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Virtue Hoarders
American Idyll
Copying Machines
Oriental Girls Desire Romance

Virtue Hoarders

A denunciation of the credentialed elite class that serves capitalism while insisting on its own progressive heroism.
Description

Professional Managerial Class (PMC) elite workers labor in a world of performative identity and virtue signaling, publicizing an ability to do ordinary things in fundamentally superior ways. Author Catherine Liu shows how the PMC stands in the way of social justice and economic redistribution by promoting meritocracy, philanthropy, and other self-serving operations to abet an individualist path to a better world. Virtue Hoarders is an unapologetically polemical call to reject making a virtue out of taste and consumption habits.

Praise for Virtue Hoarders

"If a meaningful intellectual current does emerge from the wreckage of contemporary capitalism, it may well begin from the demystification of PMC liberal mores."—Conter

"Virtue Hoarders argues that the professional-managerial class-working class alliance was doomed from the start for the simple reason that the two classes’ interests are fundamentally opposed."—The Washington Examiner

"Virtue Hoarders amplifies a discussion that still needs to be had."—Spiked

"Lui’s argument is thorough, well researched, and saturated with supporting evidence."—Rhizomes

"A quick, fun read, polemicising against views which are currently dominant in the US academic left and mainstream media, and characterising these views as expressing the interests of the ‘professional managerial class’ - or ‘PMC’ - as opposed to those of the working class."—Weekly Worker

"Delicious."—Current Affairs

"Like all good polemics [Virtue Hoarders] is a romp: lively, fun to read."—Jeff Noonan

"Thoroughly enjoyable."—Damage Magazine

"Liu’s comments in Virtue Hoarders on politics seem spot-on."—The Independent Review

"Liu, a professor at UC Irvine, draws from a well of experience, humor, and rage to show us how the PMC’s quest for class domination continues to unfold in our gilded age."—Los Angeles Review of Books

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American Idyll

A trenchant critique of failure and opportunism across the political spectrum.
Description

A trenchant critique of failure and opportunism across the political spectrum, American Idyll argues that social mobility, once a revered hallmark of American society, has ebbed, as higher education has become a mechanistic process for efficient sorting that has more to do with class formation than anything else. Academic freedom and aesthetic education are reserved for high-scoring, privileged students and vocational education is the only option for economically marginal ones.

Praise for American Idyll

“We are now supposedly in a post-racial moment, with an African American president who came of intellectual age in the 1980s, yet if we are to fully confront the changing face of education and politics in this era of perpetual war, economic decline, and virulent ‘authoritarian populist’ Tea Party dissent, it is crucial to begin unraveling our recent history. Catherine Liu offers a compelling polemic for liberalism—a dirty word for 1960s New Leftists and 1990s neoconservatives alike—and any book that annoys these two poles definitely has much going for it. Bringing her considerable knowledge of critical theory about film, literature, media, and philosophy to bear on this historical problem by linking trends within supposedly left/liberal humanities scholarship to the discourse of conservative punditry, American Idyll is nothing less than brilliant.”—Paula Rabinowitz, author, Modernism, Inc.

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Copying Machines

Anxieties about fixing the absolute difference between the human being and the mechanical replica, the automaton, are as old as the first appearance of the machine itself.
Description

Explores literary theory’s fear of and fascination with the mechanical.

Anxieties about fixing the absolute difference between the human being and the mechanical replica, the automaton, are as old as the first appearance of the machine itself. Exploring these anxieties and the efforts they prompted, this book opens a window on one of the most significant, if subtle, ideological battles waged on behalf of the human against the machine since the Enlightenment—one that continues in the wake of technological and conceptual progress today.



A sustained examination of the automaton as early modern machine and as a curious ancestor of the twentieth-century robot, Copying Machines offers extended readings of mechanistic images in the eighteenth century through the prism of twentieth-century commentary. In readings of texts by Lafayette, Molière, Laclos, and La Bruyère—and in a chapter on the eighteenth-century inventor of automatons, Jacques Vaucanson—Catherine Liu provides a fascinating account of ways in which the automaton and the preindustrial machine haunt the imagination of ancient régime France and structure key moments of the canonical literature and criticism of the period.

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Oriental Girls Desire Romance

Liu's debut novel recalls the seedy street atmosphere of Bette Gordon's 1984 film Variety through a narrator that is perceptive, funny and unhinged.
Description

It's 1980s New York, and though the coke flows freely, money and glamour are the more powerful intoxicants. While fortunes are being made in SoHo galleries and on Wall Street, an underclass of transient drag queens and dandies, club kids and strippers, artists and actors, models and waitstaff wander the streets, providing the city's background color, cheap labor and even cheaper entertainment. The unnamed narrator of Catherine Liu's 1997 novel Oriental Girls Desire Romance--now reprinted by Kaya Press--is a young Chinese-American woman who skirts the edges of New York privilege. A refugee both from her Ivy League education and a family of Maoist ideologues, she navigates the city as a slacker, temp and exotic dancer, outmaneuvering the ever-present lure of Prozac.

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