Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-788cddb947-tr9hg Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-10-14T09:36:39.245Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 10 - Love What You Do

Neoliberalism, Emotional Labor, and the Short Story as a Service

from Part II - Histories

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2023

Michael J. Collins
Affiliation:
King's College London
Gavin Jones
Affiliation:
Stanford University
Get access

Summary

This chapter discusses story collections by George Saunders, Charles Yu, Kwame Nana Adjei-Brenyah, and Mary South. These collections tell stories set in the neoliberal workplace, with a focus on emotional labor, pink-collar jobs, and the service economy. Constructing a genealogy of American writers who have written about service work, this chapter argues that contemporary short story writers have developed a unique perspective on the relationship between the short story and the market. Previous writers have either embraced writing short stories to satisfy the demands of the market, or have seen writing stories for the market as a kind of selling out. Contemporary writers of what this chapter calls “the Short Story as a Service” ask, instead, what it means to write stories in a neoliberal world that valorizes the figure of the artist and that describes service work as a kind of creative writing.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Work Cited

Adjei-Brenyah, Nana Kwame. 2018. Friday Black. Boston: Mariner Books.Google Scholar
Boddy, Kasia. 2010. The American Short Story Since 1950. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boddy, Kasia. 2017. “‘A Job to Do’: George Saunders on, and at, Work,” in George Saunders: Critical Essays. Ed. Coleman, Philip and Gronert Ellerhoff, Steve, 122. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Boltanski, Luc and Chiapello, Eve. 2018. The New Spirit of Capitalism. Trans. Elliott, Gregory. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Burn, Stephen. 2012. Conversations with David Foster Wallace. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carothers, James B. 1992. “Faulkner’s Short Story Writing and the Oldest Profession,” in Faulkner and the Short Story. Ed. Harrington, Evans and Abadie, Ann J., 3861. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.Google Scholar
Churchwell, Sarah. 2005. “‘$4000 a screw’: The Prostituted Art of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway,” European Journal of American Culture 24.2: 105129.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 2010. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979. New York: Picador.Google Scholar
Gaitskill, Mary. 2009. Bad Behavior: Stories. New York: Simon & Schuster.Google Scholar
Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 2012. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Horn, Philip. 1996. “Henry James and the Economy of the Short Story,” in Modernist Writers and the Marketplace. Ed. Willison, Ian, Gould, Warwick, and Chernaik, Warren, 135. London: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
McClanahan, Annie. 2019. “Serious Crises: Rethinking the Neoliberal Subject,” Boundary 2 46.1: 103132.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McGurl, Mark. 2009. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
McGurl, Mark. 2021. Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Melville, Herman. 2016. Billy Budd, Bartleby, and Other Stories. New York, New York: Penguin Classics.Google Scholar
Milkman, Ruth. 1987. Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex during World War II. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Pogell, Sarah. 2011. “‘The Verisimilitude Inspector’: George Saunders as the New Baudrillard?Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 52.4: 460478.Google Scholar
Poe, Edgar Allan. 1842. “Review of Twice-Told Tales. By Nathaniel Hawthorne,” Graham’s Magazine 20: 298300.Google Scholar
Saunders, George. 2000. Pastoralia: Stories. New York: Riverhead Books.Google Scholar
South, Mary. 2020a. Twitter, March 6, 12:52 p.m., https://twitter.com/marysouth/status/1235986723835912192.Google Scholar
South, Mary. 2020b. You Will Never Be Forgotten. New York: Picador.Google Scholar
Standing, Guy. 1989. “Global Feminization through Flexible Labor,” World Development 17.7: 10771095.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yu, Charles. 2013. Sorry Please Thank You: Stories. New York: Vintage.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×