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Dead Pledges is a study of our contemporary culture of debt. Examining novels, poems, artworks, photographs, and films produced in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, this book aims to show how US cultural texts have grappled with the rise and fall of the financialized consumer credit economy. It argues that debt is such a ubiquitous yet elusive social form that we can most clearly understand it by looking at how our culture has sought to represent it. Whether popular entertainment or avant-garde art, post-crisis cultural texts allow us to map the landscape of contemporary debt: from foreclosure to credit scoring, student debt to securitized risk, microeconomic theory to anti-eviction activism. Across this range of sites, this book offers an account of the theoretical and political consequences of debt: how it affects our ideas of personhood and morality; how it deploys a language of irrational behavior and risky excess; how it transforms our relationship to property and possession. Bringing together economic history, debt theory, and cultural analysis, Dead Pledges demonstrates how our understanding of the economy can be illuminated by culture. What is at stake in our contemporary culture of debt is not just our measures of economic credibility but also the limits of our imaginative credulity; not just our account of economic character but also our literary characters; not just the money we see but also the way we see money; not just how we pay but also how we imagine getting payback.

Ranging from the 1950s to the present, Maximum Feasible Participation traces the literary legacy of the War on Poverty. After World War II, countercultural and minority writers developed an antiformalist art that privileged process over product, rejecting literary conventions that separated authors from their audiences. This aesthetic was part of a broader trend toward participatory professionalism: an emerging model of expert work that challenged boundaries between professionals and clients. During the War on Poverty, the Johnson administration promoted this model through the Community Action Program, which encouraged “maximum feasible participation” by lower-class clients. Not coincidentally, many writers, especially cultural nationalists like Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), established institutions that were funded by this program. Participatory professionalism, however, hinged on a concept of poverty that was the paradigm’s undoing. Postwar social scientists developed a binary model of class, which insisted that the poor inhabit a culture of poverty at odds with middle-class norms. This theory resonated with process artists’ depictions of poverty as an alternative, present-oriented worldview that disrupted traditional literary conventions. This notion of cultural difference at once enabled and frustrated process art, and it lent itself to political programs aimed at dismantling the welfare state. With in-depth readings of Jack Kerouac, Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Joyce Carol Oates, Tom Wolfe, Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, Philip Roth, and Carolyn Chute, Maximum Feasible Participation shows how mid-twentieth-century welfare politics transformed American writers’ understanding of audience and literary form.

The Practice of Misuse examines the oppositional emergence and eventual ideological containment of “rugged consumers” in late twentieth-century American literature, who creatively misuse, reuse, and repurpose the objects within their environments to suit their idiosyncratic needs and desires. The book shows how authors such as Sam Shepard, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Chuck Pahlaniuk, Cormac McCarthy, and Margaret Atwood position their rugged consumers within the intertwined American myths of primal nature and rugged individualism, creating left- and right-libertarian maker communities that are skeptical of both traditional political institutions and (in its pre-neoliberal state) globalized corporate capitalism. Through their unorthodox encounters with the material world, rugged consumers can temporarily suspend the various networks of power that dictate the proper use of a given commodity and reveal those networks to be contingent strategies that must be perpetually renewed and reinforced rather than naturalized processes that persist untroubled through time and space. At the same time, this Utopian ideal is rarely met: most examples of rugged consumerism conceal rather than foreground the ideological problems to which they respond and thus support or ignore rather than challenge the conditions of late capitalist consumerism. By analyzing both the rare convergences and common divergences between individual material practices and collectivist politics, this study shows how rugged consumerism both recodes and reflects the dynamic social history of objects in American material and literary cultures from the 1960s to the present.

Remainders: American Poetry at Nature’s End discusses postwar poetry as an essential archive of ecological thinking in the era of the Great Acceleration, a period of rapid and unprecedented change to various planetary systems. While North American ecocriticism has tended to focus on narrative forms in its investigations of environmental consciousness and ethics, this book highlights the forms and themes of poetry as it imaginatively engages with various aspects of ecological crisis across this period. This book examines how works by poets including Lorine Niedecker, Gwendolyn Brooks, John Ashbery, Gary Snyder, and Juliana Spahr offer representations of remainders, from obsolescent goods to waste products and toxic matter, that explore the lingering consequences of productive relations. In their attention to these material forms, these poems explore unresolvable affects and sensations of living on amidst ecological calamity. This book’s method of reading for remainders redirects attention from postwar historical frameworks that stress social progress and economic development toward an emphasis on their socioecological effects, developing an ecomaterialist approach that draws on the critical historiography of natural history developed by Lukács, Benjamin, and Adorno. This approach also provides a distinctive account of the investments of postwar American poetry. Through its figurations of materials and activities cast adrift by capitalist modernization, poetry across this period develops a powerful ethos of untimeliness. Remainders argues that this ethos reflects on poetry’s own increasingly marginal status as a cultural form.

The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization provides an original account of the relationship between postindustrial capitalism and postmodern culture. Examining American conceptual art and experimental poetry alongside sociological and historical accounts of postwar labor, this book describes the cultural production of the period as a “counter-laboratory,” a space of speculation and experiment from which new modes of interaction emerged, premised on collaboration, mutability and free association, and utilizing the literary resources of lyric address, free indirect discourse, and the poetic line. As Bernes argues, these artistic models and challenges were eventually absorbed by industry in the long process of capitalist restructuring that followed the crisis of the 1970s, providing the conceptual germ for the eventual corporate grammar of participation, teamwork, flexibility, and creativity. The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization therefore provides a prehistory of the labor-intensive present, examining how the art and writing of the 1960s and 1970s served as a vanishing mediator, a set of challenges to work and the workplace that, unwittingly, assisted in the renewal of work and helped to reverse the trendline of rising wages and falling work hours that had held in most of the industrialized world for the better part of the 20th century. Bringing together an extensive understanding of postwar capitalism and postwar literary and artistic developments, Bernes demonstrates, conclusively, that the work of art and work in general share a common fate.