ABSTRACT

This essay examines how, through narrating the white-collar workplace, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) engages with structural concerns of contemporary capitalism, global violence, postcolonial oppression, and contemporary technologies as a text written in the wake of the 2007/8 financial crisis. Alongside these concerns and through reading two chapters of Egan’s novel, ‘Selling the General’ and ‘Pure Language’, this article also examines how fictional representation more broadly operates as both an aesthetic mode and as an active component of a political-economic sensibility that is necessary to upholding the capitalist status quo in the contemporary moment: this is, as Mark Fisher describes, capitalist realism. By bringing these critical strands in dialogue with one another, not only does this enable a nuanced reading of how the novel understands and charts the relations between these structural concerns, but it also facilitates a furthering of capitalist realism as a critical framework.

摘要

这篇文章通过叙述白领工作场所，探讨了詹妮弗·伊根（Jennifer Egan）的《恶棍小队来访》（2010 年）作为 2007/8 金融危机后撰写的文本，涉及当代资本主义、全球暴力、后殖民压迫和当代技术的结构性问题。除了这些担忧之外，通过阅读伊根小说“推销将军”和“纯语言”的两章，本文还考察了虚构表现如何更广泛地作为一种审美模式和作为政治经济敏感性的积极组成部分运作，在当代维持资本主义现状是必要的：正如马克·费舍尔所描述的，这是资本主义现实主义。通过将这些关键线索相互对话，这不仅可以细致入微地阅读小说如何理解和描绘这些结构关注点之间的关系，