Includes bibliographical references (pages 163183) and index.
Contents:
Introduction -- Blueprints: Invisible man and the great migration to white flight -- The price of salt is the city: Patricia Highsmith and the queer frontiers of neoliberalism -- Naked lunch, or, the last snapshot of the surrealists -- Shock therapy: Atlas shrugged, urban renewal, and the making of the entrepreneurial subject -- Fallen corpses and rising cities: The bell jar and the making of the new woman -- Conclusion: the siege of Harlem and its commune.
Summary:
"Novel Shocks: Urban Renewal and the Origins of Neoliberalism traces the political and cultural origins of neoliberalism to the large-scale suburbanization and urban renewal programs of the 1950s and early 1960s, and places the Cold War novel at the center of this story. Throughout the 1950s, a coalition of developers, politicians and planners, bulldozed vast areas of land deemed "slums" or "blighted" to make way for freeways to the new suburban developments, public and private housing projects, medical centers, skyscrapers, and even the new United Nations headquarters. While the program was national, New York was ground zero, and like Haussman's creative destruction of Paris a century before, the demolition and monumental reconstruction of New York created a distinctive, and soon to be global, urban sensorium, one rooted in the new segregated landscapes of prosperous white private space and poor black public space" -- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.