Novel Shocks argues that the political and cultural origins of neoliberalism lie in the battles over suburban and urban space in the 1950s and early 1960s. At the end of World War II, Harry Truman’s administration launched a national program of urban renewal that sought to create a new and distinctly American modernity, which would underpin US global hegemony. The program’s effects in Manhattan were particularly notable: throughout the 1950s and 1960s, New York bulldozed vast areas of land deemed “slums” or “blighted” to make way for freeways, public and private housing projects, medical centers, skyscrapers, and even the new United Nations headquarters. Taken together, these processes dramatically transformed New York’s metropolitan region, creating the segregated landscape of prosperous white suburbs and poor black cities, and with it new cultural forms and subjectivities. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, novelists such as Ralph Ellison, Patricia Highsmith, Ayn Rand, William Burroughs, Sylvia Plath, and Warren Miller all depicted and responded to these new urban spaces as forms of traumatic “shock” that required new aesthetic forms and political structures. These novels rejected older shock-based modernisms such as Surrealism and naturalism and, like the urbanization projects they depicted, forged a new kind of modernism, one that transformed shock from a traumatic and disruptive effect of urban modernity into a therapeutic force that helps strengthen and shape a more flexible, self-reliant, and resilient subject that would nourish the roots of neoliberalism.
