SOURCE: “‘It's the Third World Down There!’: Urban Decline and (Post)National Mythologies in Bonfire of the Vanities,” in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 43, No. 1, Spring, 1997, pp. 93–111.

In the following essay, Kennedy discusses how Wolfe portrays urban realism in The Bonfire of the Vanities and how the novel uses New York City as “a microcosm of contemporary American society.”

The symbolic order of American nationalism has been profoundly fissured by socio-economic transformations which connect local cultures in the United States to the global system. “Globalization” has become a catch-all term for diverse restructurings characterized by the acceleration of global flows of people, capital, and information.¹ This acceleration has propelled what Frederick Buell describes as “the movement from a period of globally disseminated nationalism, which reinforced the construction of national identities as objects of faith and focuses for social organization, to a period of globalism, in which the stereotypical national...