Waldherr, Ronja

My contribution explores the complicities of narrative form from the perspective of contextualist, feminist narratology. Its main interest lies in investigating how textual forms and processes, particularly those associated with high-profile contemporary novels, perpetuate or intervene in hegemonic neoliberal ways of worldmaking. Resilience is singled out as one such pertinent way of worldmaking, a distinctive psychopolitical ‘rebooting’ of neoliberal governmentality that was necessitated by the global financial crisis of 2007/08.  Since then, resilience thinking has proliferated across areas as diverse as internal security policies, educational science and popular psychology, but my contribution looks specifically at how a readjusted version of ideal neoliberal subjectivity, dubbed homo resiliensis (Stefanie Graefe), has become a site of value extraction – in the sense of Sara Ahmed’s “affective economies” – as the psychological prowess and affective glow of (individual) overcoming are harnessed to the new ‘wokeness’ of capitalism and lend new credibility to the promise of social mobility. Heeding Michael Basseler’s call for a cultural narratology of resilience, I argue that its ideological efficacy is mainly due to its narrativity as a transformative (plot) paradigm that narrates fundamental change not only in individuals’ lives but also in the life of the social formation that ‘coheres’ around triumphant survivors of the multiple legacies of oppression in a celebratory mood. My reading of Bernardine Evaristo’s enthusiastically received, Booker-winning Girl, Woman, Other (2019) demonstrates how the imbrication of plots of resilient overcoming and social ascendancy is associated with high eventfulness on the scales of relevance, effect, unpredictability, (non-)iterativity and irrevocability as described by narratologist Wolf Schmid. In addition, older structuralist work on plot and concepts from narrative psychology help us think about how the ancient canonical template of the quest syntagma is charged with the (utopian) promise of social change when populated with historically marginalised individuals such as Evaristo’s Black female and queer protagonists. Extending recent cultural studies work on the operation of resilience for (corporate) value extraction in ‘woke capitalism’ to narrative theory allows us to see it as a patterned circulation of affect with utopian contours whose narrational ‘surplus value’ lies in its renewal of a neoliberal nation in crisis through the seeming redemption of historical injustice.