Contemporary American Fiction and Cultures of Self-Help

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.

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.