Critical Darlings, Critical Dogs: Joseph O'Neill and What Contemporary Criticism Doesn't Want

This essay argues that the drive within literary studies to name new paradigms obscures key historical continuities in contemporary fiction. To explore this problem, I turn to Joseph O'Neill's The Dog (2014), a novel mostly panned or ignored by critics. The Dog courts its status as an outcast by confounding readers' expectations of novelty. It refuses to showcase supposed aesthetic progress made in the wake of postmodernism. It also forces readers to revisit the Reagan-Thatcher years, bearing us backward on an economic tide when we hoped that culture, technology, and literature might be hurtling us forward. O'Neill's satire bites heralds of experimental fiction by challenging the belief that new novelistic techniques could alter neoliberal market societies. The Dog attends to new forms of global transit and digital media, but insists that its own aesthetic horizons are still shaped by economic formations and literary forms that coalesced during the 1980s. Its failure to gain academic adherents reveals two underlying urges on the part of the critical establishment: the urge to transcend the stale horizons of the postmodern through novel periodization and the urge to exit the neoliberal order through art.