Cover not available
Article published In:
English Text Construction
Vol. 13:2 (2020) ► pp.109–131

Neoliberalism’s “official crap art”?

Sentimental humanism and the work of Tom McCarthy

| KU Leuven
British writer Tom McCarthy has repeatedly taken aim at what he calls a “sentimental humanism” and the contemporary cult of the “authentic self”. This article investigates his work through the lens of that critique. Extrapolating from McCarthy’s public statements, I endeavour to delineate sentimental humanism as a mode of cultural production and flesh out his linking of it to a neoliberal political economy. I show how his antagonism manifests itself in his work, particularly his debut novel, Remainder. By contrast, his latest novel, Satin Island, marks a turning point in that trajectory. Although implicitly framed by its author as a way of thematising the challenges with which Big Data has confronted literature, Satin Island more specifically reveals that his anti-humanist agenda has also reached an impasse. Much of the logic behind the critique of sentimental humanism mounted by Remainder, I argue, is in a sense pre-empted or assimilated by the kinds of corporate digital environments described in Satin Island.
Keywords: Tom McCarthy, Satin Island , Remainder , neoliberalism, authenticity, sentimental humanism
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Sentimental humanism
  • 3.Authenticity and the creative economy
  • 4. Remainder’s poetics of inauthenticity
  • 5. Satin Island and the corporate scriptorium
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 10 December 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/etc.00037.tsi
References (47)
References
Aiello, Giorgia & Greg Dickinson. 2014. Beyond authenticity: A visual-material analysis of locality in the global redesign of Starbucks stores. Visual Communication 13 (3): 303–321. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Barthes, Roland. 1977. The death of the author. In Image Music Text. London: Fontana Press, 142–148.Google Scholar
Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Harbor MI: The University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. 2007. The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. New York NY: Schocken, 217–251.Google Scholar
Brouillette, Sarah. 2014. Literature and the Creative Economy. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Brown, Nicholas. 2019. Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art Under Capitalism. Durham NC: Duke University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
De Boever, Arne. 2014. Narrative Care: Biopolitics and the Novel. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
De Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Deleuze, Gilles & Félix Guattari. 1986. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. 1982. Signature event context. In Margins of Philosophy. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 307–330.Google Scholar
Dworkin, Craig. 2011. The fate of Echo. In Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing, Craig Dworkin & Kenneth Goldsmith (eds). Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press, xxiii–liv.Google Scholar
Eliot, T. S. 1982. Tradition and the individual talent. Perspecta 191: 36–42. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Geulen, Eva. 2002. Under construction: Walter Benjamin’s “The work of art in the age of mchanical reproduction”. In Benjamin’s Ghosts: Interventions in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory, Gerhard Richter (ed.). Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 121–141.Google Scholar
Gilmore, Leigh. 2010. American neoconfessional: Memoir, self-help, and redemption on Oprah’s couch. Biography 33 (4): 657–679. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Harvey, David. 2007. Neoliberalism as creative destruction. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 610 (1): 22–44. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Howkins, John. 2001. The Creative Economy: How People Make Money from Ideas. London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Huehls, Mitchum & Rachel Greenwald Smith. 2017. Four phases of neoliberalism and literature: An introduction. In Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture, Mitchum Huehls & Rachel Greenwald Smith (eds). Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1–18.Google Scholar
Jay, Martin. 2006. Taking on the stigma of inauthenticity: Adorno’s critique of genuineness. New German Critique 33 (1): 15–30. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lavery, Nick. 2016. Post-humanism and the distributed consciousness in Tom McCarthy’s Remainder . In Tom McCarthy: Critical Essays, Dennis Duncan (ed). Canterbury: Gylphi, 161–180.Google Scholar
Lea, Daniel. 2012. The anxieties of authenticity in post-2008 British fiction. MFS Modern Fiction Studies 58 (3): 459–476. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McCarthy, Tom. 2006. Remainder. Richmond: Alma Books.Google Scholar
. 2010. Technology and the novel, from Blake to Ballard. The Guardian 24 July. <[URL]>
. 2011. Interview by Fred Fernandez-Armesto. The White Review February. <[URL]>
. 2012a. Literature & violence: Interview with Tom McCarthy. Video interview by Brad Evans. Histories of Violence series. <[URL]>
. 2012b. Transmission and the Individual Remix. London: Vintage Digital.Google Scholar
. 2013. An interview with Tom McCarthy. Conversation with Matthew Hart, Aaron Jaffe & Jonathan Eburne. Contemporary Literature 54 (4): 656–682.Google Scholar
. 2015a. Satin Island. London: Jonathan Cape.Google Scholar
. 2015b. The death of writing – if James Joyce were alive today, he’d be working for Google. The Guardian 7 March. <[URL]>
. 2015c. Heritage Hackney: Stories – My London (26 September). Financial Times: 271.Google Scholar
. 2016. Foreword: On being the subject of a conference or, what do I know? In Tom McCarthy: Critical Essays, Dennis Duncan (ed.). Canterbury: Gylphi, 1–2.Google Scholar
McCarthy, Tom & Simon Critchley. 2012. The Mattering of Matter: Documents from the Archive of the International Necronautical Society. Berlin: Sternberg Press.Google Scholar
Michaels, Walter Benn. 2011. Model minorities and the minority model – The neoliberal novel. In The Cambridge History of the American Novel, Leonard Cassuto, Clare Virginia Eby & Benjamin Reiss (eds). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1016–130. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2015. The Beauty of a Social Problem. Chicago IL: The University of Chicago Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nieland, Justus. 2012. Dirty media: Tom McCarthy and the afterlife of modernism. MFS Modern Fiction Studies 58 (3): 569–599. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Osborne, Thomas. 2003. Against “creativity”: a philistine rant. Economy and Society 23 (4): 507–525. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Robbe-Grillet, Alain. 1992. On several obsolete notions. In For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction. Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press, 25–48.Google Scholar
Rothe, Anne. 2011. Popular Trauma Culture: Selling the Pain of Others in the Mass Media. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Rourke, Lee & Tom McCarthy. 2010. In conversation: Lee Rourke and Tom McCarthy. The Guardian 18 September. <[URL]>
Schwartz, Sanford. 1985. The Matrix of Modernism: Pound, Eliot, and Early Twentieth-Century Thought. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Seltzer, Mark. 2017. The novel in the epoch of social systems: Or, “maps of the world in its becoming”. European Journal of American studies 12 (3). <[URL]> DOI logo
Sontag, Susan. 1977. On Photography. New York NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.Google Scholar
Taplin, Jonathan T. (Producer) & Scorsese, Martin (Director). 1973. Mean Streets. Warner Bros.Google Scholar
Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Thatcher, Margaret. 1987. Interview by Douglas Keay. Woman’s Own 31 October: 8–10.Google Scholar
Thrift, Nigel. 2002. “Think and act like revolutionaries”: Episodes from the global triumph of management discourse. Critical Quarterly 44 (3): 19–26. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vermeulen, Pieter. 2012. The critique of trauma and the afterlife of the novel in Tom McCarthy’s Remainder . MFS Modern Fiction Studies 58 (3): 549–568. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Warhol, Andy. 1975. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again. Orlando FL: Harcourt.Google Scholar
Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Trimm, Ryan
2022. Capital Fictions in the Age of Fictitious Capital. Novel 55:2 ► pp. 360 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 4 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.