Overview

In the tradition of Mike Davis and Fredric Jameson, Nick Heffernan engages in a series of meditations on capital, class and technology in contemporary America. He turns to the stories we generate and tell ourselves - via fiction, film journalism, theory - to see how change is registered. By investigating a variety of texts, he observes how structural change affects the way people organise their lives economically, socially and culturally. Case studies include Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, William Gibson's cyberspace trilogy, Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, and Wim Wenders's Until the End of the World. Using the links between narrative cultural forms and the process of historical understanding, he brings together debates that have so far been conducted largely within the separate domains of political economy, social theory and cultural criticism to provide a compelling analysis of contemporary cultural change. By relocating postmodernism in the context of changing modes of capitalism, Heffernan puts the question of class and class agency back at the centre of the critical agenda.

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9780745311050

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Heffernan explores the ways in which narratives generated through literary fiction, film, journalism, and social and cultural theory register and represent contemporary social and cultural shape. He draws on and impressive breadth of texts. This compelling and thought-provoking book is highly recommended for graduate students and above with interests in postmodernism and contemporary cultural, class, and technology studies. -- CHOICE In a stimulating read about the relationship bewtween cultural forms and social, economic, and political change in postwar America, the author uses a range of cultural texts--film, literature, reportage--to illuminate the processes and modes through which crises and changes are registered. --Book Notes

'Draws on an impressive breadth of texts, ranging from the usual suspects of post-modern social, cultural, and literary theory to an intriguing selection of films and novels, including some recent cyberpunk science fiction. The result is an eclectic analysis of the often ambiguous and anxious position of the professional middle class in the midst of a period of historic transformation, cybernation, and globalisation' -- Choice

Author Information

Nick Heffernan teaches American Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University College Northampton. He is the author of Capital, Class and Technology in Contemporary American Culture (Pluto Press, 2000).

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