A Cognitive Narratology Approach to the American Neoliberal Novel: Figure Versus Ground in Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18485/bells.2016.8.19Keywords:
Neoliberalism, American fiction, cognitive narratology, spatializationAbstract
The paper discusses Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (2010) in the context of the American Neoliberal novel – a recent subgenre1 which builds upon the tradition of the 1970s – 1980s conspiracy-centred fictions and creatively transforms it into a set of literary productions focused on the significance of global capital on everyday American lives and political governance. By capitalizing on cognitive narratology theories on the (de)structuring of fictional storyworlds, predicated on various means of spatialization, I intend to examine how ideological and social spatiality works and why such an approach to text analysis would be useful for a close reading of literary texts.
1 This literary subgenre encompasses work by Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, Joshua Ferris, Allegra Goodman, and Sam Lypsite, alongside Jonathan Franzen.
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