Appreciating Value: Fictional Economies of Art- and Self-Production

This dissertation analyzes literary fictions published in the years preceding the 2008 financial crisis and continuing through its aftermath in the 2010s. It first examines how the novels in question are animated by notions of class inequity, and traces their shared suggestion that engagement with art, in particular literary fiction, is what allows for the imaginative possibility of upward class mobility. Second, it identifies the mechanisms by which these fictions construe art as the primary site of the immaterial labor of self-production. The market and finance logics that underpin these fictions are analyzed to consider art’s ontological relation to commerce, and how the narratives enfold the value of artworks and the value of persons into a single category. Third, it argues that writing, particularly in its institutional form of creative writing MFA programs, enters the cultural imagination as an idealized form of (creative) labor—one that is thought to produce value precisely through its function as a self-productive endeavor. Taken together, the novels analyzed in this study represent an entrenched logic of privatization, in which the appearance of the creative labor motif functions on the one hand to redescribe burgeoning inequity as the promise of upward class mobility, and on the other to reconfigure labor more generally as an ineluctably private undertaking on behalf of the self.