The Idle Feel: Unemployment and the Affects of Class in Contemporary Literature

From movies, TV shows and literature about robots taking over production to right-wing populists promising to “bring back our jobs” — unemployment seems to be a growing concern in our time. Automation, the increasingly insecure nature of labor and changing gender identities relating to work have helped ensure the return of the ghost of unemployment in people’s minds and the proliferation of this motif in culture. The Idle Feel is a study of unemployment from the perspective of literature preoccupied with the emotional and affective lives of the unemployed. Previous scholarship has tended to study unemployment as exclusively an economic or sociological category designating a relatively historically stable status group at the bottom of society. Amongst other things, this has meant that studies of unemployment have been unattuned to the gradual modifications of the experience and the different ways in which unemployment as a cultural category has affected society at different times.
Inspired by the turn to affect in humanistic and social studies, the dissertation’s methodology engages with the concept of genre; understood as the normative affective expectations of different social experiences. To analyze the culturally malleable aspects of unemployment and their grounding in emotional life, the dissertation develops the concept of the genre of unemployment and traces its changes from its inception in the 1930s to today. The affective expectations we have of unemployment, I argue, are traceable in the formal and thematic history of the unemployment novel; a literary format belonging to the broader tradition of working-class fiction whose central narrative conflict is unemployment. Recent unemployment novels show the modifications endured by this format at the hands of various cultural, economic and social changes. Each analytical chapter of the dissertation combines a primary feeling, which it associates with the genre of unemployment and discusses from a phenomenological perspective, with a historical and geographical context: From resentment in the 1930s to anxiety in post-Thatcher Britain, shame in the Danish contemporary welfare state and nostalgia in Trump’s America.
The dissertation argues that whereas the social suffering of unemployment was connected to resentment and apathy during the Great Depression, it is now attached to specific forms of anxiety, shame and nostalgia. The recent anxious feel surrounding unemployment is partly due to the precarization of labor brought on by neoliberalism and the essentially downward distribution of precarity at our present moment. Further, unemployment increasingly attaches itself to shame because of recent labor market and governmental demands, which dictate that the unemployed are failing as selves, rather than as workers, because they are unable to develop the desired emotional dispositions. Nostalgia fits in the genre of unemployment as an anesthetic to the anxiety and shame that otherwise dominate. The dissertation concludes that our expectations of unemployment are framed to serve certain political and ideological ends. Today, the genre of unemployment is often taken advantage of by the Right, but the good news is that we can change unemployment’s political affiliations and use the genre of unemployment for more progressive ends.