Making it ()hole: the aesthetics of “structural adjustment” in the literature, economics, and culture of neoliberalism

The topic of resistance is a recurring motif in neoliberal culture. Yet, it largely functions to stage a lack of systemic alternatives. Drawing on works by Don DeLillo, William Gibson, Kathrin Röggla, Fiston Mwanza Mujila, and other late 20th and early 21st century texts, this study examines how literature has registered the era of the presumed “end of history.”

Key to the analysis is the concept of “structural adjustment.” Borrowed from economic terminology, the term becomes a lens for identifying a particular narrative logic in which crisis and critique are repeatedly absorbed into a broader story of capitalism’s inevitability. By reading literature alongside neoliberal self-descriptions, the book traces the diffusion of “structural adjustment” beyond economics into a broader cultural pattern.

At the same time, literature is figured as an arena where the limits and possibilities of critique continue to be negotiated. Thus, recent writing is rendered legible as a sensorium for the historical trajectory of neoliberalism that helps contextualize the authoritarian transformations of the 2020s as an actualization of tendencies latent in the program of adjustment.

Chris Reitz studied Comparative Literature at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, completing his PhD in 2024 at the Graduate School Language & Literature – Class of Literature. He now works as a curator. His research and cultural work focus on the history of right-wing ideologies, theories of crisis, critiques of political economy, and poetics of resistance.