Jeffrey T. Nealon is a Professor of English whose work delves into the intricate relationships between theory and literary practice. His scholarship often engages with post-structuralist and postmodern thought, challenging conventional methods of reading and interpretation. Nealon's approach is analytical, emphasizing deconstruction and the ethics of performative subjectivity. His publications provide deep insights into critical theory and its impact on understanding literature and identity.
The book explores the ongoing crisis in the academic study of literature, proposing a shift in perspective from viewing literary studies as merely a collection of texts to embracing it as a meaningful way of life. It offers insights into revitalizing the discipline and highlights the potential for literature to engage with contemporary issues, encouraging a deeper understanding of its role in society.
"A powerful new examination of the performative that asks "what's next?" for this well-worn concept"
This book joins the growing philosophical literature on vegetable life to ask what changes in our present humanities debates about biopower and Animal Studies if we take plants as a linchpin for thinking about biopolitics.
Despite the presence of the Flaming Lips in a commercial for a copier and Iggy Pop’s music in luxury cruise advertisements, Jeffrey T. Nealon argues that popular music has not exactly been co-opted in the American capitalist present. Contemporary neoliberal capitalism has, in fact, found a central organizing use for the values of twentieth-century popular music: being authentic, being your own person, and being free. In short, not being like everybody else. Through a consideration of the shift in dominant modes of power in the American twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from what Michel Foucault calls a dominant “disciplinary” mode of power to a “biopolitical” mode, Nealon argues that the modes of musical “resistance” need to be completely rethought and that a commitment to musical authenticity or meaning—saying “no” to the mainstream—is no longer primarily where we might look for music to function against the grain. Rather, it is in the technological revolutions that allow biopolitical subjects to deploy music within an everyday set of practices (MP3 listening on smartphones and iPods, streaming and downloading on the internet, the background music that plays nearly everywhere) that one might find a kind of ambient or ubiquitous answer to the “attention capitalism” that has come to organize neoliberalism in the American present. In short, Nealon stages the final confrontation between “keepin’ it real” and “sellin’ out.”
This book retraces power's intensification in Foucault in ways that both allow us to reread Foucault's own conceptual itinerary and, more importantly, to think about how we might respond to the mutations of power that that have taken place since his death in 1984.