Neoliberal New York: Contemporary literature and the politics of urban redevelopment

This chapter highlights New York’s singular capacity to inspire dialogue across disciplines, a practice that emerges in recent ekphrastic novels set in the post-millennial period that investigate how aesthetic experience shapes subjective reflections on time, economics, and loss. This turn towards narrativizing aesthetic experience, and how formal encounters with art may prompt critical self-inquiry, reflects these authors’ commitment to cultivate values like emotional responsiveness, perceptual acuity, and even interpersonal solidarity. This ethos, bred by a heightened aesthetic awareness, comes in response to what these authors recognize to be an erosion of creative and emotional vitality caused in part by the pervasive marketability of art in late capitalism, otherwise known as image culture.