The formal limit to imagining a post-catastrophic future remains a historical one: how can a novel bent on representing an after, bent on imagining the movement of history as such, do so “in an age,” as Fredric Jameson puts it, “that has forgotten to think historically in the first place.” Brent Ryan Bellamy’s claim is that Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming struggles to represent the present historically and that in doing so it strikes at the very limits of (...) post-apocalyptic narrative form. (shrink)

Jen Hedler Hammond reviews Kevin Floyd’s The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism. Floyd’s book succeeds in producing a dialogue between Judith Butler and Fredric Jameson that will no doubt have far-reaching consequences for both queer and Marxist theory. But what insight does this dialogue provide into the undertheorized position of women in Marxism and Queer Studies alike?

Davis A. Smith-Brecheisen reviews Diane Coyle's GDP: A Brief but Affectionate Historyand Zachary Karabell's The Leading Indicators: A Short History of the Numbers that Rule Our World.

Sarah Brouillette suggests that literary studies can help de-naturalize contemporary capitalism by accounting for the rise of the pervasive vocabulary that imagines work as a form of self-exploration, self-expression, and self-realization. She discusses two manifestations of this vocabulary. One is the notion of a “creative class” branded by Richard Florida, management professor and guru consultant to government and industry. The other is the theory of “immaterial labor” assembled within autonomist Marxism. Despite their obvious differences, Brouillette demonstrates that both conceptions are (...) more symptoms than diagnoses of a now dominant tendency to fathom creativity both ahistorically — as the essence of experimentation emanating from an internal natural source — and contradictorily — as newly valuable to capitalism but romantically honorable and free. (shrink)