This book attempts to understand what 'contemporary' has meant, and should mean, for literary studies. The essays in this volume suggest that an attentive reading of recent global literatures challenges the idea that our contemporary moment is best characterized as a timeless, instantaneous 'now'. The contributors to this book argue that global literatures help us to conceive of the contemporary as an always plural, heterogeneous, and contested temporality. Far from suggesting that we replace theories of an omnipresent 'end of history' with a traditional, single, diachronic timeline, this book encourages the development of such a timeline's rigorous inverse: a synchronic, multi-faceted and multi-temporal history of the contemporary in literature, and thus of contemporary global literatures. It opens up the concept of the contemporary for comparative study by unlocking its temporal, logical, political, and ultimately aesthetic and literary complexity.

At a juncture in which art and culture are saturated with the forces of commodification, this book argues that problems, forms, and positions that defined modernism are crucially relevant to the condition of contemporary art and culture. The volume is attuned to the central concerns of recent scholarship on modernism and contemporary culture: the problems of aesthetic autonomy and the specific role of art in preserving a critical standpoint for cultural production; the relationship between politics and the category of the aesthetic; the problems of temporality and contemporaneity; literary transnationalism; and the questions of medium and medium specificity. Ranging across art forms, mediums, disciplines, and geographical locations, essays address the foundational questions that fuse modernism and the contemporary moment: What is art? What is the relation between art and the economy? How do art and technology interpenetrate and transform each other? What is modernism's logic of time and contemporaneity, and how might it speak to the problem of thinking genuine novelty, or the possibility of an alternative to the current stage of neo-liberal capitalism? What is modernism, and what is its history? The book is thus committed to revising our understanding of what modernism was in its earlier instantiations, and in accounting for the current moment, addressing the problems raised by modernism's afterlives and reverberations in the 20th and 21st centuries. The volume includes essays that consider literature, sociology, philosophy, visual art, music, architecture, digital culture, television, and other artistic media. It synthesizes the most recent thinking on modernism and contemporary culture and presents a compelling case for what happens to literature, art, and culture in the wake of the exhaustion of postmodernism. This book will be of interest to those studying literature, visual art, media studies, architecture, literary theory, modernism, and twentieth-century and contemporary culture more generally.

At a juncture in which art and culture are saturated with the forces of commodification, this book argues that problems, forms, and positions that defined modernism are crucially relevant to the condition of contemporary art and culture. The volume is attuned to the central concerns of recent scholarship on modernism and contemporary culture: the problems of aesthetic autonomy and the specific role of art in preserving a critical standpoint for cultural production; the relationship between politics and the category of the aesthetic; the problems of temporality and contemporaneity; literary transnationalism; and the questions of medium and medium specificity. Ranging across art forms, mediums, disciplines, and geographical locations, essays address the foundational questions that fuse modernism and the contemporary moment: What is art? What is the relation between art and the economy? How do art and technology interpenetrate and transform each other? What is modernism's logic of time and contemporaneity, and how might it speak to the problem of thinking genuine novelty, or the possibility of an alternative to the current stage of neo-liberal capitalism? What is modernism, and what is its history? The book is thus committed to revising our understanding of what modernism was in its earlier instantiations, and in accounting for the current moment, addressing the problems raised by modernism's afterlives and reverberations in the 20th and 21st centuries. The volume includes essays that consider literature, sociology, philosophy, visual art, music, architecture, digital culture, television, and other artistic media. It synthesizes the most recent thinking on modernism and contemporary culture and presents a compelling case for what happens to literature, art, and culture in the wake of the exhaustion of postmodernism. This book will be of interest to those studying literature, visual art, media studies, architecture, literary theory, modernism, and twentieth-century and contemporary culture more generally.

This book attempts to understand what 'contemporary' has meant, and should mean, for literary studies. The essays in this volume suggest that an attentive reading of recent global literatures challenges the idea that our contemporary moment is best characterized as a timeless, instantaneous 'now'. The contributors to this book argue that global literatures help us to conceive of the contemporary as an always plural, heterogeneous, and contested temporality. Far from suggesting that we replace theories of an omnipresent 'end of history' with a traditional, single, diachronic timeline, this book encourages the development of such a timeline's rigorous inverse: a synchronic, multi-faceted and multi-temporal history of the contemporary in literature, and thus of contemporary global literatures. It opens up the concept of the contemporary for comparative study by unlocking its temporal, logical, political, and ultimately aesthetic and literary complexity.

Commentators across the political spectrum have argued that the future has been absorbed by an ever-expanding present to which we cannot imagine alternatives. The notion that we have lost the ability to imagine change-culturally, socially, and politically-has become one of the defining problems of our time. But what is the difference between the populist narratives of those who promise to solve this problem by returning us to a glorious past and those who promise to lead us into a glorious future? Often, this book argues, not very much at all. Revealing neo-authoritarianism and capitalist hyper-innovation as two sides of the same coin, Mathias Nilges shows that today's reactionaries and futurists both harness and profit from the same temporal crises of our present. Looking to design, popular culture, literature, and recent theoretical and political discussions, Nilges offers ways of understanding the re-emergence of familiar and disturbing forms of right-wing politics and culture (authoritarianism, paternalism, fascism) not as historical repetition but as dangerous consequences of the contradictions of capitalism today. Using critical theory, in particular the work of Ernst Bloch, this book recovers a politics and culture of hope, which it locates beyond a future that is colonized by capitalism and a past that becomes the mystical playground for the new Right:in that which was never allowed to be and thus demands realization.

In How to Read a Moment, Mathias Nilges shows that time is inseparable from the stories we tell about it, demonstrating that the contemporary American novel offers new ways to make sense of the temporality that governs our present. "Time is a thing that grows scarcer every day," observes one of Don DeLillo's characters. "The future is gone," The Baffler argues. "Where's my hoverboard!?" a meme demands. Contemporary capitalism, a system that insists that everything happen at once, creates problems for social thought and narrative alike. After all, how does one tell the time of instantaneity? In this moment of on-demand service and instant trading, it has become difficult to imagine the future. The novel emerged as the art form of a rapidly changing modern world, a way of telling time in its progress. Nilges argues that this historical mission is renewed today through works that understand contemporaneity as a form of time shaping that props up our material world and cultural imagination. But the contemporary American novel does not simply associate our present with a crisis of futurity. Through analyses of works by authors such as DeLillo, Jennifer Egan, Charles Yu, and Colson Whitehead, Nilges illustrates that the novel presents ways to make sense of the temporality that controls our purportedly fully contemporary world. In so doing, the novel recovers a sense of possibility and hope, forwarding a dazzling argument for its own importance today.

Commentators across the political spectrum have argued that the future has been absorbed by an ever-expanding present to which we cannot imagine alternatives. The notion that we have lost the ability to imagine change-culturally, socially, and politically-has become one of the defining problems of our time. But what is the difference between the populist narratives of those who promise to solve this problem by returning us to a glorious past and those who promise to lead us into a glorious future? Often, this book argues, not very much at all. Revealing neo-authoritarianism and capitalist hyper-innovation as two sides of the same coin, Mathias Nilges shows that today's reactionaries and futurists both harness and profit from the same temporal crises of our present. Looking to design, popular culture, literature, and recent theoretical and political discussions, Nilges offers ways of understanding the re-emergence of familiar and disturbing forms of right-wing politics and culture (authoritarianism, paternalism, fascism) not as historical repetition but as dangerous consequences of the contradictions of capitalism today. Using critical theory, in particular the work of Ernst Bloch, this book recovers a politics and culture of hope, which it locates beyond a future that is colonized by capitalism and a past that becomes the mystical playground for the new Right:in that which was never allowed to be and thus demands realization.

"Marxism and the Critique of Value" aims to complete the critique of the value-form that was initiated by Marx. While Marx's "esoteric" critique of value has been rediscovered from time to time by post-Marxists who know they've found something interesting but don't quite know which end is the handle, Anglophone Marxism has tended to bury this esoteric critique beneath a more redistributionist understanding of Marx. The essays in this volume attempt to think the critique of value through to the end, and to draw out its implications for the current economic crisis; for violence, Islamism, gender relations, masculinity, and the concept of class; for revolutionary practice and agency; for the role of the state and the future of the commons; for the concepts that come down to us from Enlightenment thought: indeed, for the manifold phenomena that characterize contemporary society under a capitalism in crisis.