Love What You Do

doi:10.1017/9781009292863.014

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

Lee Konstantinou

Edited by

Michael J. Collins and

Gavin Jones

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

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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.

Keywords

emotional labor service economy neoliberalism Saunders work literary marketplace

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge Companion to the American Short Story , pp. 160 - 173

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009292863.014 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2023

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