Degree Name
MA (Master of Arts)
Program
English
Date of Award
5-2024
Committee Chair or Co-Chairs
David M. Jones
Committee Members
Mark Baumgartner, Chelsea Wessels
Abstract
This thesis is concerned with the two AIDS-era novels of Gary Indiana, a long-neglected yet essential literary figure who, as the critic Christian Lorentzen has argued, “connects the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in ways readers and critics are only beginning to apprehend” (xii). Beginning chronologically with a study of Indiana’s first two novels, Horse Crazy (1989) and Gone Tomorrow (1993), this thesis attempts to realize Lorentzen’s call to action, attending particularly to the ways in which Indiana’s novels write the neoliberal subject. More than exploring life under the AIDS crisis and embodying a radical queer approach to narrative, I contend, through the repurposed frame of noir and thematic explorations of kitsch, the novels of Gary Indiana radically interrogate neoliberal subjectivities, offering a remarkably stark vision of interior lives completely colonized by capitalism, commodified subjects incapable of intimacy.
Document Type
Thesis - embargo
Recommended Citation
Morgan, Carson, "The Neoliberal Noirs of Gary Indiana" (2024). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 4412. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/4412
Copyright
Copyright by Carson Morgan.
Included in
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Commons, Literature in English, North America Commons