Chapter 19 - Contemporary Crisis Fictions: Twenty-First Century Disaffection

Summary

In this chapter, I explore the representation of affect in Tom McCarthy’s Remainder (2005) and Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011). These texts, on first sight, seem to reflect a notably affectless narration, yet here I argue that this absence of affect is itself felt to be a crisis, one which the character or narrator struggles to recognise or articulate. In these comparable invocations of emotional removal, disregard and isolation, set in a contemporary context of high speed connection, these writers thus facilitate a new articulation of crisis within the global neoliberal order, making visible a return to elapsed and displaced actualities. They contribute, in this way, to what has been called a ‘new sincerity’ within twenty-first century writing, though their understandings of this project often highlight an ironic affective separation from immediate surroundings.