The essay to follow takes as its literary archive two novels that are, in some strong sense, about the US: Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist (1998) and William Gibson's Pattern Recognition (2003). However, it claims no interest in contributing to “American Literary History,” insofar as that project sees the US as the protagonist of its own story or even as the magnet that organizes stories about it, however chaotically. Rather, this essay takes on the linked problem of writing the history of the present and the literary history of the present. It sees this problem as a problem of affect, a problem of apprehending heightened moments in which certain locales become exemplary laboratories for sensing or intuiting contemporary life. Sometimes such locales can be national—for example, the nation can be seen as one of the locales of globalization, a place where forces are managed, processes settle, and things happen. But even from that perspective the national is lived simultaneously in diffused and specific places as well as in bodies that are working out the terms of what it means to feel and to be historical at a particular moment. This essay's interest is in the historical sense, particularly of the present—any present, even a past one. How does a particular affective response come to be exemplary of a shared historical time, and in what terms?1
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