You Are What You Feel: The Feeling of Precarious Work in the Contemporary Novel

<p dir="ltr">This practice-based research project explores the feeling of precarious work in the contemporary novel, through two distinct but intrinsically related artefacts. My novel, I Want Everything, is constructed around a series of encounters between a precarious young writer and a reclusive elderly novelist. It is complemented by a dissertation in which critical reflections on my novel as a work-in-progress are set beside close readings of two contemporary novels from the Global North centred around precarious work, Halle Butler’s 2019 novel, The New Me, and Heike Geissler’s Seasonal Associate, published in English in 2018.</p><p dir="ltr">Using the frameworks of affect, precarity and autofictional theory, the dissertation investigates how Butler and Geissler have grappled with the representational challenges of depicting precarious work in emotional or affective terms. I demonstrate how these novels can be read as two extreme affective responses to a neoliberal working regime of flexibility, contingency and insecurity. The structure of my project has allowed ideas to be explored iteratively, in a way that a single novel or critical text couldn’t, allowing me to simultaneously interact with texts as a literary scholar and a creative practitioner. My project maps the inflexion points between the physical, economic, emotional and existential experience of precarity in the contemporary novel, demonstrating the potential for creative writers to use precarity as a driver for their creative practice, describing the precarious present and imagining a better, less precarious future.</p>