The Contemporary Economic Novel: Hernan Díaz’s Trust
Rezumat
Abstract: Recent American fiction has seen a resurgence of historical topics, and significant attempts have been made to revisit moments perceived as defining an epoch in American history. The revitalized interest in history in the mainstream of contemporary American fiction can be described as reckoning with and commemorating traumas in the distant and the recent past, as historicist engagements with trying to locate possible pockets of personal experience against the grain of historical grand narratives, as engagements with a neoliberal reorganization of the economy and personal relations, of urban lifestyles and politics, or of the visual, popular and political media. This turn to history runs parallel to what is described as “the genre turn,” and the text of Hernan Díaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning second novel of 2022, Trust demonstrates the dynamics of this turn to history in, and the influence of genre on, contemporary American literary fiction in the context Mark McGurl described as “the age of Amazon.” Accordingly, the paper argues that (1) Trust revisits the psychological dimensions of a subgenre of economic fiction, “the success story,” (2) it dramatizes the literary-genre divide within its narrative structure, (3) it provides insight into the understanding of the personal and the public in what is represented as an emerging neoliberal economic context in the time frame of the narrative, and (4) it does so by considering the economic novel and its entanglement in the history of gender relations and economic agency.
Keywords: economic novel, the age of Amazon, genre and literary fiction, economic agency and gender, genres of the personal.
Bibliografie
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