Citation

Jansen B. Comparative American Studies An International Journal 2019; 16(3-4): 101-115.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019)

DOI

10.1080/14775700.2019.1667695

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Drawing on critic Mark Fisher's typology of the weird and the eerie (particularly his focus on the eerie as the sensation of nothing where there should be something), as well as Nancy Fraser and Rahael Jaeggi's critiques of capitalism as an institutionalised social order, this paper uses Jeffrey Eugenides's 1993 novel The Virgin Suicide to take up the significance of place and placelessness in contemporary American culture and literature. Set in the Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe in the early 1970s, The Virgin Suicides simultaneously disguises and reveals its sense of place, a curious and unstable tension that in turn calls readers' attention to an entire set of unstable binaries inherent to capitalism as a social order-the separation of economic production from social reproduction, economy from polity, the natural from the human, and exploitation from expropriation. In its eerie interruptions and evocations of suburban decay, The Virgin Suicides offers a way to think about the destabilising effect of attempts to separate production from social reproduction, exploitation from expropriation, and human society from non-human nature, a toolkit that might then be used to think about (for instance) the Flint Water Crisis or the contradictions of an international border-crossing like the Ambassador Bridge. © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Language: en

Keywords

neoliberalism; Jeffrey Eugenides; Detroit; borders; Mark Fisher; Nancy Fraser; space and place; the eerie; The Virgin Suicides (1993)