| सारांश: | <p>The thesis starts from the observation that a significant number of novels from the 1990s and early 2000s present two salient stylistic features. First, they are sprawling with characters; second, these fictional renditions often read as ‘flat’, in that they are endowed with little psychological specificity. I contend that the sub-genre I identify as the ‘neoliberal novel’ originates at the intersection of these two traits, and that its specimens can be said to be ‘neoliberal’ inasmuch as they respond to the challenges posed by their historical juncture. Through their deployment of characters, these novels delineate the problematic nature of the idea of ‘person’ in the age of neoliberalism and elaborate varieties of perception and experience that can be said to be ‘impersonal’. Often, in the neoliberal novel, flatness of character represents impersonality, and the latter is consistently associated with the specifically biopolitical aspects of neoliberal ideology. </p>
<p>In order to explore these issues, I read four novels from the United States and Latin America: David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997), Salvador Benesdra’s El traductor (1998) and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 (2004). I contend that the American hemisphere is particularly productive as a point of observation of the general workings of the ‘neoliberal novel’ in that the historical facts surrounding the spread of neoliberal policies and practices in the region makes the continent a compendium of its stratified social and anthropological effects. Finally, I conclude that impersonality per se, while offering an escape route from the traps of liberal individualism, does not stand in any definite relationship to either authority or social change. Rather, it represents the plane of contrast in which the two constantly made and re-made each other.</p>
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