Read more
This is a book about the encounters that contemporary North American fiction stages with distinct strands of self-help. Its central argument is that the varied practices of ever-expanding and diversifying self-help cultures are generatively elastic sites of inspiration as well as antagonism for contemporary authors: spaces where they can explore what it means to be better on personal, ethical, and societal terms. It offers new perspectives on the work of nine very different writers by exploring how they play different forms of self-help off against one another. This book shows how in the clashes between practices ranging from commencement speeches and grassroots communitarian self-help to time-management productivity manuals, trauma recovery theories, pop-neuroscience, and makeover cultures, contemporary writers try to find ways of reimagining authority and agency beyond individualism, asking how - and if - it is possible to live and write 'better' in our compromised neoliberal world.
List of contents
Introduction; 1. 'An hortation': authority and advice in the work of David Foster Wallace; 2. 'Unmitigated' self-improvement: self-help leadership, slogans, and grassroots psychology in the work of Paul Beatty; 3. 'Working on things': measured, managed, and muddled time in the writing lives of Tao Lin and Myriam Gurba; 4. Getting writing done: Sheila Heti's dramas of productive and reproductive time; 5. 'We're chemistry. That's what we are': body-brain transformation in the work of Benjamin Kunkel, Miranda July, and Alexandra Kleeman; CODA: 'all that you touch you change': speculative self-help and ecologies of agency; Index.
About the author
Following her Ph.D. in Literature at the University of Cambridge, Gillian Moore completed an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship at Trinity College Dublin. She also recently graduated from an MSc in Psychology at the University of Kent where her research focused on interoceptive processes and the psychology of embodiment. Awards she has received include the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council Award, Cambridge Trust Vice-Chancellor's Award, and Trinity College Dublin Gold Medal. Her research centres on the relationships between contemporary literature, therapeutic rhetoric, public speech, and psychology, with new work focusing on embodied practices of reading and literary depictions of interoceptive and proprioceptive processes. She is Reviews Editor at Irish literary magazine The Stinging Fly and is committed to public literary engagement and communicating academic ideas to broader audiences.
Summary
Offers a unique look at the charged relationships between contemporary fiction and self-help culture. It explores how writers including David Foster Wallace, Tao Lin, and Alexandra Kleeman take critical and creative inspiration from commencement speeches, anti-racist self-help, time-management productivity manuals, and brain-body change programs.
Foreword
Offers a unique look at the charged relationships between contemporary fiction and self-help culture.
