neoliberalism

This paper will discuss a range of concepts relating to populism in digital media. The vernacular appears to literary scholars as a shift towards democracy (tilting the ideal of readership and the consciousness of the reader towards the Reformation and the Enlightenment). Along with this practical historical shift (facilitating the rise of nations and nationality), the pivot to the popular permitted an expansion of poetic and subjective possibilities in the literary arts. In the US, a second “revolution” of the vernacular takes place in the post-colonial context in rejection of perceived European norms--often with Black expression serving as a space of cultural imagination—both in the literary arts and in mass culture. This shift marked the expansion of American hegemony, beginning with Manifest Destiny and towards Neoliberalism. The result is a complicated genealogy of popular language. What can this tell us about popular culture in a post-digital age?

In this review, three social conditions of the Precarious (“precariousness, precarity, and (governmental) precarization”) are described. Furthermore, the neo-liberalist use of self-regulation as a means to exert control over individuals is exposed. The possibility to turn precarity into “a form of political mobilization,” as suggested by Lorey, is also explored.

(Source: EBR)

In this essay, Davin Heckman argues that works of electronic literature often provide occasions for cultivating attention in a mutable cultural landscape. Through readings of John Cayley, YHCHI, Rob Wittig, and Richard Holeton, Heckman points to a poetics of technical estrangement by which new media is opened up to deliberative reading, and thus presents contemporary readers with the opportunity to develop critical practices appropriate for the conditions of neoliberalism.

Davin Heckman is a Fulbright Scholar with Digital Culture this year, and will hold a lecture on his current research on Thursday, April 12, 2012.

Heckman will discuss literature in a time of media change.  Part of an ongoing research project, this talk will explore the objective tendency of neoliberalism and the digital revolution, and the humanistic potential of emerging literary and critical practices.

(Source: University of Bergen)