Lars Iyer interview

Both my manifesto and my novels are intended to foreground the difficulty of maintaining such a link between past and present, between neoliberal capitalism and European Modernism. For me, neoliberalism has deprived us of the conditions under which a certain literature – the literature, in particular, of Modernism – thrived. The vanguards have disappeared because there is no one in particular to offend. Literary fiction lives on, but it has become, for the most part, a kind of kitsch, depending on the most schematic ways of presenting character, plot, etc. – on a ‘realism’, a standardised system of representation, that is completely at one with the generic models of taste on which advertising and marketing depend.