White-Collar Work, Intensified Neoliberalism, and Valuing the Subject in Jennifer Egan’s "A Visit from the Goon Squad" (2010) and David Foster Wallace’s "The Pale King" (2011)

This paper examines the centrality of the white-collar workplace in constructing, and facilitating an understanding of, the value of subjects in 21st-century US fiction. I focus on two novels: Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) and David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King (2011). I argue that these novels facilitate new understandings of the interplay between the financial (at global, local, and individual levels) and contemporary literary production. They do this through the site of the workplace, whose representation in these texts charts the social and cultural valences of 1970s and 1980s economic policy as integral to an understanding of the 21st-century cultural moment.