Asset Details
Do you wish to reserve the book?
'MODULATED PERFECTLY': SCOTLAND'S NEOLIBERAL CULTURE OF MODERATED ALCOHOL DEPENDENCY
Hey, we have placed the reservation for you!
By the way, why not check out events that you can attend while you pick your title.
Oops! Something went wrong.
Looks like we were not able to place the reservation. Kindly try again later.
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
'MODULATED PERFECTLY': SCOTLAND'S NEOLIBERAL CULTURE OF MODERATED ALCOHOL DEPENDENCY
Do you wish to request the book?
'MODULATED PERFECTLY': SCOTLAND'S NEOLIBERAL CULTURE OF MODERATED ALCOHOL DEPENDENCY
Please be aware that the book you have requested cannot be checked out. If you would like to checkout this book, you can reserve another copy
We have requested the book for you!
Your request is successful and it will be processed during the Library working hours. Please check the status of your request in My Requests.
Oops! Something went wrong.
Looks like we were not able to place your request. Kindly try again later.
Journal Article
'MODULATED PERFECTLY': SCOTLAND'S NEOLIBERAL CULTURE OF MODERATED ALCOHOL DEPENDENCY
2021
Overview
The popular, especially British, imaginary casts Scotland as a drunken nation, just as Thatcherite political discourse presents Scotland as welfare-addicted at an individual and national level, apparently drunk on English money. In this article, I argue that Scottish literary culture has written back through a 'moderated' alcohol dependency, wherein alcohol provides emergency psychotherapy for a neoliberal professional class. I examine four novels featuring alcohol-dependent focalisers which date from the mid-1980s through to peak British alcohol consumption in 2004, namely Alasdair Gray's 1982, Janine (1984), Ron Butlin's The Sound of My Voice (1987), Janice Galloway's The Trick is to Keep Breathing (1989) and A. L. Kennedy's Paradise (2004). All of these texts look past the stereotypical immiseration of unemployed men in urban peripheral housing estates and towards a different constituency of alcohol addicts: qualified, productive, responsibilised, and self-modulating. In so doing, the works renegotiate physical, economic and constitutional dependency in Britain. But in a larger frame, they establish alcohol toxicomania in the context: of the psychopathological economy - in which productivity can only be sustained through the palliation of neoliberalism's mental health crises - and in late capitalism's reordering of social relations, or what Bernard Stiegler calls a 'liquidation of relations of fidelity'.
