Book contents
- The Market Logics of Contemporary Fiction
- Cambridge Studies in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Culture
- The Market Logics of Contemporary Fiction
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I The Emergence of Market Metafiction
- Part II The Phantasmagorias of Contemporary Finance
- Part III The Market Knows
- Part IV The Moment of Market Metafiction
- Chapter 6 Putting Everything on the Table
- Chapter 7 Between Autonomy and Heteronomy
- Coda
- Notes
- Index
Chapter 7 - Between Autonomy and Heteronomy
Exchanging Capital in Zink, Cohen, and Heti
from Part IV - The Moment of Market Metafiction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2019
- The Market Logics of Contemporary Fiction
- Cambridge Studies in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Culture
- The Market Logics of Contemporary Fiction
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I The Emergence of Market Metafiction
- Part II The Phantasmagorias of Contemporary Finance
- Part III The Market Knows
- Part IV The Moment of Market Metafiction
- Chapter 6 Putting Everything on the Table
- Chapter 7 Between Autonomy and Heteronomy
- Coda
- Notes
- Index
Summary
This chapter argues that recent examples of market metafiction by Nell Zink, Joshua Cohen, and Sheila Heti stake out a set of key positions that the ambitious novelist might adopt in the contemporary literary field. Beginning with an analysis of the improbable rise to literary fame of the long-obscure Zink, it identifies a recurrent logic, evident across all elements of the “Zink phenomenon”, including her 2016 novel Nicotine, whereby an embrace of market forces paradoxically enables the very writing that it at the same time threatens to destroy. Turning to Cohen, the chapter reads the sprawling, experimental Book of Numbers (2015) as an ambivalent attempt to channel the logic of the iconic “disruptors” of the contemporary tech sector. Finally, the chapter argues that in her memoir-cum-novel How Should a Person Be? (2010) Heti aims to produce a text that circumvents conventional forms of literary valuation by being neither merely desired (as a commodity on the market) nor simply admired (as an object of critical veneration), but existing instead as an object of use – a guide or tool with the potential to be strategically deployed by those who read it.
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- The Market Logics of Contemporary Fiction , pp. 218 - 255Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2019