ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an overview of how pre-crisis literature tackled issues of consumer culture and the American economy, and lays out the methodological aspects of the study, noting the impact of neoliberalism on literary culture. The first part of the chapter is historical and focuses on the advantages and drawbacks of different approaches to literature (particularly postmodernism, satire, and realism) in terms of their capacity to discuss matters of consumption and the US economy in the neoliberal period. The second part of the chapter returns to the question of interpretation, particularly in terms of postmodernism owing to its association with capitalism. Returning to the epistemological shortcomings of postmodernism, it ponders the developments which were to address them, which include surface readings, the descriptive turn, and Rita Felski’s criticism of the hermeneutics of suspicion. The chapter also notes the limitation of some of these approaches, particularly owing to the neoliberal fetishization of surfaces over the depths behind them. The chapter ends with a coda noting the narrative quality of neoliberal market discourse.
