ABSTRACT

The Great Recession of 2007-09, including its instigating Global Financial Crisis, inspired a collection of novels that utilize the crisis events and recession conditions in their plots and narrative. This article examines popular emotions and feelings circulating within Great Recession fiction. While anxiety and anger are arguably the emotions of the capitalist continuum, the post-crisis recession manifested a unique atmosphere due to the particularities of its historical moment: neoliberal austerity against a specific myriad of intersecting insecurities in a digital era in which anxiety-inducing spectacles go “viral” on social media and where post-9/11 police states have resulted in declining civil liberties including with regard to protest. Drawing on Raymond Williams’ conceptualization of structure of feeling, this paper argues that anger and indignation; fear and anxiety; melancholia, defeatism and hopelessness are popular emotions and feelings within Great Recession fiction. Great Recession novels articulate the emotional effects of neoliberalism yet, as a collection, contain a stunning lack of radical imagination. This paper argues, ultimately, that the structure of feeling detectable in Great Recession fiction gives affective expression to what Mark Fisher calls reflexive impotence — the disaffected state of knowing things are bad but not being able to do anything about it.

摘要

2007-09 年的大衰退，包括引发的全球金融危机，激发了一系列小说的创作灵感，这些小说在情节和叙述中利用了危机事件和经济衰退条件。本文探讨了大衰退小说中流传的流行情绪和感受。虽然焦虑和愤怒可以说是资本主义连续体的情绪，但由于其历史时刻的特殊性，危机后的衰退表现出了一种独特的氛围：新自由主义紧缩政策与数字时代特定的无数交叉的不安全感作斗争，在数字时代，引发焦虑的景象在社交媒体上“病毒式传播”，9/11 后的警察国家导致公民自由（包括抗议自由）下降。借鉴雷蒙德·威廉姆斯对感觉结构的概念化，本文认为，愤怒和愤慨；恐惧和焦虑；忧郁、失败主义和绝望是大衰退小说中流行的情绪和感受。大衰退小说阐明了新自由主义的情感影响，但作为一个集合，却惊人地缺乏激进的想象力。本文最终认为，大衰退小说中可察觉的感觉结构为马克·费舍尔所说的情感表达提供了情感表达反射性阳痿——明知事情不好却无能为力的不满状态。