Popular Press
An Interview with Ralph Clare, Author of Fictions Inc.: The Corporation in Postmodern Fiction, Film, and Popular Culture
NANO: New American Notes Online
(2015)
Abstract
Introduction: Ralph Clare is an Assistant Professor of English at Boise State University. He is the author of Fictions Inc.: The Corporation in Postmodern Fiction, Film, and Popular Culture, published by Rutgers University Press in 2013. Fictions Inc. offers detailed readings of a diverse body of texts that, in one way or another, push readers to think about the role of the corporation in 20<sup>th</sup> and 21<sup>st</sup> century America. Using a complex set of critical tools—historicizing the rise in the pharmaceutical industry in the 1980s to read White Noise; drawing on Slavoj Žižek and Louis Althusser to explain the model of resistance that appears in Crying of Lot 49; looking at 1980s gentrification policies and government outsourcing while discussing Ghostbusters—Clare generates a series of insights about the fears and the desires embodied in the corporation. What he finds is that older avenues of resistance to consumer capitalism have closed, but the desire to imagine new ones, and maybe create them, remains open.
Disciplines
Publication Date
December, 2015
Citation Information
Jeffrey Gonzalez and Ralph Clare. "An Interview with Ralph Clare, Author of Fictions Inc.: The Corporation in Postmodern Fiction, Film, and Popular Culture" NANO: New American Notes Online (2015) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/ralph_clare/24/