Abstract

This study focuses on failure in contemporary American literature. It reads literary texts that foreground failure as responses to the social and economic conditions of neoliberalism, proposing that these texts disclose ethical alternatives to everyday life. The literary texts at the core of this study -- be they novels, plays, poems, or short stories -- share a commitment to the future, one in which social interdependence as well as responsibility for the wellbeing of others would supplant the egoistic desires abetted by neoliberalism. In each text, failures such as performing badly, implacable unhappiness, and family dysfunction open onto better social arrangements. This study turns to Emmanuel Levinas's ethical philosophy to flesh out its central argument. Levinas understands the self as fundamentally co-implicated with the Other, and it is this constitutive openness to alterity to which the study's literary texts orient readers and/or audiences.