Neoliberal Narratology: The Quantification of the Self in 21st-Century Metafiction

Asim

doi:10.36948/ijfmr.2019.v01i03.75164

Neoliberal Narratology: The Quantification of the Self in 21st-Century Metafiction

Author(s)	Dr. Asim
Country	India
Abstract	And, increasingly, the modern novel presents subjectivity in the realm of management, optimization, and exchange. Instead of a struggle, memory, desire, and moral ambiguity, the classic psychological novel’s own inwardness remains to be portrayed in its later iterations as a project in the service of an administration. Characters score themselves in the area of productivity, social legibility, sexual marketability, and professional performance. They narrate what they do and how much they are able to turn feeling into survival, not just what they feel. This paper contends that fiction like this has moved us from the psychological novel to transactional fiction (a novel in which interior life is refracted through neoliberal expressions of return on investment, personal branding, emotional labor, and self-management). Drawing on Marxist literary theory and affect theory, particularly on Sianne Ngai’s description of “ugly” feelings, this essay explores how neoliberal rationality reorganizes narration itself. It stands out when considering the central claim that the unreliable present-day narrator no longer primarily is a liar or deceiver. Instead, she is a subject that has learned to internalize market logic so thoroughly that she knows her true character as a product ready to be modulated, packaged, and exchanged. The result is a distinct narrative texture marked by flatness, irony, self-surveillance, and managerial self-description. Examining Ling Ma’s Severance, Raven Leilani’s Luster, and Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman, this paper demonstrates the ways that twenty-first-century metafiction and similar literary fiction reveal the quantification of the self under neoliberal capitalism in a twenty-first-century era. These texts present not just alienation at work but how market rationality colonizes intimacy, desire, and self-narration. In the process, they reframe modern fiction as an archive of subjects who no longer question themselves but what they are worth.
Keywords	neoliberalism, narratology, quantification, selfhood, metafiction, affect theory, ugly feelings, commodification, transactional novel, contemporary fiction
Published In	Volume 1, Issue 3, November-December 2019
Published On	2019-11-14
DOI	https://doi.org/10.36948/ijfmr.2019.v01i03.75164

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Neoliberal Narratology: The Quantification of the Self in 21st-Century Metafiction

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