and failure as products of individual character.

The problem with Django Unchained, from this perspective, is its “elevation of private, voluntarist action as a politics—somehow more truly true or authentic, or at least more appealing emotionally—over the machinations of government and institutional actors.” In this respect, the movie reflects the extreme anti-institutional message currently mobilized in US (and, we might note, with increasing frequency in European) politics to delegitimate the state’s role in securing social and economic justice, to undermine unions, and to cast austerity as a kind of liberation. So far from offering a concrete critique of slavery as an institution, Django Unchained provides a much more covertly sinister critique of institutions per se—including but not limited to slavery. In a world in which very few people would support the antebellum slavery Django Unchained depicts, the film’s political message slips free of its ostensible subject to implicitly ratify the neoliberal ethos through which contemporary capitalism exploits labor power (by, for instance, delegitimating unions and other organizations designed to maxi- mize workers’ transindividual bargaining power). If this is the case, however, then perhaps there is a different way of thinking about the politics of Argo and Zero Dark Thirty—works that, if nothing else, are distinctly committed to “the machinations of government and institutional actors” (Reed). To dismiss this aspect of the movies because the main characters are CIA agents is, I suggest, the equally problematic inverse of praising Django Unchained solely because its protagonist is a black ex-slave. If Reed’s reading of the film has merit, which I believe it does, then it matters that at least some Hollywood films do not, in fact, embrace an extreme anti-institutional individualism. We can certainly be critical of the CIA as a particular institution, and of the way these films depict it, without ignoring the overdetermined nature of their uncharacteristically positive views of institutional life. In other words, we might suggest that these movies have some investment in imagining institutions and the people within them in a way not strictly reducible to capitalist individualism, and in the current moment, the CIA provides, perversely, one of the few imaginative settings in which this project can be pursued. In this regard, many of the responses to Zero Dark Thirty have noted the intransigence displayed by Jessica Chastain’s character Maya in pursuing a goal that seems to be getting her nowhere. They either cast this intransigence as some sort of obsession or point to the death of Maya’s friend Jessica (Jennifer Ehle) as the trigger that makes Maya’s quest personal and thus acceptable (cf., for instance, Edelstein; Rea; Wood). However, these responses forget that pursuing unprofitable goals is what noncapitalist insti- Thinking Institutionally 33 tutions make possible. That is, whether we understand Maya as a heroic individualist fighting the system or as a committed civil servant working within it depends not so much on the single-minded nature of her quest as on the way in which Zero Dark Thirty depicts her relationship to the institution within which she works. This depiction need not be (and, in fact, is not) wholly positive: It would be as much an ideological fantasy to argue that institutions always support the goals of their individual members as to argue that they always thwart them. Indeed, it is their subtly textured depiction of their characters’ relationships to the institution of the CIA that allows Zero Dark Thirty and Argo to function as allegories of institutional life per se. In this respect, Affleck’s Argo provides a more sanguine version of this allegory of institutional life, depicting tension between Affleck’s version of the real-life agent Tony Mendez and his employers but also choosing a subject—the rescue of American diplomats from Tehran following the fall of the US embassy—that eliminates any shades of ambiguity from the CIA’s activities. Zero Dark Thirty, by contrast, provides the hard-boiled version that is willing to say that institutions also have dark sides, for instance that they make life harder for women within them or that they permit those who are devoted to their goals to perform morally questionable acts like committing torture. This offers a somewhat different way of understanding the movie’s depiction of torture. As mentioned previously, Greenwald and others who focus on the film’s explicit politics argue that Bigelow would not show torture if she was not contending it was effective. Yet within the framework of the institutional allegory, what is fascinating about torture is the way that it foregrounds the ethical tension between the individual and the institution. If Bigelow’s film depicts torture but inserts some ambiguity—as evidenced in reviewers’ disagreements about it— about whether this technique did or did not assist in the discovery of bin Laden, then it becomes interesting precisely as a case study in how members of institutions remain committed to them even when they use ethically questionable and/or ineffective means to pursue their goals. With this in mind, we can begin to see how Zero Dark Thirty and Argo present something more complicated than the neoliberal narrative of the heroic individual’s battle against the stultifying, bureaucratic institution. Consider, for instance, a scene from the former that initially seems to epito- mize the agon between the individual and the institution, Maya’s confrontation with her Islamabad bureau chief Joseph Bradley (played by Kyle Chandler, who also plays the similar role of Hamilton Jordan in Argo) about the resources she needs for her pursuit of bin Laden. The two argue about the best use of Maya’s time, with Bradley telling her that she needs to concentrate on stopping terrorist attacks on the US and declaring that she’s “chasing a ghost while the whole fucking network goes all around” her. She replies scathingly: “You just want me to nail some low-level Mullah-crack- a-dulla so you can check that box on your resume that says while you were 34 Andrew Hoberek in Pakistan, you got a real terrorist.” The fact that Maya accuses Bradley of careerism is telling insofar as it paints him as a bureaucratic timeserver who is simply getting by from day to day, in contrast to her goal-driven individualism. This is not an entirely incorrect reading of this scene— indeed, if Reed is right that neoliberal individualism is so dominant as to be treated as an unquestioned universal, then we should expect it to show up even in parts of narratives that try to swim against this stream—but it is an incomplete one. For instance, we might note that the two characters are, in fact, having an argument not about the good or evil of the organization for which they work but rather about how to allocate resources within it: Bradley favors preventing strikes on the homeland; Maya argues that this merely addresses symptoms rather than rooting out their cause. Moreover, Maya does not strike off on her own, in action-movie fashion—rather, Bradley eventually gives her what she asks for, even if he does so in response to a threat to go over his head. (Here we might note in passing that one aspect of a good organization is, arguably, the presence of checks against the top-down exercise of hierarchical power.) That Zero Dark Thirty is, in fact, deeply committed to institutional procedure is suggested by another scene, the one in which Maya’s friend Jessica dies. While one could, as I have suggested, understand this scene as offering narrative motivation for Maya to continue her quest—Jessica’s death makes this quest personal—this does not explain the relative length of this scene or its explicit support of routinization as an institutional value. The scene is based on the real-life Camp Chapman attack of 2009, in which a terrorist who seemed to be cooperating with the CIA used his access to the camp to carry out a suicide attack. In Zero Dark Thirty, the analyst Jessica believes that she has recruited a member of bin Laden’s inner circle whom she can persuade, through an offer of $25 million dollars, to reveal the mastermind’s location, and she sets up a meeting at an air base just outside Taliban territory. The scene opens with a (by Hollywood standards) lengthy period of waiting for the supposed informant’s car to arrive at the base. This is, I contend, designed to make the audience feel Jessica’s impa- tience and to endorse her desire to step over procedural speed bumps by telling the security officer to have the base’s gate guards stand down in order to avoid spooking her contact. What follows—the man steps out of his car and sets off a suicide bomb that kills Jessica and everyone else present—obviously supports the security officer’s paean to rationalization: “Procedures only work if we follow them every time.” In this scene, Jessica’s desire to set aside regular procedure—which, in another kind of narrative, would exemplify the neoliberal drive to sidestep stale bureaucracies in the interests of innovation—is what enables the suicide bombing to work. Moreover, Jessica is even more directly allied with the logic of capitalism insofar as she believes that she can turn the suicide bomber on the basis of money alone. In an early scene, she suggests to Maya the possibility of paying al-Qaeda members to switch allegiances,