“Quit Lit” and Self-Help Memoirs as Neoliberal Narratives:
Nonfiction of Burnout, Self-Actualization, and the Great Resignation
Megan Brown
11.2
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This essay is about that intensification and evolution as expressed in popular nonfiction books about leaving a job or career, experiencing burnout, reorganizing professional and personal priorities, and exploring the possibility of talking back to neoliberalism: an economic philosophy emphasizing individual productivity and responsibility that has come to permeate aspects of lived experience well beyond the workplace. These books—sometimes characterized as “Quit Lit” due to a shared emphasis on deprioritizing work in favor of other activities—encourage readers to reconfigure their value systems. Quit Lit urges readers to disentangle their sense of self from their career, with the word “career” broadly defined: some of the texts I will analyze here focus on corporate ladder-climbing, some on issues in academia/higher education, some on monetizing one’s personal interests, and some, even, on the ways that family life and leisure time have become yet more opportunities for the ambitious to pursue excellence. Click here to continue reading.
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Where There’s Smoke, There’s Blue Sky:
The Hallmarks of 9/11’s Imagery in Prose
Amy Cook
11.2
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The breaking news of it all meant that as the networks raced to find eyewitnesses, those people came at the event from a different (literal) angle than the news helicopters, hovering in the air. On CBS, anchor Bryant Gumbel was interviewing Theresa Renaud, the wife of an Early Show producer, who called in from the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. In the footage, Renaud is live on the air when the second plane crashes into the South Tower. But in the moment, the CBS viewers see no plane at all, only a fireball in the lower left of their screens. The camera is aimed too high. Renaud reacts, shouting, “Oh there's another one—another plane just hit—oh my god, another plane has just hit—it hit another building—flew right into the middle of it—explosions!" (Morales). Gumbel struggles, having not seen the same thing, but now watching the aftermath. He is almost incredulous: “You saw a plane?”
The Gumbel reaction is an interesting metaphor for what was to come. The genre of 9/11 literature is born in this mismatch; the attacks upended a country, even a way of life. But the images that defined it made it difficult to speak about. The goal of 9/11 literature, and in particular, nonfiction, is to put the reader in the very body of the narrator: as eyewitness, spectator, survivor, and even victim. To make them feel what it was like to be there. But that begins with how to communicate. Click here to continue reading. |