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English

Content Culture: Literature in the Age of Viral Media

Tess McNulty

Amanda Claybaugh

Leah Price

Beth Blum

5/3/2022

Content Culture:

Literature in the Age of Viral Media

Tess McNulty

May 3, 2022

iii

Tess McNulty

Dissertation Advisor: Amanda Claybaugh, Leah Price

Content Culture: Literature in the Age of Viral Media

We are living in the era of “content.” Short, digital ephemera designed for rapid

circulation on social media—like listicles, hot-takes, or how-to videos—infiltrate every free

minute. Still, literary critics have yet to put the precise question: how has “content’s” ubiquity

reshaped English-language literary writing? “Content Culture: Literature in the Age of Viral

Media” addresses that question, by showing how prominent, mostly-American authors—like

George Saunders, Claudia Rankine, and Ottessa Moshfegh—draw uneasy inspiration from

popular new genres of viral content, including the “uplifting anecdote,” “iWitness account,” and

“depressive comic” (as I call them). The project makes a two-part argument: that viral content,

thanks to the unique modes of its circulation and monetization, often embraces a particular

aesthetics, and associated ethics (a set of ideas about how we should treat others and ourselves);

and that much literature now channels or resist those aesthetics and ethics.

To make this argument, “Content Culture” does two types of work. First, it analyzes viral

content—chiefly, a database that I have compiled, comprising metadata concerning 204,147 of

the most shared pieces of content on sites like Facebook and Twitter, 2014 to 2019. Here, it uses

methods of both “close” and “distant” (or computational) reading, including machine learning

tools, as recently adapted and deployed by digital humanists (e.g., Topic Modeling, Sentiment

Analysis, and Naïve Bayes Classification). Second, it analyzes literature’s relationship to

content, relying more on close reading, but still using mixed methods. In this way, the project

contributes, not only to our understanding of contemporary literary history, but also to our

transdisciplinary comprehension of social media’s cultural effects. Literary and art-critical

analyses of popular content—both analog and digital—supplement media theoretical and social-

scientific discussions of topics like “eudaimonic media” and “fake news.”

Contents

1. Title Page i

2. Copyright ii

3. Abstract iii

4. Table of Contents v

5. Introduction: “Content” 1

6. Chapter One: George Saunders and the Uplifting Anecdote 28

7. Chapter Two: Claudia Rankine and the iWitness Account 52

8. Chapter Three: Idrealism: Or, the Confused Female Character 84

9. Chapter Four: The Depressive Comic: Viral Aesthetics and Paranoid Politics 126

10. Conclusion: Content Culture 167

11. Backmatter: Notes 172

Introduction: “Content”

Roughly between the years 2008 and 2012, social media—and, by extension, much

mainstream internet culture—changed. Thanks to the internet’s increasing corporate integration,

newly popular sites like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Flickr, became more interconnected,

not only with one another, but also with other major media distributors. As a result, each became

something less of a “walled garden” for the creation and consumption of user-generated

entertainment, and something more of an interlinked contributor to the smooth circulation of

professional media.

Take, for example, Facebook, then as now a central platform. For the first

few years after its founding in 2004, the site was primarily a forum for social voyeurism.

Users—mostly students—logged on to view friends’ relationship statuses, party photos, or

profile pictures. Soon, however, the site became a vast, public commons for mass media

engagement. Users’ newsfeeds were now inundated with popular ephemera, pouring in from

external sources: op-eds, quizzes, listicles, and how-to videos.

It was also during this period, by no coincidence, that the only collective label for such

ephemera—or, “content”—burst into popular American parlance. As one, 2009 blogger put it:

At first it was just the by now omnipresent "User Generated Content". But now websites

are filled with “content.” TV schedules are now packed with “content.” Radio stations

use “content” to fill the airtime…It's everywhere...”

Previously, the word had been used broadly, by academics and industry insiders, to refer to

anything conveyed by a medium or form (like TV “content,” or the “content” of a poem). Now,

it took on a more popular, pejorative connotation. “Content,” today, suggests digital

entertainment that is as a mere byproduct or afterthought, designed to do little more than

facilitate some technical or economic process, like advertising or data collection. "Content" is not

exactly a medium, like television (at least not in the same way). Nor is it a genre, like the sitcom.

Rather, it connotes something more like a class: a particular stratum—in this case, lower—of

some broader category (like "craft," as opposed to "art"). We easily call a Buzzfeed listicle

"content," but less quickly apply the term to a New Yorker poem.

Mere filler entertainment, of course, predates Web 2.0. Think, for example, of journalistic

fluff-pieces, infomercials, or the “squibs” that filled extra space in nineteenth century

newspapers. Today, however, content emerges in new and newly ubiquitous digital forms, from

articles about radical self-experiments ("I only drank Soylent for a week!") to reports of unlikely

animal friendships (“This puppy and this iguana…”). A few features set today's content apart

from its pre-digital precursors. Most importantly, it pursues distinct aims. Pre-internet filler—in

the form, say, of the tabloid story—was mainly designed to compel "consumption": reading or

viewing. It profited most directly by inspiring subscriptions, pushing products, or attracting

attention to advertisements. Web 2.0-era content does the same, of course. But it also profits

more directly by promoting “prosumption”: “consumption” as expressive “production.”

Post-

circa 2008, that mostly means “shares,” “comments,” and “likes” on platforms like Facebook and

Twitter. Each piece of content approaches the user, not merely as a source of entertainment, but

also as a fashion statement: “What would this look like on me?”

“Content,” too, now occupies a

unique position in relation to other media. TV

series are offered to Youtube stars (e.g. Broad

City).

Films are inspired by tweets (e.g.

Zola).

Literary writing is no exception.

Throughout the past decade, literary authors

have consumed and shared content (Margaret

Atwood shares a Verge.com link, Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1

Literary authors have created content

(Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gives a popular Ted

Talk, Figure 1.2).

And literary authors have

publicized their work through the content machine

(Brandon Taylor shares a link promoting Filthy

Animals, Fig 1.3).

And yet, literary critics have

yet to put the precise questions: How has the new

media that we call “content’s” ubiquity reshaped

literary writing? And what might this tell us, more

broadly, about its cultural effects?

This dissertation addresses those questions.

To do so, it pairs major English-language, and

primarily American, literary writers with the

popular, but often as yet-uncategorized “content” genres with which their work engages. One

chapter, for example, shows how George Saunders’ fiction has responded to the genre that I call

the “uplifting anecdote”: a short, true story of an everyday act of heroism, like TimesNow’s

“Construction Workers Use Digger to Rescue Drowning Dog.”

Another shows how Claudia

Rankine’s poetry has channeled the genre that I call the “iWitness Account”: a first-person

narrative of a witnessed crime or infraction, like Youtube’s “This Lady Keeps Stealing My

Mail.”

In this way, the project makes its two, core arguments: that much “content,” thanks to

the unique conditions of its social-media based circulation—and particularly its drive to inspire

“prosumption”—embodies a particular set of aesthetics, and associated ethics (or, ideas about

how we should treat others and ourselves). And that much contemporary literary writing—

Figure 1.2

Figure 1.3

particularly in an American context—channels, but also resists, those aesthetics and ethics. In

this way, it revises ideas of the “literary” and of its ethical functions for the “social era.”

I. Methods

To make its core arguments, “Content Culture” uses mixed methods, blending classic, literary

and art critical “close reading” (or looking) with newer, digital humanistic tools of “distant

reading.” It uses these mixed methods, first, to analyze the popular content collected in a

database that I have compiled, comprising 205,147 pieces of media that have, between 2014 and

2019, “gone viral” or—by one popular, if partial definition—earned more than 500,000 shares on

social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter (See note for more details about the

construction of this database, and this definition of virality).

Not all content, of course, goes

“viral.” Much languishes in internet obscurity. (See, for example, Everest Pipkin and Zoë

Spark’s “Unpopular Content” project, curating seldom-viewed Youtube videos).

But viral

content compels particular attention. In addition to being the most widely-circulated, and

therefore, arguably, potentially-culturally-influential content, it also reflects “content’s” more

historically novel features: the conditions of social-media-based circulation that, as will be

discussed, distinguish it from its pre-digital precursors. Machine learning methods, as typically

employed by social scientists, and recently adapted by digital humanists—like Topic Modeling

and Sentiment Analysis—provide a birds-eye view of the content. More classically literary or

art-critical approaches, of historically and theoretically-informed close analysis, flesh out its

contours. Next, the project draws the content into conversation with literature, relying more on

close reading (while computational methods are necessary for the perusal of large digital

datasets, they are not required—at least—for the analysis of single literary texts). Still, mixed

methods are employed. In multiple chapters, for example, the machine learning tool called

“Classification” is used to linguistically characterize the content genre under discussion. (When

using these types of machine learning tools, I include detailed descriptions of procedures in

endnotes; I also often include basic explanations of the methods, and references to prior

monographs introducing them to humanists).

Whether examining its objects “closely” or “distantly,” “Content Culture” focuses on

aesthetic features, and on their ethical implications. Literary and art critics have long examined

how formal choices embody or encourage distinct modes of ethical thinking. For some, this

means thinking about morality (as in the Anglophone philosophical tradition); for others, it

means thinking about encounters with alterity or “self-care” (as for Continental theorists, like

Levinas, Derrida, or Foucault). Martha Nussbaum, for example, has argued that Henry James’

detailed depictions of consciousness cultivate empathy; Gayatri Spivak has claimed that

Coetzee’s shifting focalizations enable skepticism of dominant (patriarchal, colonial)

perspectives.

Others have analyzed the ethics of poetic rhythm, characterization, or plot-

structure. Perhaps most of all, such critics have argued that aesthetic “ambiguity” or “difficulty”

is morally instructive (In her 2014 book, Seven Modes of Uncertainty, Namwali Serpell unpacks

this position in particular detail). It is in this vein, with an emphasis on aesthetics and their ethics,

that the project examines both content and literature.

When analyzing the content, for example, “Content Culture” homes in on four major

genres, defined by constellations of aesthetic choices (each of which, it suggests, has been

conditioned by the viral environment). It then analyzes the ethics that those choices encode or

encourage, in the sense of both moral tenets (chapters one and two) and procedures of self-care

(chapters three and four). The “idrealist post” of chapter three, for example, best embodied by

the popular, “Instagram vs. Reality” meme

(Figure 1.4), juxtaposes two depictions of a

woman’s life, the one real and the other ideal,

in a suspended détente. The genre’s “narrator”

often verbally performs a (faux)-humble, hazy

confusion (influencer Emma Chamberlain, for

example, writes this caption describing the self-

designed planner she is promoting: “its really fun

n stuff and can help u organize stuff and stuff and

i made it pretty for ur eyes to look at.”

) The

“depressive comic” of chapter four, meanwhile,

is a brief, graphic narrative, often about a young,

white man, that embraces the worst-case-scenario

(Figure 1.5). Its visual aesthetics are simplistic

(stick-figure-like); its thematics are violent or

vulgar; and its humor is corrosive. Both genres’

aesthetic choices are well-suited to the viral environment: by expressing “relatable”

vulnerability, they inspire public identification (through posting) or cathartic communion

(thought commenting). Both also encourage a particular ethics. The “idrealist post” promulgates

a philosophy of self-care that Lauren Berlant might call “cruel optimism”: the continued pursuit

of an unobtainable ideal (typically, concerning fitness, work-life, or romance) that is encouraged,

ironically, by the acknowledgement of its own impossibility. The “depressive comic,”

Figure 1.4

Figure 1.5

meanwhile, enables something more like a kind pessimism: the acceptance of an assumption of

defeat, to avoid the pain of disappointed hopes.

When turning to literary writing, “Content Culture” then focuses not only on how this

writing imitates or absorbs the content genres’ aesthetic features, but also how it revises them,

often in the pursuit of a preferable ethics. For example, a host of younger, female novelists, like

Ottessa Moshfegh, Catherine Lacey, and Sally Rooney embrace the idrealist post’s particular

style of confused female narrator. But a few—and Moshfegh, in particular—self-consciously

rewrite the trope. In her 2018 novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Moshfegh portrays a

character who, in addition to resembling a social media “influencer” (she is a young,

modelesque, and engaged a self-care experiment) embodies the idrealist-post’s dazed

performance. But Moshfegh uncermines the viral genre’s ability to inculcate cruel optimism, by

short-circuiting her confused narrator’s “relatability.” Meanwhile, the Chicago-based cartoonist

Nick Drnaso, in his Booker nominated, 2018 graphic novel Sabrina, reinvents the depressive

comic. Drnaso aptly diagnoses that the genre, in its defensive embrace of the worst-case-

scenario, also encourages paranoid, conspiracy-theory thinking—it is no coincidence that many

of the depressive comic’s prominent protagonists, like “Wojak “and “Pepe the Frog,” have been

repurposed as avatars of the alt-right. Drnaso’s Sabrina develops an aesthetic alternative,

therapeutically addressing male dejection, but without the attendant paranoia.

II. Critical Contributions

“Content Culture” makes two main contributions to criticism. First, it supplements our emerging

understanding of contemporary literary history, particularly in an American context. Literary

critics have long examined how new, popular media shape literary movements: how Modernists,

for example, responded to radio and cinema, or how Postmodernists reacted to TV. Now, they

have begun to examine interactions between literary writing and social media, in a late blooming

profusion of new work (social media, in this context, refers to digital hubs for “user-generated”

entertainment, marked by hallmark features like the “newsfeed” or “like” function). Since 2017,

a handful of monographs have emerged which address the topic obliquely, through the broader

lenses of “algorithms” (Finn 2017), “digital communications technologies” (Murray 2018),

“network archaeologies” (Liu 2018), “the digital banal” (Dinnen 2018), and Amazon (McGurl

2021).

More recently, a flurry of new essays and articles have focused, more directly, on the

ways in which specific platforms, from Facebook to Goodreads, are reshaping the creation,

consumption, circulation, and (yes) content, of contemporary literary writing. These include,

among many others, Aarthi Vadde’s “Platform or Publisher” (PMLA 2021), Melanie Walsh and

Maria Antoniak’s “The Goodreads ‘Classics’” (Post45 2021), and Kinohi Nishikawa’s “Do it for

the Vine” (Post45 2019).

“Content Culture” contributes to this burgeoning subfield by showing

how new genres of click-bait style “content,” designed largely for circulation on social media,

influence today’s literary writing.

The project, of course, treats only a limited collection of cases, restricted both

geographically and stylistically. First, it focuses on mostly American authors, as well as on the

mega-viral forms of English-language content they might be most likely to absorb. Today’s

literary marketplace, as many have noted, is no longer national (if it ever was), but global—a

“world republic of letters,” as Pascale Casanova has put it (though having evolved past that

which she described: a nineteenth century, largely European system, centered in Paris).

Complicating this picture is the dizzying geography of digital culture, which—despite a few

initial attempts—has yet to be mapped (different popular websites have different geographic

purviews and favor different languages; users see digital media through distinct “filter bubbles”).

So, while “Content Culture” draws lines on a roughly national basis, it makes no assumptions

about the integrity or impermeability of those boundaries. In keeping with this geographic

flexibility, it follows literary networks where they lead, focusing not only on American authors,

but also on their international interlocutors (e.g., pairing Moshfegh with Rooney). The project,

moreover, steers clear of emphases on “internet novels”—or books that explicitly thematize

digital culture (like, say, Patricia Lockwood’s Nobody is Talking About This or Hari Kunzru’s

Red Pill). In his recent “The Lag: Technology and Fiction in the Twentieth Century,” Alexander

Manshel has quantitatively confirmed a hunch: that contemporary authors—until very recently—

have seemed oddly reluctant to directly depict the internet in their novels. Perhaps novelists are

unsure how to allude to the likes of Facebook or memes in serious works without deflationary

bathos (It’s hard, for example, to imagine Teju Cole’s Julius taking a pause, in his flânerie, to

tweet).

“Content Culture,” accordingly, selects a corpus of twenty-first century writings that do

not in any obvious way concern the internet (like, say, Saunder’s Lincoln in the Bardo, or

Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely). Instead, it shows the subtler levels on which literature has

been absorbing digital culture. Small-scale corpora, of course—as Andrew Piper and other

digital humanists have recently argued—cannot substantiate sweeping, literary-historical

generalizations.

But they lend support to more modes claims. “Content Culture” treats a limited

collection of cases. But the consistency of its findings across that corpus, considered alongside

other critics’ contributions, suggest the reality of some emerging trends.

For example: when compared with prominent Modernist and Postmodernist precursors,

many contemporary (American) authors appear to draw on popular media—and in this case,

“content”—not necessarily more abundantly, but often more sincerely. They strive to emulate,

rather than ironize, its mainstream appeal. Consider, for example, a comparison, between the

way in which Joyce, in the “Nausicaa” episode of Ulysses, incorporates rhetoric from popular

magazines and advertisements, and the way in which Rankine, in Citizen, references viral

debates about Serena Williams. Joyce satirizes his citations, enfolding them into his difficult,

experimental prose (Gerty, he writes, in lines at once deliberately scattered and inflated, is: “just

like a second mother a ministering angel too with its little heart worth its weight in gold. And

when her mother had those raging splitting headaches who was it rubbed on the menthol cone on

her forehead but Gerty thought she didn’t like her mother taking pinches of snuff…”).

Rankine,

by contrast, throws herself earnestly into the popular conversation, taking a position in more or

less straightforward—if carefully crafted—prose (“Commentators, spectators, television viewers,

line judges, everyone could see the balls were good, everyone, apparently, except Alves.”

Literature, in this way, converges with content. And the finding harmonizes with more general,

literary critical observations: that today’s literature—even more than its postmodern

precursors—collapses distinctions between high and lowbrow, replacing avant-garde aesthetics

with accessible “genre effects” (Mark McGurl).

For Dan Sinykin, the publishing industry’s

“conglomerate era” has heightened the pressures that authors feel to court broader publics.

For

Rachel Greenwald Smith, contemporary writers—and Rankine is a key example—have

surrendered to those pressures, producing what she calls “compromise aesthetics.”

But though contemporary authors imitate viral genres with unusual earnestness, they also

draw lines between “content” and “literature.” In this way, they renegotiate, not only received

conceptions of the “literary,” but also of its ethical functions. Since the Modernist era, at least,

“literary” writing has been associated with complexity, ambiguity, and difficulty. The “men of

1914,” as Suzanne Clark has argued in Sentimental Modernism, defined their opaque, highbrow

writing (implicitly masculine) in opposition with sentimental, didactic popular media (implicitly

female).

Literary critics, by extension, have tended to argue that a genuinely “literary”

difficulty is ethically instructive. Though contributors to literary criticism’s “ethical turn”—like

Martha Nussbaum, Dorothy Hale, Namwali Serpell, Geoffrey Harpham, and J. Hillis Miller—

have taken varied positions, their work has converged on a collective thesis: that morally

ambiguous works in a Modernist vein, by the likes of Joseph Conrad, J.M. Coetzee, Toni

Morrison, or Henry James, encourage sophisticated modes of ethical thinking, or salubrious

encounters with alterity.

Today’s content-inspired authors, in contrast with the “men of 1914,”

often self-consciously embrace the types of popular aesthetic qualities that have become

synonymous with the “unliterary.” In his imitation of the “uplifting anecdote,” for example,

George Saunders welcomes the genre’s sentimentality; in her incorporation of the “iWitness

account,” Claudia Rankine celebrates deliberate didacticism. Through this process, however,

they carve out new ethical functions for literary writing, subtly contrasting with “content’s.” The

uplifting anecdote, for example, tends to equate ethics with aesthetics, reducing moral action to

the types of self-expression that social media content depends on for its profits: “comments,”

“likes,” etc. Saunders embraces the genre’s sentimentality, but in ways that resist this elision.

Rankine, similarly, notes that the “iWitness account,” for all the good it has done (in the form,

for example, of reports of police violence), has also rendered Black suffering exploitable. To

circulate in the content economy, it has embraced the type of open-ended ambiguity that

encourages audience response. In this way, it has become susceptible to reappropriation, by

pernicious parties (To take one notorious example: in 2016, Russian operatives used this type of

content as part of an attempt to suppress the Black vote). Rankine’s reaction is to double down

on the genre’s didacticism, in ways that resist revisionist reuse. The product of this process is not

an avant-garde, literary art, defined in strict opposition to the viral marketplace. More modestly,

these authors create “good content.”

In the process of making this literary historical argument, “Content Culture” pursues a

second, broader scholarly contribution: To show how mixed methods of “close” and “distant”

analysis—grounded in literary and art critical thought—can contribute to our transdisciplinary

understanding of the internet’s cultural effects. The internet is awash with new popular forms,

from Tiktoks and TedTalks to lolcats and tweets. And yet scholars with strong ties to arts

disciplines—from “theorists” to “critics”—have been slow to scour this new material. “Media

theorists,” on the one hand, have focused on two types of entities: first, on material,

technological, and institutional aspects of the internet, like interfaces, fiber-optic cables, and

structures of surveillance; and second, on the types of avant-garde or highbrow art objects that

foreground or reflect on their own mediations (e.g., “new media art”). With only a few

exceptions (Lev Manovich and Lisa Gitelman, most prominently),

and a few recent gestures in

novel directions,

these scholars have embraced Marshall McLuhan’s famous mandate, to focus

on the “medium” rather than on the “message” (see, for example Mark Hansen and W.J.T.

Mitchell’s embrace of this maxim, in their 2010 primer for the subdiscipline, Critical Terms for

Media Studies; or see John Durham Peters’ recent, if moderate, re-affiliation with this most basic

media theoretical idea).

They have often left the analysis of new media’s “content”—and its

more popular forms of content, in particular—to STEM-adjacent colleagues: sociologists or

communications scholars engaged in “content analyses.”

Critics in arts disciplines, meanwhile, have followed suit. Literary critics, more

particularly, in their own forays into internet studies, have often taken cues from media theory. In

a first, early 2010s phase—call it 1.0—they channeled the subfield’s techno-futurist and avant-

garde sensibilities, addressing niche works of digital art, like e-literature or hypertext poetry, but

neglecting more popular digital, literary or linguistic artifacts, like blogs or even tweets (See, for

example, Jessica Pressman’s Digital Modernism or Rita Raley’s Tactical Media).

recently, as I have discussed, in a newer phase—call it 2.0—they have begun to focus on more

mainstream forms of digital literature, like Instagram poetry and #Twitterature (or, even more

insistently, on new digital literary institutions, like Amazon).

Digital humanists working in this

vein now use machine learning tools to survey fanfiction, Goodreads reviews, and other self-

consciously “literary” digital phenomena.

But they have yet to turn their attention to a broader

swath of popular digital content that, though often linguistic or aesthetic in nature, does not

affiliate with (or even, necessarily, qualify as) “literature.”

“Content Culture” breaks with these lineages (partially, at least), by analyzing new,

popular digital media’s “content” from a literary or art-critical perspective. Unlike a media

theorist—and more in the vein of a sociologist—the project examines content’s “content”: not

simply its technological and institutional contexts, but also its surface look and feel. Unlike a

sociologist engaged in “content analysis” however—and more like a literary or art critic—it

focuses, not primarily on the content’s thematics, but as insistently on its formal or generic

features, using a mixture of analog and computational tools (“close” and “distant reading”). The

convictions behind this approach are simple: that the meanings encoded in a medium are very

real contributors to its cultural effect; and that the aesthetics through which those meanings are

conveyed make a difference, too. Sociological surveys can tell us something about the ways in

which new media impact their audiences (as far as they can report). But so too can the kind of

historically and theoretically-informed formal analyses that “Content Culture” conducts—in this

case, drawing on a lineage of criticism concerning ethics and aesthetics.

Consider, for example, some of the ways in which “Content Culture’s” analyses of viral

media differ from—and therefore supplement—related social scientific approaches. To begin

with, the project, more insistently than much (if certainly not all) social scientific research,

focuses on genre as the unit of analysis, carving content into aesthetic categories. In this way, it

expands the store of media to which internet studies can attend. Much social scientific research,

where it homes in on new media artifacts and their effects, has focused on a few, much-discussed

and pre-defined entities: most prominently, memes.

As “Content Culture” shows, however,

digital media is more variegated than such research suggests, replete with forms that, though

familiar, have yet to be named or categorized. By focusing on generic features, art and literary

criticism can make culturally ubiquitous genres—like, say, the gonzo self-experiment (“I tried

x…”) or didactic infographic (“how to treat introverts”)—available for analysis. “Content

Culture” begins this work by identifying four of the most prominent, but as-yet-unidentified viral

genres: the uplifting anecdote, iWitness account, idrealist post, and depressive comic.

The project’s art- and literary-critical analyses of these genres, moreover, offer distinct

angles on prevailing social scientific conversations. Social scientists who address internet

culture, for example, sometimes analyze what they refer to as “eudaimonic media” or “feel-

good” entertainment. By performing “content analyses” of this media, or conducting audience

surveys, they answer questions about its cultural or psychological effects. Ott, Tan, and Slater,

for example, survey viewers of eudaimonic Hollywood films, to discern whether they report

either “acceptance of the human condition” or a heightened capacity to “accept life’s

difficulties.”

Rieger, Reinecke, Frischlich and Bente perform a fine-grained analysis of the

ways in which eudaimonic media impact components of well-being like “relaxation” and

“feelings of mastery.”

“Content Culture,” meanwhile, addresses the related, but more narrowly-

defined genre that is the “uplifting anecdote,” designed to produce the feeling—as Jill Abramson

has put it of much Buzzfeed content—of “having one’s faith in humanity restored.”

To do so, it

draws on a long lineage of literary and art-criticism regarding the ethical effects of

sentimentalism, by scholars like Ann Douglass, Jane Tompkins, and Philip Fisher.

In this way,

it produces a thesis about the uplifting anecdote’s effects distinct from social scientific findings

concerning eudaimonic media: that the genre equates moral action with aesthetic self-

expression—and, even more particularly, with erotic or amorous recognition, as embodied, for

example, in the act of calling someone “beautiful.”

Meanwhile, the project’s aesthetic analyses of two other genres—the iWitness account

and depressive comic—dovetail with broader conversations about digital misinformation.

Perhaps no topic is more central to today’s social scientific internet studies than “fake news.”

Researchers who discuss the phenomenon tend to focus largely on institutions and actors—how

“fake news” has been facilitated, for example, by social media’s democratization of news

creation (via amateur or “citizen journalism”) or how platforms can and should legally respond.

“Content Culture,” by contrast, through its analysis of the iWitness account and depressive

comic, reveals another facet of the phenomenon: how viral media’s favored aesthetics contribute

to the attraction of fabrications. The iWitness account, in pursuit of audience participation (via

“comments” and “shares”), erodes the authority of journalistic and legal institutions. Meanwhile,

the depressive comic—as aptly analyzed in Nick Drnaso’s work—encourages susceptibility to

conspiracy-theorizing, explaining its popularity on the far right.

III. (Viral) Content

Throughout the past century or so—according to Google Ngrams’ data—the word “content” has

been used with increasing frequency, spiking in popularity around the early 2010s (Figure 1.6).

A corpus of twentieth to twenty-first century American English (COAH) reveals the term’s

developing uses. From the 1920s through 1990s, for example, journalists and industry insiders

typically used the term to refer to what newspapers, magazines, radio, and television conveyed,

in lengthy phrases like “editorial content” or “program content”; but they did not use it yet, with

any apparent frequency, in its contemporary, stand-alone-noun form (e.g. “The Times produces

great content”).

Beginning in the early 1990s, digital pioneers began to popularize the word as

a label for new web-based media: “Content is king,” Bill Gates famously announced in 1966.

With the arrival of social media, in the early 2000s, industry and critical conversations turned to

the phenomenon of “user-generated content.” By around 2008, “content” proliferated in its

contemporary, vaguely pejorative form, powering (no doubt) its early 2010s peak.

“Content,” in this new sense, has no single, fixed definition. Rather, it is a general term,

with varying levels of more specific connotations. Most broadly, it refers to anything conveyed

by a medium, vessel, or form (Netflix “content,” a water glass’s “content”). Slightly more

Figure 1.6

specifically, it suggests digital media. “Content” in this sense, is not unlike the term “literature.”

Just as “literature” (or “letters’) in the early print era, was used a catch-all term for all printed

media,

“content” is now, in the internet age, an encompassing term for all digital material. Still

more specifically, “content,” as I have noted, now carries a pejorative connotation. In this sense,

too, it is not unlike the term “literature,” which also connotes a certain “class” of artifact. If

“content” refers to emptier forms of digital material, “literature,” meanwhile, implies the

“higher” types of creative writing (in opposition with mere “fiction”). “Content,” in this final

sense, is related to what Sianne Ngai calls the “gimmick.”

Just as the “gimmick,” for Ngai, is

that which “strike[s] us as working too little (labor-saving tricks) but also as working too hard

(strained efforts to get our attention),” “Content” is the digital detritus that promises everything,

but meets bare minimum requirements: the clickbait of advertising banners and content farms.

(The essential embodiment of “content,” Kate Eichhorn argues, is the “Instagram egg,” which

contained no information, but circulated on the platform simply for its own sake).

As discussed, this “content” is distinguished from pre-digital precursors (infomercials,

tabloid stories, “squibs”), largely, if by no means exclusively, by its drive to inspire

“prosumption.” Put another way, today's content is what Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua

Green call “spreadable media”: media created not simply for top-down “distribution,” but also

for grassroots “circulation.” It must “attract eyeballs”—or earn “impressions”—to be sure. But

its more insistent purpose is to be shared, remixed, or re-appropriated by people “who want to

communicate something about themselves.”

For Jia Tolentino, such media “brings the 'I' into

everything”: “it's as if we've been placed on a lookout that oversees the entire world and given a

pair of binoculars that makes everything look like our own reflection.”

For Wendy Chun, it

renders YouTube's “You” digital life's definitive pronoun.

To begin to get a handle on this “content,” I explore the database that I have compiled,

listing 205,147 of the most widely-shared pieces of content (with 500,000 plus shares) on

popular platforms (mostly Facebook and Twitter), between 2014 and 2019—though I also,

throughout this project, refer to content, collected in similar manners, from the years 2020-22.

The database includes, for each piece of content, the headline text, url, total share counts across

multiple platforms, and share counts for specific platforms, like Facebook and Twitter (the other

two included, with lower numbers, are Pinterest and Reddit). Depicted here, for example (Table

1.1), are the twelve most shared pieces of content listed in the database, all of which have earned

Table 1.1

mega-viral status. Prominent among them, one immediately notices, are quizzes, music videos,

and reports of celebrity deaths. Almost all of this content, moreover, is in English, which remains

the internet’s lingua franca—though its digital dominance, some argue, is on the wane

To more fully grasp the contents of this corpus, I turn to a combination of “close” and

“distant” reading. Taken together, these methods suggest that two major schemata describe the

content in the database particularly well, capturing its major thematic, generic, and aesthetic

features. The first schema orients the content between two poles: the domestic and heartwarming

and the political and corrosive. The second divides the content into three major categories:

content concerning (1) real, sensational events, (2) the self, or (3) artifice or craft.

To begin with the first schema: a critical mass of content approaches (if without always

fully embodying) one of two opposing poles. The first pole represents content that is sentimental,

uplifting, or unifying. This content often focuses on ethical, private, or domestic realms. Its

topics are family life or other classic objects of sentimental concern: the vulnerable among us (as

Phil Fisher aptly defines them), like animals, children, or the elderly.

Examples include The

Dodo's "Man Builds 'Dog Train' To Take Rescued Pups Out On Little Adventures"

or Bitecharge's "I am a Faithful Wife. What Type of Wife Are You?"

The second pole

represents content that is corrosive, upsetting, or divisive. This content often focuses on the

political realm. Often, it has fixated on Donald Trump. Examples include Shoebat.com's "Hillary

Clinton: Christians in America Must Deny Their Faith in Christianity" or The

Independent's "Donald Trump May be the Dimmest President the U.S. has Ever Had."

Multiple methods suggest those two tendencies' ubiquity, as well as the slight dominance

of the first. A topic model, for example, divides the headline text of the content into 150

(strikingly straightforward) topics. The model was run on 205,147 documents — the

headlines — comprising 2,399,270 words.

The top three topics, ordered by relative weight, can

be titled: "Family," "Animal Rescue" (one subgenre of the uplifting anecdote), and "Trump and

the Economy" (Table 1.2). This trio suggests the utility of the two-sided schema, with the first

two most abundant topics suggesting the sentimental or domestic and the third suggesting the

political or corrosive. A closer look at the topics confirms this schema's utility. Of the 150 total

topics, almost half (68) fall cleanly into one of the two major categories, with sentimental or

domestic topics (like "parenting," "childbirth" or "DIY Home") possessing a cumulative weight

of 0.311, and political or corrosive topics (like "Russian Investigation," "Trump vs. Clinton," and

"Police Brutality/BLM") possessing a cumulative weight of 0.301. Many of the rest of the topics

have at least some affinity with one category or another. Otherwise, they are diverse (they

include, for example, "science facts," "restaurant deals," and "amazing photos").

Table 1.2

More simple analyses, like word frequencies, reinforce this same schema. A plurality of

the fifteen most frequently appearing nouns in the headlines, for example, conjure home and

hearth ("house," "home," "family," "dog," "school," "baby"), while the single most frequent,

"Trump," invokes political controversy (though its use does not outnumber that of the

domestic/sentimental words). Other analyses yield similar results. A sentiment analysis of the

headlines, using Saif Mohammad's NRC Lexicon (which associates English words with eight

different feelings), is consistent with the slight dominance of the domestic and unifying over the

political and controversial.

It shows that, relative to all of the words in the lexicon, the words in

the content headlines embody a higher ratio of positive and prosocial feelings — like "joy" or

"trust" — to negative or corrosive feelings — like "anger," "fear," or "disgust" (Figure 1.7)

Figure 1.7

Table 1.3

A second, useful schema is tripartite, dividing the content into three major categories.

First, there is content that describes real, sensational events. This includes, for example, the

genres of the uplifting anecdote and the upsetting anecdote (its less abundant foil). Second, there

is content that indulges its audiences in navel gazing. This includes, for example, the genres of

the quiz (self-description) or how-to guide (self-improvement). Third, there is content that is

aesthetic or fictitious in nature or concern, rather than (allegedly) informative. This includes, for

example, the genres of the music video or craft-related content (e.g., "Seven breathtaking

sandcastles"). Most content appears to belong to at least one of these three categories. Close

inspection of multiple samples of the content confirms that rough impression. Almost all of the

first thirty consecutive pieces of content listed in my archive, for example (Table 1.3) —also the

thirty most shared—can be sorted into the three proposed categories. Category one claims the

political news, uplifting anecdotes, and celebrity deaths; category two claims the quizzes and

self-celebratory think-pieces; category three claims the music videos and photography.

Computation reinforces this schema's comprehensiveness. Consider again the results of the topic

model, a list of 150 major topics ranked by weight (Table 1.2). Category one claims two of the

three most abundant topics, "Animal Rescue" and "Trump and the Economy," as well as fifty-

nine other lower ranking or redundant topics, like "Russia Investigation," "Traffic Accidents,"

and "Animal and Human Rescues." Category two then claims eighteen of the remaining topics,

including "Weight Loss," "Hair and Makeup," and "Personality Type Quiz." Category three

encompasses another thirty-three topics, including "Music Videos," "Bollywood," and "Tattoos

and Arts and Crafts." All in all, more than 2/3 of the 150 topics fall into these three categories.

This analysis suggests, moreover, that the first category of content, about sensational events,

dominates the corpus: topic groupings associated with it contain the largest number of individual

topics (61 of 150)

and have a dominant cumulative weight (0.52698).

Such content is also, it

is worth noting, largely divided in accordance with the first schema: between the sentimental,

uplifting, or domestic (e.g., uplifting anecdotes) and the political, corrosive, or controversial

(e.g., upsetting anecdotes).

In sum, viral social media content has dominant features. It veers toward either the

actualization, and aesthetic delectation. Many of those features' dominance, moreover, can be

seen as a product of the content's more basic distinguishing quality: its pursuit of prosumption.

This is a topic to which I will return throughout this dissertation, showing how the particular

viral genres that I discuss are well-suited to inspire “shares,” “comments,” and likes. Here, one

or two examples will suffice. It makes sense, for example, that “self-oriented” content—and,

particularly, the mega-viral genre of the quiz—would be so prominent. If an internet quiz

informs you, for example, that you share qualities with Lizzie Bennett or are like Dr. Spock, this

is probably not information that you want to file away for private delectation; more likely, you

want to share it. It also makes sense that content would emphasize amateur craft. This media

relies, for its profits, on audiences' engagement in acts of self-expressive creation. Naturally,

then, it glorifies the activity. The link between idealizing amateur creation and attracting digital

responses need not be subtle. Videos that depict influencers baking bread or braiding hair will

often directly ask viewers to respond by posting their own attempts.

IV. Chapter overview

Each of the four content genres on which I focus—the didactic comic, iWitness account, idrealist

post, and depressive comic—is not simply particularly popular. It is also representative of one of

viral media’s major categories. The didactic comic and iWitness account represent two types of

content concerning real, sensational events—the one more sentimental and domestic, the other

more corrosive and political. The idrealist post is a genre of self-oriented content, emphasizing

personal development in realms like beauty and fitness. The depressive comic is a type of craft

content, emphasizing its own status as an amateur artifact. Each of my four chapters treats the

relationships between literary texts, and these content genres, in different respects.

Chapters one and two trace direct lines of influence between content and authorial craft,

focusing, also, on “ethics” in the sense of moral conduct. Chapter one shows how George

Saunders responds to the particularly popular genre (comprising about 11 % of content in my

database) that I call the “uplifting anecdote”: a short, true story of an everyday act of heroism.

That genre, thanks to its pursuit of “prosumption”— shares, comments, or likes—reduces ethics

to stylized self-expression; Saunders’ work adapts it, but resists that reduction. Chapter two then

shows how Claudia Rankine repurposes the “iWitness account”: a first-person account of a crime

or infraction. The iWitness account is distinguished by the way that it configures its narrator (or

“sharer”) as an authoritative moral arbiter, but one whose speech can be easily coopted to other

ends; Rankine absorbs the genre into her work, but revises it in ways calculated to reserve to the

narrator more control over the uses of her story.

Chapters three and four, meanwhile, read authors and content creators in parallel,

showing how they similarly respond to the viral economy, and also emphasize ethics as self-care.

Chapter three shows how a group of female Instagram influencers (like Emma Chamberlain and

Niomi Smart) and a set of female authors writing novels about therapeutic themes (like Ottessa

Moshfegh, Catherline Lacey, and Sally Rooney) embrace the style of social-media-based self-

expression that I call “idrealism”: a yoking together of “real” and “ideal” depictions of the self in

a suspended détente. “Idrealism” equates the idea of self-care with quasi-vulnerable—and, on

social media, highly profitable—self-revelation; authors like Moshfegh adapt the aesthetic, but

disrupt that equation. Chapter four shows how digital comics and graphic novelists alike produce

the “depressive comic,” a content genre which promotes yet another notion of self-care, suited to

the viral economy: this time, a cathartic embrace of the “reality” of the worst-case scenario, that

is often, in its own way, a fantastic deflection. Nick Drnaso recognizes that the genre, in its

deflective elements, encourages paranoia, with dangerous political implications. In his 2018

Sabrina, he revises the depressive comic to eliminate those elements.

Finally, a conclusion gestures towards a larger corpus of both literary and non-literary

media, through which content’s aesthetics and ethics reverberate. Literary and art-critical

analyses of these cultural artifacts, as much as media theoretical ruminations or sociological

surveys, limn the contours of our emerging content culture.

1. George Saunders and the Uplifting Anecdote

Between 2006 and 2008, the author George Saunders wrote a series of brief weekly

pieces for the print and online platforms of The Guardian. Rather than polished works of

journalism, the pieces read more like slapdash entries in the writer’s personal notebook—

anecdotes from daily life, monologues from the perspectives of American characters, parodies of

pop-cultural productions, and meandering reflections on craft. Buried within this sea of

ephemera is an admission that may today appear incriminating. In his April 12, 2008 column,

Saunders describes having been “intrigued” by advice that a bookseller gave him regarding how

to write a sure bestseller. “You can’t miss,” the bookseller told Saunders, if you write about one

of the following four topics: “a puppy,” “a dead, wise mentor,” “how to maintain a positive

attitude,” or “Abe Lincoln.”

Since then, Saunders hs written to increasing popular acclaim on

each of those four topics. In 2008, he wrote a monologue from the perspective of a dog that, after

appearing in the Guardian, was republished in multiple venues (in book form, in O Magazine).

A few months later, he wrote a series of widely-circulated pieces on the death of his friend and

mentor David Foster Wallace.

In 2013, he delivered a self-help-style graduation speech,

modeled on Wallace’s “This is Water,” that went viral and became a bestselling book.

Finally,

in 2017, he published Lincoln in the Bardo, a Civil War-era novel which, after reaching number

one on The New York Times bestseller list, won the Booker prize.

A reader more cynical than Saunders himself might describe those data points as marking

the process by which the author sold out. Indeed, during the most recent phase of his career

(2008 to 2018), Saunders appears to have surrendered to a set of stylistic impulses that he

previously regarded as, if typically crowd-pleasing, bad or unliterary. Once, for example, he

vigorously defended the short story as his chosen genre, declaring himself “unlikely” to write in

the more popular novel form.

In 2017, he published Lincoln in the Bardo. Once, he refused to

write fiction with the intent of reaching a wider audience (“Really great things will not get done

[with] one eye on the market”).

In 2013, he described his bestselling Tenth of December as an

attempt to do just that (“[I wanted to] try to be a little more ecumenical about who could come to

the book.”

). Once, he rejected what he called run-of-the-mill, “banal” realism.

By the 2010s,

he embraced it (“Now I see that there is nothing that can happen to a person that is banal.”

Once, he purposefully checked his own sentimental tendencies, calling the violence in his

writing a “cloaking mechanism” for otherwise saccharine scenes.

More recently, he’s

surrendered to those tendencies, “giving himself a pass,” as he put it in one interview, to write

about themes that once seemed to him “too earnest and too sentimental.”

Whence the author’s change of heart? In this essay, I offer an explanation surpassing the

cynical or obvious: that he sold out or softened with age. The period of Saunders’s

transformation, circa 2008 to 2018, coincides with the explosion of “content” (or, more

particularly, viral digital media). And his engagement with it helps account for his career’s arc.

To make that argument, I focus, more particularly, on Saunders’s engagement with one

particularly popular and quintessential content genre, which I call the “uplifting anecdote.”

Uplifting anecdotes are short, “true,” heartwarming stories (or groups of stories),

like Reshareworthy's “Incredible Dog Who Saved the Life of Newborn Baby Has Lasting

Legacy” or Bored Panda's “30 Suicide Survivors Share How Happy They Finally Are.”

Generally, they are sentimental, in the pejorative, post-1900 sense of the word. More

particularly, they evoke an emotion that—Jill Abramson has quipped—has no name: "the feeling

of having one's faith in humanity restored."

Uplifting anecdotes are particularly pervasive,

comprising an estimated one ninth of the content in my database.

They are also representative,

embodying many of content’s more common features, like sentimentality and a preoccupation

with ethics and morality. Readers familiar with Saunders may already discern some connections

between his work and the content genre. The author’s prototypical post-2008 plotlines resemble

those of uplifting anecdotes—the first and last stories of Tenth of December, for example,

concern young boys who rescue their neighbors from rape and suicide. Lincoln in the Bardo was

based on a nineteenth century iteration of the genre, a news story describing Lincoln’s reaction to

his son Willie’s death.

Of course, I am not the first to suggest that Saunders is an accessible and sentimental

writer. Many have classed him as a “New Sincerity” author, ambivalently embracing the mass

appeal and sincere commitment that Modernist and Postmodernist precursors eschewed. Nor do I

suggest that viral content’s ubiquity bears sole responsibility for Saunders’s developing

tendencies—the publishing industry’s “conglomeration era,” as Dan Sinykin has argued, has

compelled more writers to pursue mass appeal.

What I do want to show, however, is that

Saunders’s engagement with viral content in general, and with the uplifting anecdote in

particular, has exacerbated and reshaped his accessibility and sentiment in significant ways. I

begin, in the essay’s first section, by describing the uplifting anecdote. Thanks to viral content’s

particular modes of monetization, the genre promotes a particular type of ethics: it reduces moral

action to aesthetic self-expression. If, as Walter Benjamin argued, new mass media contributed

to an “aestheticization of politics,” such content abets a parallel aestheticization of ethics.

Next,

in the essay’s second and third sections, I trace opposing aspects of Saunders’s engagement with

content and the uplifting anecdote. Saunders increasingly emulates the content genre’s

accessibility and sentiment. And yet he resists its etiolation of the ethical. In this sense, he does

not, like Modernist or Postmodernist precursors, set out to create radical, avant-garde art that

declares its autonomy from market forces; more modestly, he creates good content.

I. Content and the Uplifting Anecdote

Before the year 2000, “content” in the pejorative sense—or cynical, profit-driven filler—existed

mostly in analog forms (e.g., tabloids or infomercials). Beginning around 2000, it flooded the

internet in two major phases. During the first phase, circa 1996 to 2002, commercial providers

like AOL, Prodigy, and Compuserve dramatically expanded internet usage by supplying

customers with gateways to the world wide web. Suddenly, entertainment was required to

populate the newly accessible network. During the second phase, circa 2006 to 2012—and

discussed in my introduction—new social media companies began to corporatize and

interconnect, giving birth to what José Van Dijck has called the economy of “connectivity.”

Now, there was a demand for content that could move across sites like Facebook, Twitter, and

Youtube, facilitating the data sharing on which profits now depended.

As “content”—in its most recent, pejorative sense—sprung up online, it took on new

forms, in the pursuit of “prosumption” (again, as discussed in my introduction). One product of

those developments has been an abundance of digital sentiment (an estimated one fifth of the

content in my database might be called sentimental). Indeed, in general, content and sentiment

go well together. Content is utilitarian, designed to achieve economic aims. Sentiment is more

“didactic than mimetic,” designed to persuade more than accurately depict.

Social media

content lends itself still more particularly to the sentimental. Indeed, the aesthetic is ideally

suited to inspire prosumption. It stokes the two desires—for self-expression and connection—

that compel shares, comments, and likes. When we react to sentimental media, unlike, say, when

we react to pornography, we are liable to want to publicly own our feelings. Moreover, we are

liable to want to commune with others—sentiment’s byproduct, as Joanna Dobson puts it, is a

“desire for bonding.”

Unsurprising, then, not only that content is so often sentimental, but also

that the platforms and hubs that circulate it embrace the aesthetic. Facebook creates

“friendiversary” videos celebrating interactions between users; Buzzfeed and Bored Panda exhort

content creators to “join the…Community.” In place of monetary compensation, they offer a

saccharine ideal of amateur creation. “What I love about Bored Panda,” one contributor writes in

a promotional blog post, “is that it’s almost entirely user-generated…It’s so much more

emotionally engaging than hearing about something from a journalist.”

Viral content’s distinguishing features, however, do not simply encourage sentiment.

They also encourage sentiment of a particular kind: that of the uplifting anecdote. Like viral

content in general, the uplifting anecdote is not a wholly novel type of entertainment. Generally,

it resembles prior sentimental media, like Uncle Tom’s Cabin or the sitcom’s “very special

episode.” More particularly, it is preempted by a smaller collection of media that is both

sentimental and anecdotal, like the saccharine TV advertisement (“…Priceless”) or political

stump speech segment (“Let me tell you about my good friend Jim …”). Contributors to the

“Viral Text Project” at Northeastern University have discovered what may be the uplifting

anecdote’s clearest ancestor. Setting out to discover the nineteenth century version of “viral

texts”—texts that spread from newspaper to newspaper—they identified the genre that they call

the “vignette”: a short, true, saccharine or heartwarming story.

Like most of its precursors, the uplifting anecdote concerns itself with ethics. In general,

sentimental media invoke the ethical in one of two ways (there are others). They aim to inspire

sympathetic or altruistic feelings toward the vulnerable parties on whom, as Fisher notes, they

often focus. Or they invite audiences to take pleasure in the depiction of those feelings,

particularly in the context of familial or proto-familial relations (between mothers and children,

friends who are like sisters, etc.). Sometimes, such responses are presumed—Dickens assumes

his readers' capacity to sympathize with dying children. Sometimes, they are compelled—

Beecher Stowe attempts to awaken her readers' latent compassion for enslaved Americans. The

uplifting anecdote invokes ethics in a similar way. In general, it relies on audiences' feelings of

sympathy for diminutive figures — dogs, infants, children — who are in peril. It relies, also, on

audiences' feelings of moral approval when some heroic person or animal saves the day. More

often than not, such feelings are assumed. The genre mostly asks audiences to feel quasi-

universal, uncontroversial forms of sympathy, for parentless puppies, harried mothers, or varied

types of ugly ducklings. In a much smaller number of cases, they compel more divisive

responses, asking audiences to feel in ways that code politically right or left. An uplifting

anecdote from Breitbart, for example, asks audiences to celebrate a gun owner's heroism

("Concealed Permit Holder Stops Attempted Mass Shooting in Chicago"). An uplifting anecdote

from Buzzfeed asks audiences to sentimentalize the struggle for LGBTQ rights ("This Gay

Couple Re-Created their Pride Parade Photo Seven Years Later and it Has People Emotional").

Nevertheless, uplifting anecdotes specifically, like content genres generally, differ from

their print or television precursors. They do so on the same grounds, in that they profit

immediately, and directly, by inspiring "prosumption." For this reason, they promulgate a

particular, and arguably problematic, variety of ethics. In the subsequent paragraphs, I will make

this point by drawing not only on close analysis of uplifting anecdotes, but also on the results of

a final digital experiment.

For this experiment, I trained a Naïve Bayes classifier on a hand-

labeled dataset of the headlines of 1022 uplifting anecdotes and of 1022 other pieces of content.

The classifier, trained using ten-fold cross-validation, could distinguish between the two groups

of headlines with 76.7 percent accuracy, on the basis of some trends (this rate surpasses that

achieved by randomized labeling—or the "null baseline"—at 51.03 percent; it is also comparable

to rates achieved by similar experiments).

A sample of these trends are depicted in Table 2.1,

Table 2.1

showing the five words most and least likely to indicate uplifting anecdote headlines, as

expressed by a ratio (the number of appearances in uplifting anecdote headlines over the number

of appearances in other headlines, adjusted to prevent dividing by zero). Many of these results

simply confirm the uplifting anecdote's nature as I have defined it, and on the basis of which the

tagging was done. They show, for example, that uplifting anecdote headlines are more likely

than those of other content to refer to sentimentalized beings, particularly children and dogs.

They also show that uplifting anecdotes are, by and large, at odds with the major classes of

politically divisive content. Three of the four words least predictive of uplifting anecdote

headlines were "Trump," "Donald," and "President" (though those results are influenced by the

abundance of those words). Other of the classifier's results, however, are more unexpected.

Those results inform my subsequent analysis.

In general, where critics have discussed the ethics of sentimental media, they have tended

to do one—or both—of two things. Where they have praised sentimental media's ethics, they

have focused on its sincere pursuit of moral persuasion: its ability to make audiences sympathize

with, and potentially assist, members of vulnerable groups. Fisher, for example, has argued that

though sentimental novels like Uncle Tom's Cabin may engage in forms of stereotyping that

seem distasteful in retrospect, such crude depictions are a necessary first step toward humane

consideration.

Where critics have critiqued sentimental media's ethics, they have focused on its

economic aims: how, in pursuit of profit, it flatters its audiences into narcissistic quietism. That

is Ann Douglas's argument, which condemns the sentimental as a consumerist aesthetic,

designed to indulge audiences in the shallow, self-satisfied feelings. James Baldwin famously

describes those feelings as the "ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion."

Put

another way, critics' positive or negative evaluations of sentimentalism have often hinged on

how completely they conceive of it as conforming to a definition of content in the pejorative

sense. Unsurprising, then, that the uplifting anecdote merits something less like the first mode of

critical celebration and something more like the second mode of critical censure.

It does so, though, in its own particular manner. Thanks to its pursuit of prosumption, it

promotes a shallow, inert sort of ethics, equating moral action with aesthetic self-expression. It

does so, first, by means of its aforementioned emphasis on the self (as per the second schema,

discussed in my introduction). Uplifting anecdotes differ from some if not all other sentimental

media by virtue of one of their key features: their happy endings. Rather than focus primarily on

suffering—inviting audiences to mourn—they focus more on the heroic acts through which that

suffering is alleviated—inviting audiences to celebrate. They then equate those heroic acts with

the acts of emotive self-expression through the sharing, liking, and commenting that they attempt

to inspire. Consider, for example, the following comparison, between one classic type of

sentimental media—a Save the Children Ad—and a particularly viral, uplifting anecdote:

"Mexican Bakers Make Pan Dulce For Hundreds of Harvey Victims After Being Trapped By

Floods" (Figure 2.1).

The primary and most overt aim of the Save the Children ad (to

oversimplify only slightly) is to encourage charitable contributions — for this reason, it dwells

on the child's suffering. Indeed, this is the approach that most GoFundMes take. The main aim of

the uplifting anecdote, however, is to compel not only consumption, but also prosumption. For

this reason, the anecdote focuses less on the bakers' own heroic act than it does on the positive

response that the bakers' heroism is inspiring, both on and offline. Rather than describe or

interview the bakers themselves, the anecdote's text moves from quoting their kvelling manager

to recapitulating social media responses to their feat: "thousands of people reacted to the bakers'

'heartwarming' feat on social media," the article's text reports, before quoting gushing comments

at length.

That text flanks an image, not of the bakers, but of a Facebook post about the event,

featuring their image. The uplifting event being narrated, here, is less the bakers' generosity than

its cyber-celebration, in which the viewer can also now participate.

The classifier provides additional evidence for this idea, in one of the more interesting

trends that it reveals: relative to non-uplifting anecdote headlines, uplifting anecdote headlines

are distinguished by the frequency with which they refer, in meta-fashion, to the very processes

of content circulation. They are 5.5 times more likely to use the word "internet" (as in "the

internet is going crazy over…", " …broke the internet"); 4 times more likely to use the word

Figure 2.1

"viral" ("This viral story…"); and 5 to 10 times more likely to use various words that

preemptively describe the content's emotional impact ("touching," "adorable," "sweet," "wow,"

"heartwarming," "powerful," etc.). This abundance of meta-discussion is very likely the result of

their insistence on an equation between ethics and online prosumption.

Indeed, uplifting anecdotes tend to equate moral action not only with self-expression, but

also with the amateur acts of aesthetic creation and curation that prosumption involves. (Here we

see the genre's emphasis on artifice or craft.) The classifier provides an initial indication of this

trend. It suggests that uplifting anecdote headlines, even more than those of other content, use

certain words to connote aesthetics or making. They're particularly likely, for example, to use the

words "beauty" (7 times more likely) or "beautiful" (3.7), to use words that call attention to their

visual medium like "pictures" (8) or "photo" (3.8), or to use other words that suggest acts of

making or their results, "sing" (5.5), "write" (4), "written" (4), etc. Whether uplifting anecdotes

refer to aesthetics or making more than other content, in any case, is not as important as the fact

that they do so excessively. Indeed, they enfold the idea of artifice into their ethical system in

two ways. First, they frequently describe acts of moral heroism that are also acts of amateur

creation. Here are but a small sample of anecdotes that do so: a man takes photos of himself in a

pink tutu to cheer up his sick wife; a woman draws pictures celebrating her boyfriend's love; a

man makes cartoons celebrating his relationship with his girlfriend; a gay couple creates photo

montages of themselves at Pride; a man creates photo montages of his dog and cat who are best

friends; a man splices together Harry Potter clips, featuring the character Severus Snape, making

people "feel things"; a child signs a Christmas concert in ESL for her deaf parents; a man signs a

wedding song in ESL for his (not deaf) daughter; a mother invents a harness for disabled

children; a boy invents a device to cool down hot cars after he learns of one killing an infant; and

so on.

Second, they equate moral heroism not only with creation, but also with curation: the

recognition and dissemination of aesthetically pleasing or beautiful entities that might be

involved in sharing, liking, or commenting on content. Here, the uplifting anecdote enacts its

most dramatic elision of the ethical and aesthetic. As an example, consider one of the most

abundant subgenres of uplifting anecdote. In this subgenre, some human or animal not

previously regarded to be beautiful or desirable is acknowledged, recognized, or

depicted — stirringly, heroically — as such. The content may subvert invidious stereotypes

regarding what is beautiful or attractive, but may also inadvertently affirm them by assuming

they are shared. Examples include "Girl Mistakes Bride for Real Life Princess From Book She's

Holding and the Reaction Melts Everyone's Hearts" (the bride, unlike the princess in the girl's

book, is black), "This Woman Was Nervous About Her Photoshoot With Fiancé, But The

Results Won the Internet" (the woman is overweight, and the photographer celebrated rather than

hid that fact), "Teen With Down Syndrome is determined to become a Model" (she succeeds),

"Teen Bullied for Her Incredibly Dark Skin Color Becomes a Model, Takes the Internet By

Storm," and "Rare Kitten Born With Two Faces Grows Into the Most Beautiful Cat Ever."

Audiences can enact the aesthetic recognition that those stories praise in recursive chains of

shares, comments, and likes. The examples reveal an increasingly pervasive attitude that to have

one's human worth recognized is to be deemed an appropriate candidate for sexual

objectification. That puzzling millennial ideology has gained traction among so-called "incels"

and members of other erotic online subcultures. The analysis also supports an armchair

observation that social media is in part responsible for the post-circa 2010 fixation on the ethics

of representation in pop culture, as much if not more than in other realms (politics, professions).

I am thinking here of #OscarsSoWhite or the celebration of the "strong female protagonist." A

medium bent on compelling users to engage in representational acts, unsurprisingly, invests the

symbolic realm with supreme moral import.

Of course, not all social media users embrace the uplifting anecdote's moral implications.

Even the dissent that the genre inspires, however, is often colored by its ethics. To be sure, some

reject the genre from a position beyond the pale of its presumptions. They tend to vocalize a

classic critique, which might apply to any type of sentimental media: that emphases on personal

altruism or sympathetic feeling can serve as narcissistic distractions from the realer, more

pressing problems of politics. A recent uplifting anecdote, for example, which described a CEO's

$22,000 contribution to the relief of Philadelphia students' school lunch debts, inspired this type

of response. Celebrating the CEO's generosity, some argued, distracted from the deeper issue of

the Republican party's anti-welfare policies opposing free lunch programs and debt relief.

Others, however, take issue with uplifting anecdotes from perspectives that accept more

of — indeed, are inspired by — their particular premises. Consider, for example, one logical

consequence of the uplifting anecdote's consistent suggestion that all moral action occurs on the

plane of symbolic self-expression. If this is the case, then the predominant ethical crime is no

longer either inaction or incorrect action: rather, it is false self-depiction. Indeed, much of the

ethical debate that goes on, in the realm of social media content, concerns how sincere, accurate,

or authentic a person's performance appears to be. Such authenticity is at stake in the classic

complaint of the internet nihilist or "troll," who objects to all inevitably self-serving "virtue

signaling." It is also at stake in the objection that users tend to levy (if any) at otherwise

uncontroversial uplifting anecdotes (indeed, this type of response is more typical than that which

the school lunch story inspired). Take, for example, the debate that "This Guy Travelled The

Country In a Pink Tutu Just to Make His Wife Laugh During Chemo" provokes. Commenters

consider whether the man—who posts photos of himself in the tutu—does so really to amuse his

sick wife, or more properly for the public attention.

I. Saunders and Content, Part One: From Ambivalence to Emulation

During a first phase of his career, spanning the 1980s through 1990s, George Saunders, like

almost everyone else, engaged with little internet-based media. He did, however, take a

particular interest in one of viral content’s key forebears: inane television. In essays, interviews,

and short stories, he fabricated parodic versions of TV ads (“are you experiencing erectile

disfunction, making you feel less like a man?”

), 24-hour-news-cycle stories (“Dog crap expert

Jesse Toville provides his assessment of the probable size of the dog…”

), sitcoms (“Honey, I

killed the cat!”

), and reality shows (“The Bachelor: Actually I am Dead.”

). He also wrote

stories in surreal, television-inspired styles. The dreamlike theme-park settings in which the vast

majority of Saunders’s early stories take place were often modelled on television

programming—in “Pastoralia,” actors dressed in historical garb stand in square, transparent

displays, like so many TV screens; the name of company at which “The 400 Pound” CEO is set,

“Humane Raccoon Solutions,” was inspired by infomercials.

Saunders’s approach to television resembled that of his New Sincerity peers: it involved

him in an only-ambivalent embrace of accessibility and sentiment. Beginning in the mid-1990s,

New Sincerity authors, Adam Kelly has argued, reacted against what they saw as still prominent

(Post)Modern notions of literature as inaccessible and uncommitted. But their break with that

past was only partial.

Take, for example, David Foster Wallace’s “E Pluribus Unam,” an essay

on literature and television often read as a New Sincerity manifesto. In the essay, Wallace argues

that authors should imitate television—but without pandering to the “lowest common

denominator”;

he also argues that they should counter television’s irony by risking

“accusations of sentimentality”—but not, as Kelly reads him, without reservation.

Saunders’s

approach to television was similarly ambivalent. Like Wallace, he would imitate television, but

not to the point of embracing its mass market appeal: his surreal style refracted the medium’s

characteristic features through a more estranging, experimental lens. Indeed, in “Bounty,” he

critiqued a sitcom-creator’s “kowtowing to the lowest common denominator.”

Like Wallace,

moreover, Saunders could only partially embrace sincerity as an antidote to television’s

corrosive irony. He clearly saw that irony as a problem—his faux reality shows were irreverent

spectacles of violence and cruelty (e.g. “How My Child Died Violently”

). But he rejected

sentiment as a wholly adequate solution. In one interview, he explained how, in his stories, he

would temper sentiment with violence (“If you have in one scene a kid getting his hand cut

off…you’re more willing to accept a sentimental scene.”)

The story “Isabelle,” for example, in

which a man adopts a helpless child, might seem sentimental were it not for the fact that the

child is called “Boneless” to indicate her particular deformity.

Around the year 2000, Saunders began to engage with digital content. In the early 2000s,

he started—as he admitted—to get all of [his] news from [the AOL] email log-in screen.”

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2011, he became an active Facebook user, curating his own page. Now, he often parodically

referenced digital inanities. Some were real, like a viral video called “My Sister Freaks Out”;

some were fabricated, like a website called “Evidence of Evil” or a trending story about “The

Miraculous Turkey Baby.”

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Indeed, Saunders’s new digital focus seemed not to replace, but

rather to exacerbate his prior interest in TV. Before 2000, he frequently alluded to, say, sitcoms

or infomercials. But it was not until the early 2000s that, for a few years, such filler became his

major theme. In his Guardian essays, he discussed vapid pop culture more than any other topic.

In a 2008 essay, “The Braindead Megaphone,” he bemoaned a culture in which a gifted friend

wrote “content” (Saunders’s first use of the word) about Anna Nicole Smith, and then traced the

problem back to television coverage of the O.J. and Lewinski scandals.

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During this period, Saunders began not just to consume, but also to create—if not

“content” in the most pejorative sense—then internet journalism embracing many of its

attention-grabbing tactics. Beginning in 2000, the author, who had thus far written only two

pieces for print-journalistic platforms, produced a vast corpus of online writing: essays for

outlets like GQ, Slate, The New Yorker, and O Magazine, along with two years of weekly

Guardian columns. At first, he wrote a piece or two in the traditional writerly genres mostly read

by literary types—lyrical personal essays or art reviews.

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Soon, however, he wrote pieces in a

number of more web-friendly and viral forms. These included short satirical pieces (Guardian,

New Yorker, O), listicles (O, Guardian), presidential profiles (New Yorker, GQ), travel pieces

(GQ, Slate), accounts of amazing real life events (GQ), self-help (New York Times, Guardian),

political punditry (Guardian, New Yorker), food writing (New Yorker), and pop-cultural

commentary (Guardian, New Yorker).

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Of all the content genres that Saunders now consumed and created, one loomed largest:

the uplifting anecdote. Saunders began to take an interest in the content genre when AOL

became his primary news source. “There are no more wars and famines,” he joked of that

development. “Just dogs calling 911 and gifted hogs who play the cello.”

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Subsequently, he

frequently referred to heartwarming news stories (“I’ve recently noted a new trend in U.S.

journalism, the ‘heroic pet saves master…story”

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) and generated parodies: “Mother Kills Pit

Bull Mauling Son With Spatula;” “Lover Kills Shark Swimming Towards Daughter With Spear

Gun”; “Son Stops Mountain Lion Attacking Dad Using Judo.”

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When Saunders joined

Facebook in 2011, he shared and commented on uplifting anecdotes, like a video in which a

cartoon reflects on the true meaning of Christmas, an article relaying the stories of the parents of

the fallen soldier Humayan Khan (notoriously mocked by Donald Trump), and a meme depicting

a crying immigrant marine, reflecting on how far he has come (the caption says).

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At the same time, Saunders also began to produce sentimental digital content, often

resembling, and sometimes fully embodying, the uplifting anecdote. To name just a few

examples: In 2006, Saunders circulated a GoFundMe that told the tale of a twenty-one year old

undocumented Mexican immigrant who, having fallen form a roof and become paralyzed, was in

need of financial aid (which, Saunders could then happily report, poured in).

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In 2012, for a GQ

piece, Saunders’s narrated vignettes from a trip to Haiti with Bill Clinton in terms that even the

New Sincerity writer might find too cloying: “Imagine a classroom in a hospital in the

Dominican Republic filled with little sweethearts in Communion frocks…”

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In a viral 2013

Syracuse commencement speech, Saunders told the story of a bullied young girl in his

elementary school class to whom he had come to wish he had shown more kindness. Finally, in a

2016 story on Trump supporters, Saunders foregrounded an extended tale about a resilient young

girl named Noemi who, after living in the U.S. since her birth, had been deported.

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Perhaps because Saunders created as well as consumed digital content, he began to

emulate it, in his fiction, with less ambivalence than he once had television. To begin with, after

he began to write content, his fiction became more accessible. As he put it in 2013:

I think [my fiction] is more accessible…Lately I’ve been writing these non-fiction travel

pieces and have noticed that a lot of very bright, engaged people I know, who don’t really

get my fiction, seemed drawn in by these. So I had that goal in mind—[to] reach out…

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To that end, Saunders, as he describes it, began to write fiction that repurposed journalistic

tactics. He explicitly discussed imitating journalism’s brevity (he cut his story “Semplica Girl

Diaries” down to “magazine pace”). He also discussed being influenced by its realism and

simple prose. In one, 2006 interview, he described how writing journalism had made him more

comfortable writing “banal” realistic fictional scenes, rendered in “workmanlike” prose.

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“To

get the scope of the world,” he commented, “you have to be willing to do some workmanlike

sentences….That is something I am trying…the journalism helps a lot.”

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Indeed, much of Saunders’s post-2000 fiction came to resemble his digital writing.

Consider, for example, the difference between Saunders’s two, pre-2000 short story collections,

CivilWarLand and Pastoralia, and his third, post-2000 collection In Persuasion Nation. The

third book so clearly draws inspiration from Saunders’s online writing that one is tempted to call

it a content collection. Relative to the first two books’ stories, its stories are, like Saunders’s

online writing, shorter and more abundant (the first two volumes each include six or seven ten to

forty-page stories; the third includes twelve, two to ten-page stories). They are also more

generically similar to Saunders’s digital output. Rather than third person accounts of dreamlike

events, many are amusing monologues from the perspectives of quirky characters, almost

indistinguishable from the short humor pieces that Saunders had been writing for Slate, The New

Yorker, and (soon) the Guardian (e.g. “I Can Speak,” “My Amendment,” “9399”). Others fit the

mold of Saunders’s new “banal,” journalistic realism—“Christmas,” “Bohemians,” “Adams” and

“the Red Bow” all describe plausible events in the lives of American families. Finally, In

Persuasion Nation largely concerns the theme of journalism, organizing its sections around

epigraphs that are pieces of vapid political punditry. Though Saunders would largely abandon

that major theme in his next, 2013 Tenth of December, he would continue to write accessible,

straightforward, realistic stories, now with the help of his GQ editor Andy Ward.

At the same time, thanks in large part to his engagement with the uplifting anecdote,

Saunders wrote more earnestly sentimental work. Saunders himself has attributed his final

surrender to sentimentality to his own content creation.

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Indeed, many of his later stories

rehearse the prototypical plotlines of trending uplifting anecdotes. Permit me to make this

argument by way of a classic content genre: “X or Y—Can You Guess?”

Saunders Plotline or Sentimental “News” Story—Can You Guess?

A. Track Star Saves Girl Next Store From Home Invader

(Answer: Saunders Plotline, “Victory Lap”)

B. “How I Learned to Accepts My Gay Grandson”: A Grandfather Tells All

(Answer: Saunders Plotline, “My Flamboyant Grandson”)

C. Teen Rescues Cancer Victim From Suicide: “I Knew He Wouldn’t Do It”

(Answer: Saunders Plotline, “Tenth of December”)

D. Child Found Chained to Post Like Puppy

(Answer: Saunders Plotline, “Puppy”)

E. Father Shocks Daughter With Surprise Gift on Her Birthday

(Answer: Saunders Plotline, “Semplica Girl Diaries”)

In Saunders’s late work, such sentimental plotlines are not ironically undermined, rendered

grotesque, or played for laughs. Rather, they sincerely court the pathos-laden feelings through

which sentiment appeals. “Tenth of December,” for example, ends with the cancer victim’s

realization that life may still be worth living: “[he] saw that there could still be many—many

drops of goodness…ahead.”

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At the end of “Escape From Spiderhead,” we are stirred by the

heroism of a narrator who sacrifices his own life to avoiding hurting another.

The 2005 story “My Flamboyant Grandson” marks Saunders’s transition from a parodic,

New Sincerity-style critique of televisual content to a more earnest embrace of digital content

and the uplifting anecdote. The story, like much of Saunders’s early work, is set in a surreal,

media-saturated world critiquing our own. At “My Flamboyant Grandson’s” heart, however, is a

story more mawkish than anything Saunders had yet produced. One of the most popular types of

uplifting anecdote, in the digital era, has been the tolerance tale—typically, a video capturing a

gay teen coming out to an unexpectedly accepting parent. In response to a story like this, the

amenable audience feels defensive tenderness on the child’s part, approving (if condescending)

relief at the parent’s response, and awed recognition of human goodness. Saunders’s tale, about a

grandfather struggling to transport his homosexual grandson to a Broadway show, earnestly baits

those responses. We are touched by the grandfather’s humane feeling and anxious about the

child’s potential disappointment. Saunders makes us suffer: the pair are delayed on their way to

the theatre. But he rewards us with a happy ending: they make it to the show.

II. Saunders and Content, Part Two: Resisting Prosumption

Even as Saunders draws inspiration from sentimental content, however, he makes his own

alterations to the genre. Indeed, he resists its prosumption-driven ethics. To begin with, in

general, he criticizes content’s “me” rather than “we”-centric qualities. Social media, he argues,

is too divisive, making us more “prone to fighting.”

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And sentimental content in particular

inspires self-righteousness rather than sympathy. In one essay, he provides a parodic example of

a viral sentimental story about a mermaid who suffocates under a whale’s weight. The story

inspires less concern than complacent outrage: “We begin to hate whales. We see that all whales

are selfish idiots. Next time someone says, ‘Save the whales!’ we are like, ‘Oh, I think the

whales do a good job of looking out for themselves.’”

118

In his story, “Semplica Girl Diaries,”

Saunders describes how a man uses an uplifting anecdote to substitute self-satisfaction for

altruism. To convince his daughter that she does not need to feel bad for the “Semplica Girls”

whom he pays to be human lawn decorations, he shows her a Youtube video suggesting how

much better off the girls are thanks to his employing them. The video shows “Bangladeshi

[Semplica Girl] sending money home: hence her parents able to build small shack.”

119

Many of Saunders recent writings rebel against social media’s “me”-centric sentiment,

which reduces moral action to self-expression. Lincoln in the Bardo marks his most sustained

engagement with, and revolt against, the uplifting anecdote and its ethics. In general, the book

can be read as an allegory, not only of social media, but also of the forms of sentimental

storytelling that it enables. The “Bardo” in which the book is set, overtly, is a limbo-like space

where recently deceased humans wait to ascend to some other realm. On a symbolic level,

however, the setting seems a stand in for Facebook or Twitter. The populants of this Bardo are,

like social media users, virtual beings—neither dead nor alive—drawn together through time and

space. The novel, moreover, rather than describing these beings in the third person, comprises

their brief, first person monologues, operating like so many status updates. In the Bardo, as on

social media, the main events are discursive: characters mostly express and bear witness to one

another’s narrativized identities. On the novel’s first few pages, its two protagonists, Hans

Vollman and Roger Bevins III, each tell short versions of their own personal stories; they then

encounter a number of different characters, all of whom do the same.

Many of the stories that the Bardo’s citizens tell are uplifting anecdotes. Indeed, a critical

mass invoke the popular social media thematics of erotic or aesthetic recognition. Hans Vollman

tells the story of how he, a gentle old man, was wed to a young and beautiful girl. Meek as a

lamb—and in both sentimental and perhaps anachronistically “woke” fashion—he found himself

unable to impose himself upon her sexually: “I could see her…distaste.”

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Thanks to his

kindness, the girl eventually falls in love with him. But before they can consummate their

marriage, he dies. Roger Bevins III, meanwhile, tells the story of how as a young man he took up

with a lover named Gilbert. When Gilbert left, he attempted suicide. Half way through the act,

however, in a classic sentimental trope (think It’s a Wonderful Life), he realized how beautiful

life was.

121

Other characters have similar tales to tell: Captain William Prince regrets betraying

his wife; Elise Traynor replays happy scenes with suitors whom she might have married.

The Bardo, moreover, is pervaded by the variety of ethics that social media in general,

and the uplifting anecdote in particular, promote: ubiquitous and self-conscious but also anemic.

In the Bardo, to begin with "virtue," or the degree to which one is capable of earning a place in

some rumored next world (presumably some sort of heaven, though we never learn) becomes a

matter of the quality of one's self-depiction. The Bardo inhabitant's cardinal sin is not the one we

would expect to see in some afterlife antechamber, or limbo — the middling sum of one's good

and bad ethical actions in life. Rather, their sin, again, is inauthenticity, a habit of dissembling

born of inadequate self-knowledge. One reason that characters like Bevins and Vollman remain

in the Bardo is that they cannot even admit to themselves and others that they are dead. Vollman

refers to himself as still "sick" or in his "sick box"; whenever Bevins is on the verge of saying

something like the word "dead," he omits it or is interrupted.

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Meanwhile, Lincoln's son Willie

is in danger of never ascending to the next world precisely because Lincoln cannot admit to

himself that the boy is really gone. These characters will earn their place in the next world (or, in

Lincoln's case, earn Willie's place), not by doing good deeds, but rather by achieving authentic

self-expression: by knowing what they are and saying it plain.

Saunders, however, critiques this symbolic world, of morality’s equation with self-

presentation. In the Bardo, as on social media, exchanging sentimental stories turns out to be a

not particularly effective manner of inspiring sympathy; rather, the characters remain locked in

prisons of self-concern. More often than not, when one member of the Bardo tells his or her

story, another responds merely by launching into his or her own (see, for example, the transitions

between Abigail and Eddie’s speech on page 94, between Randal and Twood’s speech on page

132; or see Betsy and Eddie’s weariness with Elson’s story on page 217). Rather than seeing, the

denizens of the Bardo can all only clamor to be seen. When Lincoln comes, for the first time, to

visit his son Willie, the ghosts react by declaring a desire: “We wanted the lad to, see us.” To be

seen, in this case, would be to live vicariously through Willie’s having received an amorous or

loving type of attention: “To be touched so lovingly, so fondly,” says Bevins. “We were perhaps

not so unlovable as we had come to believe.” It would, by extension, also be to return from the

dead. It’s “as if one were—” Bevins says, omitting the implied word: “alive.”

123

Self-obsessive storytelling, Saunders implies, is a pathological and deforming activity.

Indeed, each character is misshapen in a manner that corresponds to the story that he or she

repeats and the desire for romantic recognition that it expresses. Vollmann, for example, has a

gargantuan, floating erection; Bevins has many scattered eyes, ears, noses, and fingers, which

represent his final sensuous desire to evade his death. More to the point, self-obsessive

storytelling holds these characters hostage. Through their repetition compulsions, they refuse to

accept that they are dead (Vollman and Bevins both call themselves “sick”).

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It is this denial,

Saunders implies, that keeps them stuck in the Bardo. As Bevins and Vollmann together note:

“To stay, one must deeply and continuously dwell upon one’s primary reason for staying…one

must be constantly looking for opportunities to tell one’s story.”

125

During the novel’s climax, however, things change. Saunders’s characters manage to

transcend their self-concern sufficiently to sympathize. This occurs during two climactic scenes,

marking Lincoln’s acceptance that his son is dead. During the first, he says to himself: “allow

yourself to think that word.”

126

During the second, he can admit: “His boy was gone.” In both

cases, he feels an expansive sympathy with all humanity. The scenes have a similar effect on his

spectral spectators. During the first, they join forces to enter Lincoln’s body and together think:

“We all thought…as one…All selfish concerns (of staying, thriving, preserving one’s strength)

momentarily set aside….” Thus freed of their navel-gazing, they shed their symbolic deformities.

Bevins notes that Vollmann is “suddenly clad, his member shrunk down to normal size.”

127

himself becomes a “handsome young man… two eyes, one nose, two hands.”

128

During the

second scene, the ghosts sense that “At the core of each lay suffering…We must try to see one

another in this way.” Meanwhile our two protagonists, as if inspired by Lincoln’s example, can

confront their own deaths and relinquish their lingering desires for amorous recognition. After

rehearsing their tales one last time, they resolve: “Let us go, together.”

129

What about Lincoln’s story compels self-transcendence? Its bald confrontation with loss.

Where sentimental social media content may evade the fact of suffering in pursuit of “uplift,”

this story instead looks that fact in the face. Saunders’s novel, as a whole, does the same. Indeed,

it does so by revising the uplifting anecdote. The novel, as we have seen, opens with Vollmann

and Bevins’ sentimental tales. But these tales, as yet, have no endings. Vollmann remains—at

least in his view—on the brink of returning to the world to consummate his marriage. And

Bevins, too, believes he might return, perhaps to rekindle his affair with Gilbert. Saunders might

have given these stories, like their viral counterparts, uplifting conclusions, granting these two

characters the erotic recognition that they desire. Instead, he does the opposite. During the scenes

in which Vollmann and Bevins finally admit to themselves that they are dead, we, too, learn

some fatal information. Vollmann’s young wife, Bevins reveals, has long since married another

man, the “great love of [her] life”; indeed, she has already died and passed through the Bardo,

thanking Vollmann for putting her “on the path to love.” We also learn that Gilbert left Bevins,

not out of guilt, but rather for another man. The two lovers even “[shared] a laugh” at Bevins’s

expense

130

The scene is sentimental, to be sure. But it is sentimental in a tragic, rather than in a

comic mode. The reader can feel no relieved self-satisfaction. Rather, the scene inspires only a

less complacent feeling: sympathetic pain at unredeemed loss.

Here, then, is Saunders’s Web 2.0-era manifesto for sentimental literary writing: it can

pander to the “common” reader; and it can preach on behalf of a cult of kindness. What it cannot

do, however, is evade the human suffering that inspires sympathy and cater only to self-concern.

Indeed, one final comparison, between Saunders’s viral 2013 graduation speech and David

Foster Wallace’s “This is Water,” underscores the overarching point. Wallace, though he speaks

sentimentally, does so only in a defensive mode—his apologetic asides, stylistic pyrotechnics,

and academese all operate to excuse him from charges of naivete (He begins: “So let’s talk about

the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre…”

131

). Saunders, an acolyte

of the uplifting anecdote, more baldly embraces sentiment: “What I regret most in my life,” he

says, “are failures of kindness.”

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And yet, he too will only go so far. Rather than dwell, in self-

congratulatory fashion, on the heroic alleviation of suffering, he instead castigates himself for

not having prevented it. Here as elsewhere, Saunders does not carve out a space for an avant-

garde, highbrow art that would transcend mass market concerns. Rather, he enacts a humbler

aim: to provide the general public with good content.

2. Claudia Rankine and the “iWitness Account”

“I struggle with wanting to reroute the content I am living”

–Claudia Rankine, interview, BOMB magazine, 2014

By almost every possible metric—critical, popular, political—Claudia Rankine’s 2014

book, Citizen: An American Lyric, was a success. The multi-media, collage-like collection of

reflections on Black life in the contemporary United States, in addition to earning praise from

outlets like The New Yorker and The New York Times, and winning seven poetry prizes (The

National Book Critics Circle Award, most prominently), topped bestseller lists for a year.

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Meanwhile, as Ferguson erupted with protests over the police killing of Michael Brown, and

#BlackLivesMatter gained traction on Twitter, Citizen became entwined with the viral

movement. BLM activists tweeted quotes from the book, and photographs of its pages, alongside

calls for justice for Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and Sandra Bland. Rankine, in turn, updated Citizen

with each new print run, adding names to a running list of victims of police violence. From

relative obscurity—even in literary circles—Rankine became a prominent public spokesperson

for racial justice, writing widely circulated articles on pop-cultural racism and white privilege

(for example, a New York Times Magazine piece on “The Meaning of Serena Williams”), and

earning a MacArthur Genius Grant to found a collective called the “Racial Imaginary Institute.”

While the world celebrated Citizen, however, Rankine herself engaged in a period of

more apparently critical self-reflection. In a 2019 interview, commenting on her own work’s

tendency to focus on the theme of “dead black bodies” (as she put it), she said: “In terms of

entertainment and art, there is the sense that the portrayal of this is valuable —

and literally valuable…I thought it was important to show…[But] what am I putting out there

and why am I putting it out there? And for whom?”

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During that same year, she published her

first full-length work since Citizen, a play titled The White Card, in which a Black visual artist

named Charlotte Cummings asks herself the same questions, and then provides a more decisive

answer. After an art collector named Charles Spencer shows Cummings a work that diagrams the

dead body of Michael Brown, the artist decides to expunge her own work, which has thus far

portrayed scenes of anti-Black racism and violence, of all resemblance to the piece. “There I

was,” she says, bemused, of her former self, after taking a few months to embark on new

projects, “handing over black death spectacle.”

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In this chapter, I use viral content as the framework through which to understand, not

only Rankine’s change of course, but also the broader trajectory of her poetic career. To do so, I

focus, more particularly, on Rankine’s engagement with the prominent genre which I call the

“iWitness account.” The “iWitness account,” as I define it (most generally), involves a first-

person or “live” narrative account of a witnessed crime or infraction (for example, a viral video

capturing a woman licking ice cream in the grocery store, or babe.net’s notorious “I went on a

date with Aziz Ansari”

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). In all its iterations, the genre is widespread, comprising an estimated

one to two out of every one hundred pieces of viral content on sites like Facebook and Twitter,

as represented in my database. But it is best known, perhaps, in the form of the

“microaggression,” in which a person describes a quotidian experience of discrimination.

Readers of Rankine’s writing may already recognize the connection between this genre and her

work. Citizen opens with a sequence of descriptions, in the second person, of these types of all-

too-common experiences. One, for example, which has also been excerpted, online, as one of

Poetry Magazine’s most-shared posts of the past few years, begins: “You are in the dark, in the

car, watching the black-tarred street being swallowed by speed; he tells you his dean is making

him hire a person of color...”

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Readers may also note that the iWitness account, unlike other

viral genres addressed in this dissertation, more imperfectly embodies the definition of “content,”

at least in its more pejorative form. Certainly, the digital genre comes in purely trivial forms, like

the Youtube video “This lady keeps stealing my mail”

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; but it also comes in more decidedly

serious iterations, like iPhone videos of police brutality. It is this aspect of the iWitness account,

however—its ambiguous status between profit-driven “content” and serious political activism,

and its ability to be used for those radically different ends—that occupies Rankine’s attention.

Of course, connections between Citizen and digital media—including the genre of the

microaggression—have hardly gone unnoticed. Indeed, Rankine is one of the few authors whose

thematic and formal adaptations of new viral genres have been discussed in much detail (Heather

Love and Andrea Long Chu have unpacked Citizen’s debts to the microaggression).

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But no

critic has treated Rankine’s engagement with viral content, more broadly, in depth. Nor has her

writing been read through the lens of what I call the iWitness account. Rankine, as I will show,

writes work that imitates and adapts this viral genre, on levels both thematic and formal. Indeed,

Citizen differs from its highly similar precursor, Rankine’s 2004 Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An

American Lyric, largely by virtue of its absorption of the iWitness account. Furthermore,

Rankine’s work, rather than simply resembling, arguably exists as, the viral genre. Citizen, in

addition to having been excerpted in popular Twitter and Facebook-based forms, includes, as

part of the text, a set of internet-based “Situation Videos” (originally hosted on Rankine’s

website), that are themselves avant-garde iWitness accounts. Through her engagement with the

genre, I will show, Rankine grapples with one of viral content’s most distinctive features: its

particular susceptibility to re-use and re-appropriation in different forms, to different ends (some,

as I’ve suggested, more in line with “content’s” pejorative definition than others).

I begin, in section one, by defining the iWitness account and distinguishing it from some

of its ancestors and relations: namely, the much-discussed “citizen journalism” and “fake news.”

Thanks to the particular conditions of its circulation, I argue, the genre has mixed implications,

empowering users to speak up, but rendering their speech more exploitable. Next, in section two,

I turn to Rankine’s poetic career. In Citizen, I show, Rankine moves past her prior work by

absorbing thematic and formal elements of viral media and the iWitness account. But even while

composing the book, she begins to grapple with their divergent effects: how, for example, the

iWitness account enables users to expose Black suffering, but in forms vulnerable to pernicious

types of re-appropriation. Finally, in the third section, I show how Rankine’s reckoning with

these aspects of virality have shaped her subsequent career, first, in her 2019 play The White

Card, and then in her more recent work. They are partly responsible, for example, for her

thematic shift of emphasis from Blackness to whiteness, and her embrace of a more self-

consciously controlling relationship to her writing’s reception.

I. The iWitness Account

The second, major category of content that appears in my database, as I’ve shown, concerns real,

sensational events that are negative or tragic in nature. Much of this content, an initial perusal

also shows, deals with the description of crimes or other infractions, both serious and trivial. In

order to get an initial handle on the contours of this content, I use a Naïve Bayes Classifier (as in

the previous chapter on the uplifting anecdote) to distinguish between the headlines of 1,000

crime or infraction-related pieces of content and 1,000 randomly selected content headlines,

which produces a prediction with an accuracy of about 76%.

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I then (as in chapter 1) rank the

words most likely, according to the classifier’s methods, to indicate crime-related content. Some

of the top ten results are expected, like the relative frequency of words like “sexual,” “abortion,”

“shot,” “islam,” and “catholic.” These suggest that the content focuses on crimes involving

sexuality, guns, and religion—an unsurprising result, at least, in the North American context.

Other results, though, are more unexpected, like the particular frequency of words “petition,”

“punish,” “tells,” or “call.” These, however, come to make sense when considered in light of

content’s drive to produce “prosumption,” Such terms tend to turn mere descriptions of

wrongdoing into pleas for a certain kind of verbal or emotive response, to “petition” or “call” on

some entity to “punish” the wrongdoer. A piece of content with a title like “Petition: punish the

shelter employee who abused over 800 dogs” is not simply alerting readers of some alleged

wrongdoing, but urging them to respond, in socially-mediated fashion: to sign the petition and

then circulate it, by sharing it. The more specific genre of crime-reporting that I call the iWitness

account, too, in its own way, is often shaped by a drive to produce “prosumption.”

The iWitness account, as I define it, describes an alleged crime or infraction in two

distinct ways: first, it presents the violation in narrative form, from beginning to end (as far as

possible), so as to reproduce the experience of “being there.” Typically, this is achieved through

individual testimony or video. Second, it does so in a manner that places the epistemological

authority of deciding the details of the event, or its appropriate verdict, less in the hands of

authoritative journalistic or judicial institutions, and more in the hands of readers or viewers.

Consider, as an initial example, the distinction between an iWitness account describing the 2016

police shooting of Walter Scott (NBC.com’s “A closer look at the Walter Scott Shooting”) and a

more traditional story describing the same event (The Washington Post’s “South Carolina police

officer charged with murder…”

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(Figure 3.1). The iWitness account (top image) presents a

narrative of the event in chronological order from beginning to end, replicating the experience, as

far as the medium allows, of being present for its duration: it consists of a single video of the

shooting taken by a bystander. In this way, it conveys the idea that the viewer has the power,

authority, and prerogative to decide

the event’s details. The caption under

the video extends the invitation:

“Take a frame by frame look at the

video showing the death of Walter

Scott at the hands of Officer Michael

Slager. Does it match Slager's

incident report and what is the

unidentified object he leaves near

Scott's body?” The Post story, by

contrast (bottom image), does not

convey the crime in narrative form. Rather, it collects a number of sources, organized

conceptually rather than chronologically, providing distinct, piecemeal, and sometimes

contradictory accounts of the event and its context. These include quotes from Scott’s lawyer, the

mayor, and Slager, and details assembled from an incident report, bystander video, and affidavit.

Rather than quoting or showing these pieces of evidence in full, the paper synthesizes and

reduces them to soundbites. Everything that can be known with certainty, this presentation

implies, has been found, analyzed, and translated by the Post. The reader may make further

judgments, but is not nudged to do so.

Other recent examples of the iWitness account achieve similar effects in different ways.

Some narratively convey the crime in question, not via video, but rather via image and/or text.

Buzzfeed, for example, translated George Zimmerman’s account of Trayvon Martin’s death into

their signature picture book format of images captioned with text (Figure 3.2);

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Babe.net

Figure 3.1

presented “Grace’s” story about being violated by Aziz Ansari in largely linguistic form, shifting

between first-person quotation, third-person narration, and free indirect discourse.

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These

differently mediated versions of the genre confer

epistemological authority on the viewer or reader in

different ways. An iWitness account involving a

video, for example, will typically present the video in

complete and unedited form, without cuts,

commentary, or captioning (as it might otherwise

appear on TV news

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) to convey the impression of

bringing the viewer as close as possible to the event as

it occurred. It might also include a preamble to the

video indicating as much, like The Daily Beast’s 2016 introduction to the footage of officer

Blane Salomoni’s shooting of Alton Sterling: “The Daily Beast is publishing this video in its

entirety—despite its graphic nature—because it shows what happened before, during, and after

the killing.”

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Meanwhile, an iWitness account conveyed linguistically will encourage audience

participation in other ways. Take, for example, the microaggression, or brief first-person

description of an indignity suffered for race or identity-based reasons. Almost by definition,

Andrea Long Chu has argued, the microaggression is unverifiable, because knowing the

infraction has occurred often involves discerning a perpetrator’s motivations or thoughts

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—

this is true, for example, of Trish Doolin’s viral story, as remediated from a Twitter by BET.com,

alleging that a bank teller was reluctant to cash her check for unarticulated, but, in her view,

palpably racist reasons (Figure 3.3). And yet, the microaggression narrative is typically presented

alongside a single impassioned interpretation, confirming the discrimination—Doolin’s tweet

Figure 3.2

includes lines about wanting to “scream.” This rhetorical combination of speculation (however

justified) and passion, in contrast with the cool and “impartial”

mode of more traditional news, provokes an audience response.

Though the iWitness account bears relations to two

media entities that are much discussed in the social sciences—

“citizen journalism” and “fake news”—it is distinct from both.

Though the genre does, for example, often incorporate

“amateur” or citizen reporting, it is almost always, like much of

the most shared content online, presented by professional

outlets, like Buzzfeed or CNN. It also just as often relies on non-“amateur” journalistic sources,

like a surveillance video or incident report. Moreover, though the iWitness account does, like

much “fake news,” typically eschew many of the “objective” or “impartial” standards of

traditional news reporting, it is not, in most of the most shared cases, necessarily apocryphal.

Of course, the iWitness account, whether considered as a discrete genre or a more

amorphous tendency, is not wholly new. Like most contemporary viral media genres, it has

precursors in print-journalistic and televisual formats. Many of the oft-cited precursors to today’s

“citizen journalism,” for example, are also ancestors of the iWitness account. Even where they

do not fully embody the genre’s features (like presenting a crime, as far as is possible, in a

narrative form from beginning to end), they still rhetorically empower the reader to render

judgments at odds with official accounts. Critics, for example, often cite the photographs of

Emmett Till’s body taken at his mother’s behest, or the video of Rodney King’s assault recorded

by George Holliday, as early examples of citizen journalism that awoke the general public to the

idea that official news-media might not always present the whole story. Tabloid news reporting,

Figure 3.3

too, has often resembled or embodied the iWitness account—take, for example, the classic type

of tabloid story that shows images of two celebrities presumed to be having an affair, inviting

readers to decide for themselves whether their body language suggests as much.

The iWitness account’s current abundance, however, as well as its particular character,

can be (at least) partially attributed to the social media era. As with many the other viral genres,

the genre’s proliferation (or migration) online, can be broken down in two stages. During the

first stage, beginning around 2000, the World Wide Web began to democratize media

production, particularly by way of an abundance of blogs. This facilitated two phenomena

conducive to the iWitness account’s abundance: first, individuals who witnessed indiscretions

could more easily publicize their stories (the release of the iPhone, in 2007, and iPhone with

video, in 2009, facilitated this process). And second, media outlets could then remediate or

present those stories without having to meet rigorous standards of thoroughness or objectivity.

Indeed, if sources like Buzzfeed or the Daily Beast often favor the iWitness account as a form of

crime reporting, then it is presumably in part because it requires less compensated labor (posting

a single Facebook live video, rather than gathering and synthesizing many sources). During the

second stage, beginning around 2008, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter began to

dominate the distribution of journalistic media. This meant that, in order to profit, this media had

to inspire not simple “consumption” (or viewing), but also “prosumption”: sharing, liking,

commenting, and other forms of interactive engagement. The iWitness account, which, rather

than simply presenting the facts of a case to its audiences, encourages and empowers them to

formulate an opinionated response, is suited succeed under those conditions.

More than simply popularizing the iWitness account, however, the social media era has

also shaped the genre in particular ways. For example, the genre, because it culls much of its

material from Facebook and Twitter posts, will tend to focus, not only on serious legal

violations, but also—and perhaps even more frequently—on minor, everyday, or even comic

moral infractions. Crimes recently reported by iWitness accounts, for example, have included

rude letter-writing, mistreatment of a pitbull, shortness with hospital patients, libertinism,

chastisement of breastfeeding mothers, and ice cream licking.

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The genre will also, like many

other genres of viral content, tend to emphasize symbolic or pop-cultural spheres. Potential

crimes, as the iWitness account presents them, will often be (allegedly) offensive moments in

popular entertainment, like a Fox anchor’s attitude toward his cohost or a comedian’s

inappropriate joke,

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or social media posts for which the poster has earned some form of censure

(like being fired or doxed), presented in their original form (a woman’s tweet about hating her

teaching job, a CBS anchor’s flippant post about the Las Vegas massacre, etc.).

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Thanks to the particular conditions of its circulation, moreover, the iWitness account has

the potential to produce mixed social effects. On the one hand, thanks to its drive toward

interactive “prosumption,” the genre empowers social media users to see themselves as arbiters

of justice, checking the imperfect authority of journalistic and legal institutions. This has already

facilitated much invaluable grassroots action. The recent Black Lives Matter and #MeToo

movements, for example, were both largely fueled by posting and discussion of iWitness

accounts (videos of police brutality and personal stories about sexual harassment).

But even while the genre empowers users to speak up, it renders their speech susceptible

to re-use, re-mediation, and exploitation. The data-driven digital economy means that users’

content, or statements about content, are almost always mined for economic and other

unforeseen ends. Engagement statistics and personal details produced, for example, might then

be used to set prices for advertising space on audiences’ home-feeds. The advertisers who win

bids for that space may then profit from users’ exposure to their ads. What this means is that

where individuals post content or comments with a particular political intent, they may also

inadvertently, however marginally, empower corporations with diverging aims. A widely-shared,

Occupy Wallstreet-associated iWitness account, for example, would likely have generated ad

revenue for powerful media conglomerates (Facebook, Amazon, Alphabet (which owns Google),

and Apple). A mega-viral piece of Black Lives Matter content may, as it makes its way through

Facebook or Twitter, produce data for a political consulting firm—like Cambridge Analytica—

working for a Republican or far right campaign.

Content’s remediation also enables exploitation. Many of the most shared iWitness

accounts, for example, are social media posts (tweets, Facebook statuses, or Facebook live

videos), re-packaged by professional media outlets like Buzzfeed or Shareably without

compensation to the users who created them. Indeed, iWitness accounts, like most of the most

widely shared viral posts, tend not to go mega-viral until a professional outlet has put its stamp

on them. (For an in depth discussion of this process, see media critic Nikki Usher’s work on

what she calls the “appropriation/amplification” model of citizen journalism’s circulation).

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This type of remediation is, arguably, exploitation in Marxian terms (Christian Fuchs has made

this case well).

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It can also, much like data-harvesting, result in dramatic ideological

perversion. Consider, for example, some of the different uses to which an iWitness video of

Alton Sterling’s death, originally posted on Facebook and Instagram by a man named Arthur

Reed on Tuesday, July 5 2016, was put (it was one of five videos of the shooting).

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Reed,

rather than a casual bystander, was an activist working with an organization called “Stop the

Killing,” which takes videos of violent altercations to screen for Black teenagers, with the aim of

deterring them from getting involved in gang or criminal activity. After Reed posted the video, it

was quickly recirculated by Black Lives Matter activists, intent on demanding police reform,

rather than crime prevention. Liberal and Conservative outlets alike then remediated the video to

different effect—Breitbart, for example, linked or circulated the video under headlines

emphasizing Sterling’s culpability and condemning other outlets for understating it (e.g. “Black

Lives Matter Spin Has Already Begun in Baton Rouge Shooting,”“Huffpo Headline Calls

Allegedly Armed Baton Rouge Victims Unarmed,” “CNN: 911 Call Reveals Alton Sterling

Threatened Homeless Man with Gun,” etc.

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); Buzzfeed remediated the link and video with

different rhetorical aims (headlines included “Meet the Ex-Gang Leader who made Alton

Sterling’s Killing go Viral” and “How Many Black People Can You Mourn in One Week”).

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Though content like this has always been used by different parties for different ends,

social media platforms, thanks to their democratization of publishing power, and near-absence of

now be almost instantaneously adopted, wholesale, by differently-oriented agents and outlets,

without need for verification or compensation. The recycling of content has, at times, been

particularly discordant or disturbing. The Black Lives Matters insignia for example, lacking the

trademark protections of a corporate brand, has been re-deployed in sinister ways. For at least a

year, the largest Black Live Matters page on Facebook, which regularly posted iWitness-

accounts, was a scam partially orchestrated by, among others, a middle-aged, white Australian

man named Ian Mackey (He profited, among other ways, by collecting donations on Paypal and

Patreon.)

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In another well-known, pernicious appropriation of BLM content, which came to

light shortly after the 2016 election, Russian agents used a number of fake and prominent Black-

activist Twitter and Facebook accounts, including one called “Blacktivist,” to attempt to

influence Black American voters. Their apparent aim, in posting Black activist content, was—as

Jaron Lanier describes it—to “irritate black activists enough to lower voting turnout for Hillary.

To suppress the vote, statistically.”

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Events like these, among others, have led media critics like

Justin Cook, David Leonard, and Tonia Sutherland to raise red flags regarding the “viralization”

and commodification of black death in the digital sphere.

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II. Claudia Rankine and the iWitness Account

Claudia Rankine’s work has been profoundly shaped by the emergence of viral media, and, more

particularly, of the iWitness account. The poet’s popular media consumption, to begin with, has

proceeded in three stages. During a first, pre-2001 stage, Rankine appeared to absorb much of

her popular media from TV. At this time, she was rarely interviewed, wrote no published

nonfiction, and almost never mentioned other media in her work. The only two mentions of

popular entertainment in her first three volumes of poetry—Nothing in Nature is Private (1992),

The End of the Alphabet (1998), and Plot (2001)—concern TV.

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During a second phase,

spanning roughly 2001 through 2008, Rankine began to consume and cite internet-based

entertainment, if not yet that designed for circulation on social networking sites. In her 2004

Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, for example, her lyric narrator describes conducting a Google search

about rape statistics and then, later, opening her email to find a link to “Bin Laden, Nowhere to

Run Nowhere to Hide,” a viral flash animation set to the tune of a parody of Harry Belafonte’s

“Day-0” (The reader may recall the lyrics: “Come Mister Taliban, Hand Over Bin Laden….”).

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During a third and final phase, spanning roughly 2008 to the present, Rankine began not only to

consume and cite, but also to create, shareable social media content. Though she did not, like

many authors, establish public Facebook or Twitter profiles, she mentioned those platforms and

the content that they disseminate in interviews, essays, and creative work.

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In her 2014 Citizen,

for example, she cited artist Jayson Musson’s widely shared Youtube videos (created under the

alias “Hennessy Youngman”), and in her 2019 play, The White Card, she alluded to viral hot

takes by Teju Cole and Ta-Nehisi Coates.

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She also began to produce her own viral media,

often in the form of major content genres, like the open letter (The Rumpus, 2011)

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, hot take

(The Guardian, 2015)

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, pop culture exegesis (The New York Times Magazine, 2015),

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Humans of New York-style photo series (Vogue, 2018).

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Between these three phases, Rankine’s work changed in ways attributable to her own

changing media consumption. Between the first and second phases, for example, with the

proliferation of the web, her work became more preoccupied with popular entertainment.

Rankine’s first three, pre-2001 poetry collections make so few references to popular culture—

beyond their two mentions of TV—that their events are difficult to orient in time. The second

two, in particular, take place in settings that could almost be mistaken for pre-modern. Where

their reflective lyric narrators describe external, rather than internal worlds, they dwell on

concrete natural and domestic details (trees, kitchen taps), rather than on symbolic or mediated

phenomena (political events, films, etc.). By contrast, Rankine’s two post-2001 poetry volumes,

Don’t Let Me Be Lonely and Citizen, concern themselves largely with recent political and pop

cultural events and artifacts. Both take the form of what Rankine calls the “American Lyric”

(each bears that subtitle), interspersing passages of poeticized personal expression with

discussions of news and other media, both high and lowbrow. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, for

example, mixes references to Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarroldo and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace with

discussions of Princess Diana’s funeral and the movie The Matrix. Citizen juxtaposes art by Kate

Clark and David Hammons with discussions of the U.S. Open and World Cup.

Though not all of the popular entertainment that these two books cite is explicitly or

necessarily digital, the books’ ways of integrating those sources smacks of the internet era.

Consider, for example, a distinction between the two books and one of their avowed precursors:

Eliot’s The Waste Land (Rankine mentions her debts to Eliot in interviews). Like the collage of

high and low sources that is The Waste Land, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely includes a set of notes at

its end citing and commenting on its sources and rendering its relation to Eliot’s poem explicit.

Both of Rankine’s books, however, curate their sources differently than Eliot’s poem, in manners

reflecting digital “convergence”: the phenomenon whereby web or smartphone users can

seamlessly flit between different types of media—film, TV, music, journalism, etc.—on one

device. Eliot, on the one hand, collects his sources together in a sort of jagged, discontinuous set

of juxtapositions, whereby song lyrics, advertisements, and quotes from classic literature

interject a series of poetic segments. These segments are neither recounted by a unifying narrator

(despite the brief invocation of Tiresias) nor are they organized in a clearly narrative or

chronological sequence. By contrast, Rankine’s sources in Don’t Let Me Be Lonely and Citizen

are presented against a more continuous backdrop, like the media that converge on one device. In

each book, they are curated by a lyric narrator whose identity seems roughly consistent (an “I”

and “You”) and in loosely chronological order (The first book begins with references to Clinton

or early Bush-era news stories and ends with a concluding chapter on 9/11; the second cites

media roughly organized from the early 2000s (e.g. Katrina) through to the height of Black Lives

Matter). Both also indicate the digital origins of their media fixation in other manners. Don’t Let

Me Lonely’s access to a broad array of media objects, the book explicitly indicates, is facilitated

by digital tools: at one point, Rankine’s lyric narrator walks us through a spontaneous Google

search regarding the topic at hand, and the book’s endnotes include urls). Meanwhile, Citizen’s

sleek design, setting fragments and stills of assorted media objects against a “sharp white

background” (as one of the book’s refrains puts it) mirrors Apple’s iconic minimalism.

As Rankine began, around 2001, to make more reference to popular media in her work,

she also began to imitate some of its accessibility. Before that year, her poetry was largely

hermetic. Her first three books comprised poems that—as per the subtitle of one of her co-edited

anthologies, “Where Lyric Meets Language”—pursued the classic lyric project of emotional

expression by means of tactics developed by twentieth century experimentalists, from the

Modernists (Eliot, Stein), Objectivists, and Projectivists (Olson, Baraka) to Language poets

(Bernstein, Hejinian).

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The opening lines of The End of the Alphabet and Plot, for example, are

typical of Rankine’s pre-2001 style. They read: “Difficult to pinpoint / fear of self, uncoiled. /

specter unstrung. staggering stampede”

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and “Submerged deeper than appetite / she bit into a

freakish anatomy. the hard plastic of filiation.”

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Here, Rankine’s lyric speakers express

themselves in more or less difficult, experimental veins. They employ opaque external

symbolism (“specter unstrung”) and complex syntactic play (“staggering stampede”). By

contrast, Rankine’s post-2001 Don’t Let Me Be Lonely and Citizen open with lines as

straightforwardly communicative as those that might be included in the popular media they cite:

“There was a time I could say no one I knew well had died” and “When you are alone and too

tired even to turn on any of your devices…” Here, Rankine finds her talent for imbuing

otherwise prosaic lines with auratic, elegiac force. Unlike precursors like Eliot or Rukeyser, she

enfolds allusions to popular entertainment, not into opaque Modernist lyric, but rather into

language as accessible as the entertainment itself. Indeed, that language is often reminiscent of

the slack, unadorned “email-style” of post-2000 digital journalism. It includes sentences as

seemingly deflated as “His father’s been taken off the ventilator and will clearly not be able to

breathe for himself much longer”

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and “In 2004 Alves was excused from officiating any more

matches on the final day of the U.S. open after she made five bad calls against Serena in her

quarterfinal matchup against fellow American Jennifer Capriati.”

170

The poet of Citizen, as Nick

Laird has noted, is too tired to “turn on [her] devices” in more ways than one.

171

Between the second and third phases of her career, Rankine’s work came to reflect the

ubiquity, not only of digital media, but of social media content and the iWitness account.

Rankine’s interest in popular media has in all phases fixated on the types that describe real,

tragic events. The poet, for example, has dwelt on stories about celebrity deaths or natural

disasters, both of which—the first in particular—are now subjects of some of the most mega-

viral content (her work discusses, e.g., Princess Diana’s death and Hurricane Katrina). More

particularly, Rankine had long taken an interest in the media’s descriptions of crimes or

infractions. When, in her pre-2001 work, she twice refers to TV, she each time references crime

coverage (footage of a beating at the LA riots and reports of a mother’s murder of her child). Her

2004 Don’t Let Me Be Lonely then takes, as one of its major themes, violent crimes of various

kinds, as reported in print or on TV news. She references, for example, multiple hate crimes and

acts of police brutality (like those committed against James Byrd Jr., Abner Louima and Amadou

Diallo), a gang related homicide, an adolescent’s murder of a six-year-old, and a terrorist attack

(9/11).

172

In Citizen, her emphasis on criminality takes on a broader scope, covering not only acts

of violence, but also more everyday sorts of infractions. The book is largely divided between

narrative accounts of microaggressions, which Rankine collected from friends and

acquaintances, and discussions of other sorts of mediated transgressions, from police murders of

Black citizens to Serena Williams’s supposedly inappropriate outbursts on the tennis court.

Between Don’t Let Me Be Lonely and Citizen, however, Rankine’s treatment of the

crimes on which she focused began to reflect the ascendance of the iWitness account. Consider,

for example, the difference between the ways that the book’s lyric speakers describe criminality.

In Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, the narrator tends to present crimes in two ways reminiscent of much

traditional crime reporting: first, by presenting facts about the events described through collages

of quotations from relevant sources, so as to, second, suggest the epistemological authority of the

news-media that originally conveyed them. Rankine’s first description of a hate crime, for

example, the murder of James Byrd Jr., proceeds in the following fashion: the narrator quotes

Cornell West on the topic of American optimism, then mentions how George Bush, as quoted on

TV, was unable to “remember if two or three people were convicted for dragging a black man to

his death in his home state of Texas”; the mention of the crime is accompanied by a still photo of

the victim, James Byrd Jr., and two photos of the crime scene. Rankine’s allusion to Bush’s

ignorance of the facts of the crime, as originally reported, suggests their fixity; so too does the

note at the end of the book which, in clinical terms, lists a few more of its details (where it

occurred, who perpetrated it, etc.).

173

Rankine describes the next violent crime that she discusses,

the police assault of Abner Louima, by rehearsing facts and quotations in a quasi-list form. She

quotes Louima (“I hope what comes out of my case is change...”); she lists some details of the

case (“It’s been four years since he was sodomized with a broken broomstick while in police

custody…He has just agreed to a settlement with the city and police union for 8.7 million

dollars…”

174

); she quotes his lawyer, and then continues in this fashion.

In Citizen, by contrast, Rankine more often narrates crimes in the two distinct manners of

the iWitness account. First, she presents them beginning to end as from the perspective of a

present witness. Second, she describes them so as to confer epistemological authority on the

reader, who is addressed as a “you” with opinions about the crime that may differ from an

official story. Consider first, for example, her manner of narrating the book’s microaggressions,

including the following events: a Black patient is mistaken by her therapist for a home intruder; a

Black academic is lectured by a colleague about affirmative action; a Black woman is referred to

by her white friend as a “nappy headed ho.”

175

Each instance is narrated from beginning to end in

the second person, and with reference throughout to “your” thought process as it occurs (e.g.

“You are in this dark in the car….he tells you his dean is making him hire a person of

color…you think maybe this is an experiment…etc.”).

176

The use of the second person

synthesizes social media’s structure of “prosumption,” whereby each user is encouraged to see

the content as a potential means through which to represent herself. She is encouraged, more

specifically, to formulate an opinion. The microaggressions as Rankine narrates them, in keeping

with the genre’s features, are inherently undecidable and therefore require “your” interpretation.

Rankine follows up most of their descriptions with an initial expression of uncertainty and

disbelief (“What did he just say? Did I hear what I think heard?”)

177

followed by a circling,

hermeneutic inner monologue (“Maybe the content of her statement is irrelevant…Maybe she is

jealous of whoever kept you…Maybe she…etc.”).

178

Where Citizen recounts other sorts of

crimes or infractions, moreover, it does so in a similarly iWitness-account-like fashion. To

address the topic of Serena’s allegedly bad tennis serves and inappropriate responses, Rankine’s

narrator describes each incident in Serena’s career from beginning to end, in (mostly)

chronological order, spanning the years 2004 through 2015. She does so, moreover, in a manner

that encourages the reader to make judgments contrary to the official story. Referee Jennifer

Alves may have called Serena’s serves as misses, but the live footage reveals that they were not;

pundits may have called Serena’s outburst inappropriate but the narrative suggests that, after so

many miscalls, her behavior was justified.

179

Finally, parts of the book are meant to be read

alongside a set of six “Situation Videos,” many of which are avant-garde or exaggerated

iWitness accounts—avant-garde because the text presented to accompany them is more abstract

and hermetic than most of Citizen, and exaggerated because the videos, some of which wholly

comprise footage of crimes or infractions (like soccer player Zinedane Zidane’s illegal headbutt

of another player or Hurricane Katrina’s arguably U.S. government-exacerbated damage),

dramatically slow down that footage, as if to emphasize that it is the viewer’s job to carefully

scrutinize and, to the best of her ability, decide the details of the case. As Rankine put it: “The

use of video manipulation…allowed me to slow down and enter the event, in moments, as if I

were there in real time...” This aided her “search for meaning.”

180

The types of crimes described in Citizen, relative to those described in Don’t Let Me Be

Lonely, are also more characteristic of the iWitness account. iWitness accounts, I have argued,

thanks to the unique conditions of their social media circulation, are more likely than much prior

crime reporting to deal not only with serious legal infractions, but also with everyday acts of

rudeness or discrimination (microaggressions) and aesthetic or expressive crimes (offensive

elements in TV shows or films). Indeed, where Don’t Let Me Lonely deals almost exclusively

with violent crimes (police brutality, murder, terrorism), Citizen more often emphasizes

microaggressions or conflicts in the worlds of tennis or soccer. Indeed, it is somewhat ironic that

Citizen is, within Rankine’s corpus, so closely affiliated with Black Lives Matter, when its

predecessor, in fact, devotes more attention to police violence. Citizen mostly focuses on racial

questions as they pertain to academic spaces, popular media, and the artworld.

Citizen does more, though, than simply begin to cite or resemble the iWitness account. It

also begins to grapple with the viral genre’s mixed effects. On the one hand, the book reflects the

iWitness accounts’ empowerment of posters and audience members. It does so, first, formally,

through how it configures its lyric “subject” or narrator. Critics of Rankine’s work have often

taken an interest in this aspect of its construction, arguing that her post-2000 works, like many

late twentieth century or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poems, reflect postmodern ideas about the

subject’s fragmentation and dissolution into cultural and mass-mediated contexts. Anthony Reed

has argued that Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is an “anti-lyric” whose speaker “is so multiply fractured

and contradictory that [the poem] demands reconception of the singularity and integrity of the

poetic ‘voice.’”

181

Kamram Javadizadeh has extended that argument to Citizen, suggesting that

the book challenges the integrity of the presumably white lyric subject through the production of

an even more radically “open text”—“open” not only due to its media-collage form, but also to

its protean nature (he cites the poem’s perpetually updating page).

182

As far as Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is concerned, this argument is accurate. The book,

though in many ways radically distinct from L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and related late-twentieth

century poetries, similarly reflects postmodern ideas about

the subject’s dissolution into cultural contexts. Indeed,

Rankine’s work has much in common with the strain of

mid-to-late-century poetry, by poets like Baraka or Olson,

that crystallized abstract postmodern ideas through a

concrete focus on the material or body. (In this sense, one

might also say that Rankine participates in what some

have called a recent, post-post-modern “material turn,”

which nonetheless has roots in the postmodern period).

Consider first, for example, the relation that the book

Figure 3.4

establishes, both thematically and formally, between the self and its cultural surroundings. The

prevailing metaphor that the book uses for this relationship is the metaphor of the “liver” (Figure

3.4). Toward the center of the book, the narrative voice that has, throughout the text, curated and

commented on its cultural references, transcribes a conversation that she—by implication this

book’s author—has had with an editor. In this conversation, she expresses her desire to write a

book in which the “I” or authorial “subject” is not simply defined (“am ‘I’ just a gearshift to get

from one sentence to the next?”…“What does the subject mean to me?”) but rather functions like

the body’s “liver”: as a sort of physical purification system that processes and filters cultural

detritus or—and this is the first time that she uses the word in her work—“content” (“If I am

present in a subject position what responsibility do I have to the content?”). The book’s own

narrative structure reflects that idea. Its nebulous and undefined narratorial “I” appears almost

exclusively through her (or his, their) treatment of a collage of cultural artifacts, which operate as

the fragments of her being. Moreover, rather than asserting herself in relation to the objects by

taking any sort of clear stance on them, the narrating subject seems simply to physically mingle

with them in a digestive process akin to the liver’s decomposition of food. Indeed, Lisa

Siriganian has complained that this “small feeble liver,” which feels the blow when it sees police

violence on TV or gets a headache thinking about a reported murder, has nothing to say for itself

in relation to the media it consumes but one of the poem’s repeated refrains: “I am here.”

183

Citizen, however, is different. It more closely reflects social media content’s

reconfigurations of the subject, in relation to the media he or she consumes. To be sure, Citizen’s

lyric or narratorial subject, like postmodern and social media-based subjects alike, is artificial

and constructed. Like the subject of Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, she finds expression through a

complex collage of external media objects. In the process, however, she comes to look less like

the chaotically and amorphously dissolved subject of the postmodern anti-lyric, and more like

the at least partially empowered user of social media. First, by narrating much of Citizen in the

second person, Rankine hails the reader as “prosumer”: a user who encounters each piece of

content that she surveys as an expression of her own opinion or identity. Indeed, one might

argue, with Wendy Chun, that the “You” of Youtube is Web 2.0’s signature pronoun; as Jill

Abramson reports, one of Buzzfeed’s early data-driven discoveries was that content spreads

faster when the word “you” is included in the headline.

184

Moreover, the “you” of Rankine’s text

is not figured as an amorphous and ill-defined entity who, like the “liver” of Don’t Let Me Be

Lonely, passively sifts through cultural material. Rather, like the subject of social media, she has,

by implication, a position to assert. She is implicitly configured as Black, the victim of the

book’s microaggressions. And she is empowered, through the iWitness account form, to take a

stance contrary to “official” stories. The accumulation of microaggressions—seen through the

eyes of the person who regularly experiences them—will make the reader more likely to accept

their validity in any one case. The collective sum of Serena’s encounters with questionable calls

will encourage sympathy with her strong responses. In sum, if the narratorial subject of Don’t

Let Me Be Lonely becomes present by asserting bodily presence (“I am here”) the subject of

Citizen becomes present, like the subject on social media, by having a “take.” These are also the

terms in which, in her own viral New York Times Magazine essay on Williams, Rankine

describes the tennis pro. It is when Serena protests, Rankine argues, that “we actually see her.

She shows us her joy, her humor and, yes, her rage (emphasis mine).”

185

Similarly, while writing Citizen, Rankine, herself, began for the first time to make her

voice heard by way of viral media. She did this, not only by encouraging the book’s entwinement

with the Black Lives Matter Movement (e.g., through her updating page), but also by producing

supplemental content. Before Citizen’s publication, Rankine almost never published nonfiction.

After, she collaborated with multiple media outlets to produce anti-racist media. This media

included, for example, prominent New York Times articles on Black death and Serena Williams

(the second is still her most shared story, reaching true mainstream “viral” status with more than

500,000 shares), and interviews with Buzzfeed and Elle educating readers about everyday

racism.

186

Meanwhile, Rankine, at the time, often celebrated social media and the iWitness

account as instruments of empowerment. In multiple interviews she stated that she was perhaps

“naively optimistic” about social media, because they made events like Michael Brown’s death

“your problem…because you can see it” (emphasis mine).

187

But Rankine also began—even within Citizen’s pages—to register the flipside of viral

media’s empowerment of its creators and audiences: its expanded opportunities for their

exploitation. In Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, Rankine begins to allude to the theme of artwork’s

inevitable commodification (for example, she mentions her editor’s desire for her to write lines

that can serve as “ad copy”).

188

By Citizen, however, that commodification—and particularly of

the black artist’s work—has become one of her major themes. Appropriately, the conversation

begins with a piece of social media content, one of Jayson Musson, alias Hennessy Youngman’s,

viral Youtube videos: “How to Be a Successful Black Artist.” Musson, as Rankine glosses him,

satirizes the pressure that the Black artist feels to “engage in a performance of blackness,”

producing a “commodified anger” that can be “played like the race card.”

189

Rankine’s treatment

of the topic continues, not only in Citizen, but also in her companion essay on Serena Williams,

wherein she discusses Serena as corporate brand: Serena’s “black excellence” is of the type that

can be “commodified,” and at stake in her fame is “what it means to be chosen by global

corporations.”

190

That Rankine now becomes more concerned with Black talent’s

commodification should come as no surprise, given that Citizen is her first book to cement its

popular—and therefore relatively more lucrative—status by merging with social media content.

Indeed, shortly after publishing it, Rankine was already beginning to question social media’s

“contentification” of black suffering in forms like the iWitness account, and her book’s own

participation in the process. “All of those dead black bodies in the media,” she reflected a few

years later, like those that she had “thought it was important to show in her work,” were being

served up via “supply-and-demand.” And she could not help but ask: “what is being bought,

given, made, and sold?” (the implicit answer: Black death).

191

III. The White Card

Throughout 2016, controversy swirled around the Whitney Biennial’s decision to display Dana

Schutz’s Open Casket, a painting which depicted the mutilated body of the fourteen-year-old

lynching victim Emmett Till. The debate, which largely took place on social media, centered on

the charge of cultural appropriation. From Schutz’s perspective, the composition of her painting

was, as she described it, an act of empathy. She had created the work, not by looking at the

famous newspaper photographs of

Till’s body—taken at his mother

Mamie Till-Mobley’s bold behest—

but rather by reading Till-Mobley’s

description of the image. She said: “I

don't know what it is like to be black

in America but I do know what it is

like to be a mother.”

192

Her

Figure 3.5

dissenters, meanwhile, argued that the painting’s composition was an act of exploitation. The

artist Hannah Black wrote an open letter accusing Schutz of “transmut[ing] Black suffering into

profit and fun.”

193

Meanwhile, the artist Parker Bright stood in front of the painting wearing a

tee-shirt bearing the words: “Black Death Spectacle” (Figure 3.5).

Of the public figures who became involved in the controversy, Claudia Rankine was one

of the most active. Her Racial Imaginary Institute, funded by her MacArthur Genius Grant,

hosted an open forum on the controversy. And the theme cropped up again in Rankine’s next

piece of literary work, her 2019 play the White Card. That play, likely less familiar to most

readers than Citizen, comprises two acts. In the first, much longer act, an art collector named

Charles Spencer and his wife Virginia host a Black female artist named Charlotte Cummings for

dinner at their home. Also present are the Spencers’ activist son Alex and an art dealer named

Eric. In the second act, which takes place a few months later, Charles comes to see Charlotte in

her studio, where the two engage in a dialogue. During this second act, Charles and Charlotte

discuss Dana Schutz’s painting, which “moved” Charles, but inspired Charlotte (among other

experiences) to change her own work.

194

The play is also full of other echoes of the Open Casket

controversy. Charlotte uses the phrase “black death spectacle,” and Charles’s wife Virginia,

echoing Schutz, attempts to empathize with Black suffering through the vehicle of her

motherhood (“I feel terrible for all those mothers who lost their sons”).

195

The first act ends with

Charles unveiling an artwork that blends Open Casket with Kenneth Goldsmith’s similarly

controversial poem “the Body of Michael Brown”: a visual diagram of Brown’s corpse.

That Rankine took special interest in the Open Casket controversy comes as no surprise.

The controversy, as I have suggested, animated the very problem that Citizen had begun to

explore: the fact that viral media like the iWitness account—and, by extension, art that imitates

or is intertwined with it—can exploit, commodify, or “content-ify” black suffering. In the most

recent phase of her career, Rankine has experimented with solutions to that problem. She has

done so, most extensively, in The White Card, which can be read as a manifesto for Black art and

expression in the social media era. The play, to begin with, has much in common with the work

that Rankine produced in the immediately previous stage of her career. Like Don’t Let Me Be

Lonely and Citizen, it concerns itself with the very-present day, and with an array of differently

mediated and largely digital media objects. It includes mentions, for example, of the Ferguson

and Charlottesville riots, of U.S. open tennis (Serena) and Colin Kaepernick, of La La Land and

Moonlight, and of viral essays by Teju Cole and Ta-Nehisi Coates (“White Savior Complex” and

“My President Was Black”).

196

The play’s text also includes still images of artworks mentioned,

like Rauschenberg’s White Painting or Glen Ligon’s Hands. Like those books, too, it formally

mirrors social media content in different ways: it includes, for example, its own built in

“comments” section, concluding with a pre-scheduled period of audience discussion.

At the same time, however, the play attempts, in different ways, to reckon with viral

content’s susceptibility to exploitation. It does so, first, by deliberately attempting to exert

increased control over its own reception. To this end, Rankine embraces a more didactic, less

ambiguous approach to racial thematics, in an attempt not only to dictate, but to control the shape

of, audience discussions. The tactic calls to mind her critique of Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, as

described in an interview with Lauren Berlant. Despite the half-irony of the sculpture’s title (it

depicts a gigantic hybrid of a Black woman and a sphinx, or “Mammy-Sphinx”), Rankine

criticizes it on precisely those grounds: as too subtle. Notoriously, many spectators responded to

the piece in immature and racist manners, mocking and sexually objectifying the Mammy-

sphinx’s physique. And while Rankine respects Walker’s “refusal to contextualize or educate

beyond what can be seen,” such that all manner of responses are possible (“if you can’t or won’t

do the math, the space must hold your reactions to it”), her own impulses now work in the other

direction. As she puts it: “I struggle with wanting to reroute the content I am living, and often its

supremacist frame is pushing, pushing back hard.”

197

One way that Rankine “reroutes” the

content, in The White Card, is through a deliberate didacticism (I use the word without its

pejorative connotations). The play is stark in its moral stances, clearly condemning Charles

Spencers’ exploitative attitude toward the Black artists he claims to support, and endorsing

Cummings’ decision to eschew his support (Spencer, for example, has no good response to his

own son’s argument, that the same money that he uses to support Black artists’ work was earned

through investments in the private prison system).

But Rankine also finds another way to resist the “supremacist frame,” working against

what she described, in the above-cited interview, as Citizen’s potential (if not decided)

complicity in the broader culture’s exploitation of Black suffering. During the first act of The

White Card, Charlotte reveals herself to be a partial stand-in for Rankine, an artist who has spent

the past few years working on projects that in some ways resemble Citizen. More particularly,

she has been producing artworks that, like Citizen, resemble iWitness accounts documenting acts

of racism both mild and severe. During the early part of her career, she “stag[ed] small

inadvertent aggressions that are overlooked or repressed in our day to day life”

198

For example,

when a white man knocked over her cousin’s daughter on the bus, she hired actors to replay the

scene. Now, she stages reenactments of more severe offenses, and she is currently working on a

reproduction of the crime scene of the 2015 Charleston church shooting, in which Dylan Rooff

shot and killed nine African-American adults at bible study.

Throughout the first act, however, Charlotte realizes that her works are not being

received by white spectators like Charles in the manner that she would have hoped. Charles,

whose collection entirely comprises artworks about acts of racist violence, grasps the problem of

white supremacy, but sees himself as apart from it: he cannot see any connection between a

lynching and his own investment in private prisons.

199

Moreover, Charlotte is disappointed to

learn, he cannot grasp the distinctions between her own work, as she sees it, and other work

about Black suffering that she finds exploitative and offensive. When, at the end of the first act,

he unveils the piece that he thinks she will like—the diagram of Brown’s dead body—she is

horrified to learn that this is how he sees her work (“If you think what I’m doing is no different

from this than I fail”).

200

Similarly, she cannot impress upon him the difference between a

controversial work about racist violence, Schutz’s Open Casket, and a related but uncontroversial

work appearing at the same Whitney Biennial, Henry Taylor’s painting of Philando Castile. For

Charlotte, the difference is that while Schutz’s work is shallow, Taylor’s involves a “developed

craft and a deep consciousness of his history.”

201

For Charles, the only difference—and the real

source of the controversy—is that one artist is white while the other is black.

In response to the realization of her work’s almost inevitable reduction to a “black death

spectacle” (as she puts it: “There I was, handing over black death spectacle”), Charlotte realizes

that she must change course.

202

More specifically, she must turn the camera around, and show

Charles the very thing he cannot see: his own whiteness, or the fact that he does not stand apart

from the worlds of white supremacy and racial conflict. The thing that has been missing from her

work, she tells him, is “you.”

203

She then proceeds to reveal, to his horror, that her new project is

a series of photographs that she has been taking of him; in the play’s final scene he takes off his

shirt and turns around to let her take a photo of his broad, white back, while, as the camera

flashes, turning his face to her in “horror and confusion.”

204

Charlotte’s project appears to have

two aims. The first aim is not—as imaged critics might suggest—to retrench the dominance of

white life as the primary subject of western art, but rather to return whiteness to this canon (not

that it ever left) in a more self-conscious condition, revealing white identity as a racial position

with interests that its members, whether they realize it are not, actively promote. “I’ve never

actually looked at my skin,” says Charles to Charlotte. “It protects me…from being you.”

205

The

second aim, however—which is less clearly acknowledged, but suggested by the text—is

revenge: to put Charles, and his whiteness, in the same sort of position of exploitability that, in

the worlds of both content and high art, Blackness has been. Indeed, if Jayson Musson’s videos

assert the necessity, in a white dominated artworld, of commodifying Black anger and “play[ing]

the race card,” then Charlotte turns whiteness into the card to be “played.”

Though the conversation is choreographed, its final twist is forceful and, as manifesto,

makes its case. Indeed, Rankine has devoted the most recent stage of her career, in the realms of

art and content production to exposing (and, by extension, exploiting) whiteness, in place of

Blackness. Her most recent book, Just Us, in many ways mirrors Citizen in its formal structure: it

strings together a series of multimedia, lyrical essays, many of which describe brief, racially-

inflected interactions that might be referred to as microaggressions. The book even includes a

full screenshot of a tweet describing a situation of racial discrimination.

206

Now, however, the

focus of Rankine’s ruminations is on whiteness, rather than Blackness, and the stories told center

white privilege, rather than Black suffering: the particular benefits of having blonde hair, for

example, or the manner in which white passengers stroll casually onto planes, unsuspected of

wrongdoing of any kind (the subject of the screen-capped tweet). Rankine has also recently, prior

to the publication of Just Us, coedited a photo anthology called The Image of Whiteness, on the

visual “invention and continuance of the white race.”

207

Even the poet’s digital content has transformed in accordance with her developing aims.

After Citizen’s publication, as I have noted, Rankine became an active digital content creator,

producing op-eds, interviews, and other forms of edutainment for outlets like Buzzfeed and Elle,

where she often served as an explicator of the painful effects of racism. Today, however, her

digital content is beginning to look different. Rather than focusing on Black suffering as the raw

material that will be transformed into shares, comments, likes, and profit, she has taken as her

subject the phenomenon of whiteness. In recent years, for example, she and her husband John

Lucas have created her second most shared piece of viral media—after her Times Essay on

Serena Williams—a photo-essay project (as

remediated, most prominently, by The Atlantic

and Vogue) comprising images of people’s fake

blond hair (as most people’s is. Figure 3.6).

208

Rankine, like most, has found no escape from

social media’s exploitative frameworks—its

datafication, commodification, and re-

appropriation of activist content. But she has

found a way to reroute their operations in the

pursuit of cultural transformation.

Figure 3.6

3. Idrealism: Or, The Confused Female Character

Flip through the pages of books by some of today’s buzziest, younger female authors—

authors like Ottessa Moshfegh, Sally Rooney, Catherine Lacey, Sheila Heti, Elif Batuman, and

Alexandra Kleeman—and you may notice this: that the same type of female character crops up

again and again. Often, she is relatively aimless. The protagonist of Ottessa Moshfegh’s 2018 My

Year of Rest and Relaxation finding herself with no more real purpose in the world, decides to

take a drug which will allow her to sleep through the coming year. The heroine of Catherine

Lacey’s 2017 The Answers, mysteriously ill and deeply in debt, abandons her entire life to

participate in an opaque, absurdist experiment. From Batuman’s titular idiot and Kleeman’s

alienated A, to Lacey’s ethereal drifters and Rooney’s dead-inside damsels, these women are

collectively world-weary and oddly confused. Together, they coalesce into a bewildered chorus,

singing the same hazy refrain: “None of this made sense to me” (The Answers, Lacey); “I had no

idea what you were supposed to be thinking about” (The Idiot, Batuman); “I don’t really think

anything at all” (How Should a Person Be? Heti); “I’ve never worked hard at anything”

(Conversations with Friends, Rooney); “It took me minutes every morning to remember who I

was, how I’d gotten here” (You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, Kleeman).

209

The characterization may reflect the self-effacement that the authors themselves have felt

pressures to perform. Lacey, for example, has confessed that, as a woman, she feels beholden to

“play the fool” and “pretend” that her success “[is] some silly accident, and not decades of

working and reading.”

210

This is likely why, when asked questions like “how do you write?” she

offers responses like: “It’s a blur. I feel confused. Then it’s over.”

211

But this performance—

whether in real-life or fiction—is not wholly self-denigrating. The characters that many young

female authors craft are, like both Dostoyevsky’s and Batuman’s idiots, not true but rather holy

fools—what they simply do not get is what it takes to get ahead. By playing the fool, too, they

are playing it “cool.” In this respect, they are not unlike Lee Konstaninou’s “Cool Characters” or

the female writers of Deborah Nelson’s Tough Enough: like both, they are unsentimental. And

yet rather than canny and knowing, they are dazed and confused (in this respect, their closer

precursor is the punk).

212

These female characters are also not alone in their incomprehension.

They share it, for example, with Youtube and Instagram it-girl Emma Chamberlain, known for

her comically inept cooking videos, or with Jennifer Lawrence, whose signature guffaw has

cemented her star-power. One buzzword that has arisen, to describe this blessed ineptitude, is

“awkward”; the more common is “relatable.”

In this chapter, I trace this popular, female persona—and some of its close cousins—

across the oeuvres of two different types of creators: producers of social media-based, self-help

content and authors of literary fiction with a therapeutic orientation. More specifically, I focus on

young, often Instagram-based female influencers who create content on topics like wellness,

fitness, mental health, and romance, and young, female authors who write literary work (often

called “autofiction”) about similar themes. These two sets of creators, each prominent in their

respective domains, have a few things in common: first, both create work that is either explicitly

self-help or therapeutic in orientation. Second, both operate, in different ways, as

autobiographical presences in, or appendages to, their own work. The female authors, in

particular, often complain—and no doubt justifiably—that, relative to their male peers, they face

more pressure from publishers to operate like influencers: to publicly display their “real” selves

in visually mediated forms, and to do so in the role, not only of comely ingenue, but also of

spiritual guide. As Heti has put it: “so many of the women who become successful writers end up

taking on the role of guru. Their audience wants that of them…they become like mentors or

older sisters or mothers to their entire readership.”

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These two types of creators, moreover, operate in increasingly intertwined industries.

Today, digital creators and literary authors alike work across both social-media and print-based

platforms. “Even a cursory glance at the literary internet,” as Simone Murray puts it, “shows how

print and digital technologies have brokered a truce…Just as earlier broadcast media mined

books for radio readings, film adaptations, and TV book clubs, the digital and print realms

enthusiastically cannibalize each other's content.”

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Indeed, the influencers and authors that I

examine are, more properly, each producers of print-content conglomerates. The most popular

influencers, though best known for their YouTube videos or Instagram posts, leverage their

popularity into book deals, self-present as “literary” writers, or produce “bookish” content (as

Jessica Pressman would call it) at a price (Indeed, they sometimes promote books written by the

authors that I examine, like Sally Rooney).

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Meanwhile, the authors whom I treat, though

known primarily for their print-based, literary writing, do often create the type of influencer-style

content that publishers and readers are said to desire—Lacey, Kleeman, and Batuman maintain

public Instagrams. They also now often publish what one might call “content books,” much like

the compendiums put out by influencers. These are collections, often collaborative, of short-form

ruminations on different female-oriented “lifestyle” topics, like fashion, friendship, or romance.

Some recent examples include Heti et. al’s Women In Clothes, Lacey et. al’s The Art of the

Affair, or Jenny Offill et. al’s The Friend that Got Away (Offill, like a few other authors I’ll

mention, is an only-partial member of the group that I’ve selected).

In her recent, The Self-Help Ethos, Beth Blum has shown how, throughout the twentieth

century, self-help and literature have been “competing for readers’ attention,” converging and

cross-fertilizing.

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This, no doubt, remains true, and the authors on whom I focus do often draw

on social media-based self-help content, while adapting it to more literary ends. But rather than

untangle such webs of influence and resistance (as I did in the first two chapters of this project,

regarding different types of literature and

content) I here, instead, emphasize the

common manners in which both influencers

and authors now respond to a new media

environment: that of increasingly prominent

social networking sites, and their structures

of circulation. They respond, I argue, by

embracing one, overarching aesthetic, of

which the literary character that I have described—of the confused, female, holy fool—provides

a central example. I call this aesthetic “idrealism,” and the posts that are characterized by it

“idrealist posts.” I define it, most generally, as a mode in which equally artificial depictions of

the “ideal” and “real” are placed side by side and permitted to exist in harmony, rather than

eroding one another’s legitimacy. (I call it an aesthetic, or an aesthetic “mode,” and not an

aesthetic “category,” because the term is not already in circulation and therefore, unlike Ngai’s

“interesting” or “cute,” as-yet encodes no prior common set of value judgments). The most

commonly recognizable, and elegantly simple example of idrealism comes in the form of the

popular Instagram-based meme called “Instagram vs. Reality”; in this meme, which has

circulated regularly throughout the past decade, a woman posts side by side pictures of her

“Instagram” physique—posed to emulate perfection—and her “Reality” physique—posed to

highlight flaws—typically taken minutes apart (Figure 4.1). Neither the ideal nor the “real”

picture can claim full veracity, or fully nullify the other. Instead, the barrier between the two, like

the swinging door between the two sign systems of one of Barthes’ mythologies, is perpetually

Figure 4.1

traversable—the viewer can oscillate between investing her (partial) cognitive or emotional faith

in either constructed image. The “reality” image will often, in the parlance of social media, be

classified as “relatable.” But many of the digital effects that are today called “relatable,” as I will

suggest, actually play supporting roles in the creation of idrealist effects. Because today’s self-

help media—like many of its precursors, and for reasons that I will discuss further—tends to

emphasize character, personality, or persona, I will focus on idrealism in those arenas. But

idrealism, much like “realism,” is an aesthetic that can manifest on multiple levels, from

character and plot to linguistic or visual style.

Idrealism, on the one hand, stokes what Lauren Berlant has called “cruel optimism.”

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More to the point, it embodies an ethos of self-improvement that is of and for the era of

ubiquitous content. While the “uplifting anecdote,” as I showed in chapter one, reduces ethics, in

the sense of moral action, to aestheticized self-expression, idrealism reduces ethics, in the sense

of self-cultivation, to an inert, artificial form of interpersonal “relating.” In the first section of

this chapter, I will trace the general development of self-help content on social media (largely on

Facebook and Twitter), showing how the viral context exacerbates self-help’s emphases on

persona (or characterization) and immediate, emotional rewards. Next, in the second section, I

will show how these general trends crystallize in the form of Instagram content, and more

particularly in its embrace of the aesthetic that I call idrealism (or the genre of the idrealist post).

In the third section, I will draw some basic parallels between the worlds of online, and

particularly Instagram-based self-help, and those depicted in recent novels by six female authors:

Batuman, Heti, Kleeman, Moshfegh, Lacey, and Rooney. I will also begin to show how these

books manifest the aesthetic that I have called “idrealism,” largely on the level of character, but

also of genre. Finally, in section four, Moshfegh’s work will take center stage, exemplifying how

an author both adapts and revises the idrealist aesthetic. Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and

Relaxation embraces the “idrealist” trope of the confused female character, but short-circuits its

dazed heroine’s capacity to convey empty “relatability.” Finally, in the chapter’s conclusion, I

will highlight two bodies of work, by and about women, that present even more robust aesthetic

alternatives to idrealism: Jenny Offill’s two recent novels, which dispense of idrealism’s

artificial ideal, and Elena Ferrante’s Neopolitan novels, which eschew its artificial “real.”

I. Self-Help Content: Persona and Emotional Rewards

Social media, broadly speaking, is awash with self-help content. Such content belongs to the

larger category that I have identified as “self-oriented” or navel-gazing content—one of four

major categories represented in my database (see introduction). Within this category, the most

frequently-shared content genre is the quiz. Indeed, the most shared piece of content collected in

my dabatase is “Which birthdates are most common?”, requiring that the reader select her

birthday to discover how common it is.

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Much of the remainder of this self-oriented content

comes in the form of advice or how-to content. It may focus on emotional or therapeutic topics

(“Person Asks Online For Advice On How To Deal With Grief. This Reply Is Incredible”

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), on

relationships, childrearing, or family (“Why Parents Should Go to All of Their Kids Games”

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on workplace success (“Great Leadership Isn’t About Control It’s About Empowering

People”

221

), on fitness, physical wellness, or beauty (“Five Effective Leg Exercises You Can Do

at Home”

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), or on other practical concerns (“37+ Easy Bullet Journal Ideas.”

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). Though

largely gender-neutral, this content does—like much self-help, have a slight female bent. A

critical mass of the relationship and family advice is geared toward mothers, with a smaller

amount addressing fathers. The majority of the fitness or beauty advice—though, again, by no

means all—targets women. This is nothing new. A long and familiar association between

middlebrow, mass-market culture and femininity has led the self-help industry to focus its recent

expansion on female consumers. Two commonly-cited statistics reflect this fact: between 2000

and 2019, the self-help industry grew from a 2.48 billion

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to an 11.6 billion

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dollar sector, and

then only expanded more dramatically during the Covid-19 pandemic

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; meanwhile, women

(and mostly affluent women) make up an estimated seventy percent of the self-help market.

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The self-help that circulates on Facebook and Twitter exacerbates and concentrates some

of the genre’s pre-existing tendencies. Self-help, to begin with, has long emphasized personality

or persona. Indeed, what Warren Susman has famously called the twentieth century’s shift of

emphasis from “character” to “personality”—or from moral essence and “self-sacrifice” to

outward charisma and “self-realization”— is often associated with the early century’s self-help

boom.

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Dale Carnegie’s bestselling, 1936 How to Win Friends and Influence People not only

preached the tenets of likability, but performed them through a dazzling array of ingratiating

rhetorical devices (“Why then, did I have the temerity to write another book? And, after I had

written it, why should you bother to read it? Fair questions, both, and I’ll try to answer them.”)

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Self-help has also always, to some degree or other, provided readers not only with pragmatic

advice, but also with more immediate emotional satisfactions. As Kenneth Burke writes of self-

help readers, with reference to Carnegie’s book: “The lure of the book resides in the fact that the

reader, while reading it, is then living in the aura of success. What he wants is easy success, and

he gets it in the symbolic form of mere reading itself.”

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Burke likely overstates the average

self-help reader’s lassitude. But there is plausibility in his observation, that the genre, for many,

may offer a brief, reassuring diversion, rather than a goad to real change (The social scientific

research on self-help’s efficacy and effects, in this respect, is broadly conflicting).

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On Facebook and Twitter, self-help collapses into its performance of these two functions.

First, the most shared self-help content on these platforms focuses particularly on persona or

personality, and in a novel way—it focuses not so much on the persona of the creator as of the

viewer, presenting itself as a vehicle through which audiences can express themselves. Second,

in the process, this content focuses less on offering viewers realistic, pragmatic advice on how to

change—something it often never does—than on providing them with more immediate

emotional rewards. Consider, for example, a fairly typical piece of most-shared, self-help

content, “Is drinking wine better than going to the gym, according to scientists yes!” The

“advice” offered in this article is minimal, at best—presumably, the program suggested is to

“drink wine,” though the article never says when or how much, and even admits that, despite the

findings of the single study that it cites, “doctors are still unlikely to recommend their patients to

start drinking any type of alcohol.”

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Clearly, Facebook and Twitter users are not meant to

seriously study this guidance—rather, they are meant to share the article, in faux self-deprecating

displays of their own fun-loving overindulgence, aversion to the gym, etc. Rather than

compelling readers to change, the article offers them an emotional payoff in their current state—

the pleasure, for example, of solidarity with others who are similarly deviant.

Indeed, the lion’s share of the top thirty, most mega-viral pieces of self-help content in

my archive follow this basic formula: they invoke “science” or authority, typically in the form of

one study, to defend some course of action that many are already likely taking, but, for some

reason or other, may need to feel justified in taking. In some cases, this may be a hedonistic or

leisurely activity, at odds with so-called higher pursuits—see, for example, “neuroscientists

strongly recommend you visit the beach regularly” or “people who are always late are more

successful and live longer, says science.”

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In other cases, it may be a style of living (typically,

parenting) to which the reader feels self-righteously attached, and which she may therefore want

to proclaim as a maxim—see, for example, “Raising our kids near their grandparents was the

greatest gift we could ever give them.”

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Moreover, machine learning methods suggest that this sub-genre dominates the corpus. A

classifier (as employed in the previous two chapters) trained to distinguish between 1,000 self-

help and non self-help headlines distinguishes the self-help headlines (with an accuracy of

81.9%), primarily, on some predictable grounds (Table 4.1).

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Among the top most

distinguishing words are expected terms like “lessons,” “happier,” “weight,” and “diet.” But it

also makes its judgments in less predictable ways: First, through words that appeal to science or

authority (“psychologists,” “experts”); and second, through words that indicate the very types of

entities that readers of self-help are typically attempting to avoid, like “wine,” “chocolate,” and

even, in the number one place, “fat.” These results make sense when considered in light of the

dominance of the “science says bad thing x is actually good for you” genre. Viral self-help, in

sum, caters to an audience, whether real or imagined, that fits Burke’s caricature to a tee. In the

process, it treats the viewer less as the beneficiary than as the dispenser of wisdom. She does not

surrender to the self-help

author’s charismatic person;

she uses the self-help content

to express her own.

That viral self-help

places a particularly strong

emphasis on persona and

performance, should, by now, come as no surprise. As I’ve argued throughout this dissertation,

Table 4.1

digital content’s key, distinguishing feature, relative to its precursors, is its overwhelming drive

to inspire not just consumption—or viewing—but also “prosumption”: self-expression in the

form of shares, comments, and likes. In the content economy, almost every pop-cultural genre

becomes something more of an instrument of personal performance. That viral self-help

prioritizes immediate, emotional effects over pragmatic advice also makes sense, given that

content thrives on inspiring an affective response—the more shares, comments, and likes a piece

of content compels, the more ad-revenue it can generate. But this second aspect of viral self-help

content also reflects broader trends, responsive to other cultural developments. In recent years, as

Beth Blum notes, popular self-help as a whole has taken a turn toward “anti-self-help,” whose

prime exemplars, like Mark Manson’s bestselling The Subtle Art of Not Giving A Fuck, urge

readers to resist the culture of perpetual self-improvement—to accept rather than change their

current states.

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The recent success of this type of media bespeaks a widespread exhaustion with

self-betterment. One cause, among many, may be social media’s exacerbation, particularly

amongst millennial audiences, of the drive toward self-improvement. Platforms like Facebook

and Twitter, by exposing people more regularly to one another’s lives, have encouraged

relentless self-comparison, and particularly along the superficial vectors on which these

platforms focus: physical appearance (as displayed in photos), or relationship status (as stated on

Facebook). As a result, they have arguably helped produce a generation more single-mindedly

devoted to “self-optimization,” and glutted with media facilitating it—one commonly-cited

statistic shows that, in 2015, 94 percent of millennials had made personal improvement

commitments, compared to 81 percent of gen-Xers and 84 percent of baby-boomers.

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Arguably, then, platforms like Facebook and Twitter have contributed both to the disease and its

(alleged) cure: they have helped stoke a fever-pitch of obsession with self-improvement, and

then dispensed the content that promises respite.

II. Instagram Self-Help: “Relatability,” and the Rise of Idrealism

Nowhere are the described developments clearer than on Instagram, the go-to-platform for self-

help content. Indeed, no discussion of the genre could be complete without it (despite its

exclusion from my own database, for reasons discussed in my introduction). Since its founding

in 2010, and purchase by Facebook in 2012, Instagram has overtaken comparable photo-sharing

apps, like Tumblr and Flickr, in active monthly users. The platform is best-known for its cadre of

so-called influencers, who post content, often both on Instagram and YouTube, monetized

primarily through sponsorship deals. Today, thanks to the introduction of agencies and

middleman, these deals are increasingly expensive, with popular influencers charging between

$50,000 to $70,000 for a single video.

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Since its inception, the platform has prioritized different

types of content—as we’ll soon see, industry insiders often divide the platform’s history into two

phases. Throughout, however, a few things have remained stable. First, the platform has

produced a critical mass of content that, to some degree or other, might be called self-help:

content, that is to say, that presents audiences with an ideal vision of beauty, romance, or

wellbeing, and, to some degree or other, instructs them on how to realize it—though this may

simply be by purchasing particular products. Second, the platform, in its production of self-help

content, has, to a greater extent than Facebook or Twitter, born out the implicit association

between female consumers and mass-market advice. Top influencers in areas associated with

personal development or wellness (food, travel, fashion, design, lifestyle, and fitness) are mostly

female—of the 99 top influencers in those areas listed by the marketing firm Hubspot in 2019

(excluding families or groups), 70 are women.

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Instagram users, too, skew female, with women

comprising 56.4 percent of the platform’s subscribers in 2020.

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Instagram self-help, like that on Facebook and Twitter, concentrates the genre’s

emphases on individual persona and immediate emotional reward. To begin with, this self-help

content is inextricable from the influencer who creates it. It stands or falls on the basis of

(usually) her personal appeal, which lures followers to her page, and keeps them eager for

updates. Advertisers and influencers alike tend to use one, catch-all term, by now almost

meaningless in its generality, to describe the influencer’s allure. “The value of the content,” as

Wired puts it, “is derived from the perceived authority—and, most importantly, authenticity—of

its creator.”

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At the same time, throughout the commonly-cited two phases of Instagram’s

development, Instagram self-help has placed increasing emphasis on immediate emotional

satisfaction, and decreasing emphasis on pragmatic or future-oriented advice—in this sense, it

has mirrored Facebook and Twitter’s convergence on “anti-self-help.” In the so-called first phase

of Instagram’s development, lasting until the late 2010s, influencers mostly presented idealized

visions of their lives toward which viewers could aspire. These influencers were praised as

“authentic” because, when compared with celebrities, they seemed relatively “real,” posting

photos of themselves shopping at the grocery store, checking into a hotel, or spending a lazy

Sunday with family. But the vision of everyday life that they presented was still largely

idealized, dappled with perfect physiques, breathtaking vistas, and carefully curated

representations of domestic bliss. These influencers also presented audiences with some of the

(alleged) means of achieving their apparent beatitude—they might, for example, offer practical

instructions, in the form of workout regimens or meal plans, or simple models from which to

draw “inspiration” (as well, of course, as sponsored product recommendations). In the second

phase, however, beginning in the later 2010s, influencers began to dismantle their idealized

facades, becoming, in the parlance of the medium, not simply “authentic,” but also more

“relatable”—their “relatability” might come in the form of unflattering photos or longer posts

revealing their personal, emotional struggles. “Honesty [is] in,” a spokeswoman for the

prominent Instagram talent agency Gleam told the Guardian in 2019;

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Meanwhile, Dayna

Tortorici noted the platform’s “stay at home depressive” turn.

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In posts displaying their

imperfections and vulnerabilities, influencers, at least momentarily, offered viewers not a

roadmap toward a more ideal future, but rather solace and solidarity in the present moment—

take heart, these posts seemed to say, I too am simply struggling to be me.

Take, for example, the popular lifestyle influencer Lee Tilghman (“Lee From America”)

whose trajectory mirrored that

of the platform as a whole.

Between 2014 and 2018, Lee

amassed thousands of followers,

through a feed primarily focused

on idealized food and fitness

content—she was best known

for her visually elaborate salads

and smoothie bowls, as well as

for her sundrenched images of hiking, yoga, and trips to the beach. Her posts, during this period

(Figure 4.2)

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, showed viewers images of a life they might wish to imitate, and gave—or sold—

them some of the tools to do so: Lee disseminated meal plans in $10 pamphlets, hosted paid

workshops on how to follow her gluten free, low-sugar, hormone-manipulating diet, and

Figure 4.2

recommended products like clay masks and name brand avocados. In February of 2019,

however, after producing two years of content that began to bespeak some behind-the-scenes

struggle (where her yoga photos used to include captions describing the poses depicted, they

were now often flanked by meditations on “self-worth”), Lee suddenly disappeared from the

platform. When she returned, five months later, she and her feed appeared transformed. Sporting

an almost aggressively unflattering haircut, and unveiling a less obsessively chiseled physique,

Lee now devoted her posts to raw personal confession: she opened up about the struggle with

orthorexia—or pathological obsession with health—that, she now said, had been turning her

private life into a nightmare. If Lee’s early posts compelled self-optimizing action, her new posts

(Figure 4.3)

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offered audiences a

simpler form of satisfaction: the

catharsis of “relating” to Lee in her

struggle, and taking to the

comments section to share their own

(of course, Lee still suggested one

concrete form of action: purchasing

the books, furniture, and pet

products that she now promoted in

place of yoga pants and supplements).

But where influencers like Lee may have entirely changed course, most simply began to

integrate “relatable” content into their otherwise idyllic feeds—few fit-fluencers, for example,

failed to produce at least one “Instagram vs. Reality” post. In this sense, Instagram’s “relatable”

turn was in fact a turn toward the aesthetic that I am calling “idrealism”: a juxtaposition of two,

Figure 4.3

often equally artificial visions of the “ideal” and

“real,” or the aspirational and relatable. Idrealism

typically manifests, not only in the form of the

ubiquitous “Instagram vs. Reality” meme, but

also in the combination of an idealized visual

image with a caption exposing the less-than-

perfect reality behind it—see, for example,

Natasha Adamo’s “ten years ago” post, Kayla

Itsiness’s discussion of being asked to don high-

waisted swimwear, and Sjana Elisse’s sports

illustrated-style spreads coupled with real-talk

about self-loathing (Figure 4.4).

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In a recent

New York Magazine article, discussing

Instagram’s new wave, Tavi Gevenson self-

consciously translates this newly popular style

into narrative form. She writes, of her time in

New York:

When I review posts from this era now, I almost envy my own life as though it were

someone else’s. Then I mentally fill it out with everything that happened off camera.

Here’s my friend and me dancing at a fashion party in very tiny outfits; today, we no

longer speak. Here’s me in the pool at my Palm Springs Airbnb; I self-medicated so

much I missed my flight home. Here’s me posing at the Met Ball; I sent my therapist an

email declaring my spiritual crisis from inside the after-party bathroom.

“The next era of Instagram,” she closes the essay, “is all about the ‘relatable influencer,’ with

trends like #nomakeup, #nofilter, #mentalhealth, #bodyimage, and ‘Instagram vs. Reality’

memes. I now realize that in this essay, I’ve hit five out of five.”

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Figure 4.4

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Often, idrealism pervades not simply single posts, but an entire influencer’s persona.

Many newly popular influencers of the #relatable era follow this same formula—they appeal, to

some degree, because they achieve

some form of superficial

flawlessness; and yet they present

themselves, in its pursuit, as

woefully or adorably incompetent.

Take, for example, Cassie Ho,

who, while documenting the

maintenance of her miniscule

physique, also embraces a quirky,

“epic fail” persona, posting weekly about her gluttonous love of food, simple inability to stop

snacking, and laziness (Figure 4.5).

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Or take the popular teen influencers Emma Chamberlain

and Joana Ceddia. Both effortlessly embody one version of Gen Z “cool”—they adorn their lithe

frames with crop tops and tinted glasses—and are beloved for their irreverent humor. At the

same time, they embrace airhead personae, constantly announcing their awkwardness,

Figure 4.5

Figure 4.6

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incompetence, and basic loser-dom. See, for example, Chamberlain’s posts about being unable to

drive her uber or attract a boyfriend, or Ceddia’s recent confession of being “lazy” coupled with

a picture of her messing up her own makeup (Figure 4.6).

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The recently infamous Caroline

Calloway, too—before her Instagram became the site of an avant-garde meltdown—has

tempered her curated visions of extravagant partying at elite universities with confessions of

social awkwardness. In one post, she pays homage to the patron saint of cool girl incompetence:

“I don’t know what to do at parties and not in a cool jlaw way!!”

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There are two types of female influencers, at least, who make use of “idrealism”; they do

so in ways that indulge different “ideal” fantasies and convey different “real” vulnerabilities.

First, there are more mainstream, girl-next-door (or supermodel-next-door) female influencers—

I’ll use the Gleam agency’s Niomi Smart, who currently has 1.5 million followers, as an

example. Second, there are the slightly more edgy, often Gen Z influencers—I’ll use Emma

Chamberlain, who currently has 10.3 million followers, as an example. Both types of influencers

depict lives that, in similar ways, feel ideal. Indeed, on the “ideal” side of the “idrealist”

equation, both produce feeds that encode fantasies about a world that is no work and all play—or

in which work is play (or “playbor”). Indeed, this is one idyllic dream of the Instagram feed: of a

life in which all one does is engage in leisure or self-care activities—travelling, eating, dressing,

exercising, socializing, crafting—and gets paid for it, to boot. For Niomi Smart, that means yoga,

vegan-cooking, and spending time with her boyfriend (or, more recently, fiancé, and then, even

more recently, ex-fiancé). Hers, like the world of most mainstream influencers, is the soft-lit,

sunset world of the harlequin romance, in which the fleeting presence of the tall, tousle-haired

boyfriend is a rare but indispensable feature. For Emma Chamberlain, it means cavorting around

L.A., in thrift store outfits, with her equally irreverent friends.

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On the more “realist” or “relatable” side of the idrealist equation, both types of

influencers, these days, are not afraid to occasionally admit that influencing is hard work. Niomi

and Emma alike will sometimes show their followers the day to day of their work schedules—

attending meetings, managing photoshoots, or, in Emma’s case, doing the painstaking labor of

editing her elaborately cut Youtube videos. These influencers, however, are apt to reveal their

personal efforts, vulnerabilities, or consternations in different ways. Mainstream influencers like

Smart are unafraid to present themselves as dedicated, competent professionals in an avowedly

and wholly commercial industry. Smart, for example, always appears beautiful, put-together, and

composed, as much while lounging by her pool as while taking us inside the creation of the ad-

campaign for her skin care line. “And that’s a wrap,” she smiles, in a recent photo taken after a

shoot. “This weekend has been the @mysmartskin debut campaign shoot! It’s been the most

incredible experience seeing @mysmartskin come to life having worked on creating the business

during the past two years.”

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These influencers’ forays into realism or “relatability” also

typically involve revealing how, in work or life, they face emotional hurdles: “Life is a

rollercoaster at the moment,” Smart writes in a Covid-19 themed post “but I’m trying to make

time for the little things to keep grounded in a world that is so unpredictable.”

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Meanwhile, edgier influencers, like Chamberlain, have more traditionally avant-garde

aspirations. Like many artists before them, they seem, while eager to emphasize their status as

serious creators doing artistic work, equally intent on downplaying their identity as industry

professionals engaged in more commercial pursuits. Emma is happy to demonstrate the

laboriousness of her craft—her genuinely innovative and amusing YouTube videos famously

feature jump cuts to footage of herself, scowling at her laptop at 3 or 4am, working to put

together the very video that we are watching.

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But she is at pains to separate herself from an

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influencer like Smart’s more banal professionalism—for Emma, “relatability” often means

violating decorum, like posting close-up, deliberately unflattering pictures of her acne-spotted

face or ironically flashing middle fingers in every other shot. Where Smart earnestly owns her

product lines and ad campaigns with a smile, Chamberlain pushes products with the ironic eye-

roll of a kid who’s being forced to do this by her parents. “DECLAN N FRANKIE MERCH” she

labels one of her recent photos, showing off the so-unfashionable-they’re-fashionable sweat suits

she is selling, featuring decals and patches meant to represent her two cats, Declan and

Frankie.

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“Buy my planner” she commands in another, “its really fun n stuff and can help u

organize stuff and stuff and i made it pretty for ur eyes to look at.”

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This is so often the purpose

of Emma’s “relatably” ostentatious cluelessness, spaceyness, ineptitude, and confusion: to show

that, when it comes to seeming sexy, cool, compelling, or in other ways enviable—which is to

say, on Instagram, marketable—she’s doing it by accident. It’s not that Emma is not trying to be

those things. It’s more that she really just doesn’t get it. When she posts bikini shots otherwise

worthy of Victoria’s Secret, she messes up by squinting into the sun.

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In one recent photo, she

gazes vaguely past the camera, slight

blemishes visible on her skin, but still

otherwise lithe, youthful, and

symmetrical, beside the caption: “I’m

breaking out and all of my acrylic

nails r falling off and i have two rolls

of toilet paper left at my house and

all the stores are sold out of toilet

Figure 4.7

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paper but ill be okay.” The post earns many likes and laughs, but one commenter, at least, is not

taken in: “at least you’ve got a skinny shnoze” (Figure 4.7).

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What makes Smart and Chamberlain’s feeds identifiably “idrealist” is the fact that their

ideal and realist aspects—both of which are stylized and curated—can exist in such harmony.

Anyone scrolling through their feeds still feels the ideal’s effects: Smart’s life, in most respects,

still looks impossibly perfect, and viewers can lose themselves in this fantasy of beauty, success,

and domestic harmony—as well as buy the products that Smart says she uses to help realize it.

But in moments of earnest confession, she releases the pressure valve, reminding us, don’t

worry, this isn’t quite real; it’s an ideal that even I cannot fully embody. Chamberlain,

meanwhile, can still look enviably attractive—and make us want to buy the tween brands that

help her do so (Brandy Melville, Urban Outfitters, etc.)—while flaunting some imperfections

along certain vectors. Even she has bad skin. As in the Instagram vs. Reality meme, the viewer is

permitted to have it both ways: to preserve the vision of bodily perfection, while also

acknowledging that it is quite difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. The overarching message of

the meme is two-fold: keep doing push-ups, but don’t feel too bad. In this sense, idrealism keeps

Instagram self-help audiences trapped in the cycle of what Berlant calls “cruel optimism,” or

attachment to a fantasy contrary to one’s own flourishing. But it does so in idiosyncratic fashion.

Idrealism preserves the fantasy of the “good life,” of ideal beauty, love, success, or mental

health, precisely through its denial—through the acknowledgement of its impossibility, which,

ironically, provides the comfort necessary to persist in its pursuit.

Meanwhile, on the “relatable” side of the idrealist equation, self-cultivation becomes

synonymous with empathetic exchange—if not more robust resistance. Content, as we saw in

chapter one, reduces the idea of ethics, in the sense of moral action, to curated or aestheticized

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self-expression. The “uplifting anecdote” suggests that what it is to be “good” is to post, like, and

comment in a certain manner—by, for example, exposing typically unacknowledged beauty. The

motivations behind this ideology are obvious—content earns more ad revenue when it can

inspire quantifiable engagement. Meanwhile, idrealism, on its “relatable” side, similarly reduces

the idea of ethics—this time, in the sense of self-cultivation or self-improvement—to digital

exchange: all you must do for the moment, in the name of self-care, is commune with other

women in their struggles. The “relatable” posts that pepper most influencer’s otherwise idyllic

feeds often directly request participation (Sjana Elise, on her seasonal affective disorder: “Have

you ever heard of SAD? Know what it is? Or maybe experienced it yourself?”).

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And again,

this idea of self-cultivation has a clear motivation—influencers metrics, in terms of likes and

comments, get them sponsorship deals. Still, it does not override the more general drive toward

self-optimization that the content, on its ideal side, continues to stoke. In this sense, idrealism is

like the broader category of “anti-self help,” which preaches indifference to success, but

typically in the name of success itself. It is an aesthetic adapted to the environment that social

networking platforms have helped usher in: an environment of self-comparison so relentless that,

to keep its lucrative wheels turning, audiences must be provided with periodic release valves.

III. Contemporary Fiction as Self-Help Content

Throughout the past decade, many of the most popular, widely-reviewed literary works—at least

in the Anglo-American world—have been novels written by younger female authors about

women in their twenties or thirties, sometimes called (perhaps inaccurately) semi-

autobiographical or autofictional. These novels, all of which to different degrees embrace a self-

help or therapeutic orientation, can be said to have emerged in two waves: a first, five-year wave

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(2010-2015), featured Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, Alexandra Kleeman’s You Too Can Have a

Body Like Mine, and Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be?; a second, five-year wave (2016-

2020), featured Catherine Lacey’s The Answers, Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and

Relaxation, and Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends. All of these novels, too, channel

self-help content—and, for the writers in the second phase especially, Instagram-oriented self-

help content, and its idrealist aesthetic. Here, I’ll discuss these works collectively, but save much

discussion of the example of Moshfegh for the essay’s next section.

All of these books, to begin with, feel decidedly of the internet or social media eras—

even where they reference those new media obliquely, or not at all. As I’ve shown in chapters

one and two, authors like Saunders and Rankine, though profoundly influenced by the

emergence of digital content, have tended to focus explicitly on prior media—like TV—while

incorporating the internet into their work only allegorically. This is less true, to some extent, of

the authors whom I here discuss—Heti and Rooney, for example, include texts of emails in their

work. And yet, these women, too, more often channel digital or social media’s effects on more

symbolic levels. Similarly, while the characters in Sheila Heti’s 2010 How Should a Person Be?

never mention Facebook or Twitter, their world feels like that which social media was beginning

to forge: a world of perpetual, circumspect self-comparison (At the time, Heti was frequently

tweeting). Stylistically, too, these books mostly go the way of other works of post-2000 fiction

that I have discussed, embracing the accessible, chatty, and often-slack linguistic style of the

email or blog. (Lacey’s fiction, for example, features the same baggy, meandering sentences as

does her HTML Giant blog, e.g.: “then skin on my lips was drying and I thought about how all

the cells on every body are on their way to a total lack of moisture and everyone alive has that

thought all the time but almost no one says it…” etc.

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All of the books, too, embrace a therapeutic or self-help orientation, asking—as the title

of Heti’s book does—"How should a person be?” The protagonists of each are on quests for

happiness or fulfillment—Heti’s protagonist, Sheila, is in pursuit of personal and aesthetic

perfection, using her friends as guides; Kleeman’s A is on a quest for spiritual completion,

pursued by means of self-starvation, and then membership in a food-centered cult (it worships a

snack called Kandy Kakes). The books, too, often embrace either an existentialist philosophy (as

per Batuman’s Dostoevsky-inspired The Idiot), or therapeutic ethos, attributing characters’

problems to their parental relations in somewhat direct fashion: Conversations with Friends, for

example, introduces the character of Frances’s father—an unreliable alcoholic—to help explain

her trepidations surrounding male intimacy. More often than not the books directly allude to self-

help. “I have read all the books and I know what they say,” says Heti’s Sheila. “You—but better

in every way!”

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Kleeman’s A’s best friend, B, for example, unquestioningly embraces every

quasi-spiritual teaching of the beauty industry (“Your True Skin is Within”).

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The novels also more specifically resemble social media-based self-help, in that they

perform their therapeutic functions largely on the level of character or persona. Digital self-help,

as we have seen, shifts emphasis away from practical advice, and toward the experience of

communing with or relating to figures like the “relatable” influencer. These works of fiction, too,

convey no particular ideas about how to achieve spiritual fulfillment or wellness. Instead, they

thematize the lack of answers to life’s most pressing questions, inviting us to identify with their

characters in the struggle to get things right. Lacey’s The Answers, like most of her books,

foregrounds the idea that there are none (“I want to create a fictive space in which the questions

can be addressed and the answers are not as important,” she says.

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); Conversations with

Friends, which largely concerns Frances and Nick’s ambivalences about the intimacy that they

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find with one another, closes on the two lovers in a state of continued limbo—“Come and get

me,” Frances tells Nick, leaving it uncertain whether he will.

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As for Heti, her book never

answers the question of how a person should be. Instead, it places its final emphasis on the

companionship that one finds in the struggle to live well. In the book’s final scene, Sheila and

her friend Jon watch as two of their other companions—Margaux and Sholem—play an

exuberant game with a ball. “I don’t think they even know the rules,” says Jon. “I think they’re

just slamming the ball around.” Sheila punctuates the point: “And so they were.”

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If readers are

looking to these books for roadmaps for how to live, they will find none. What they’ll more

likely find, instead, is a sense of solidarity with fellow wanderers.

These novels, too, more specifically conjure the female-oriented, self-help world of

Instagram—emphasizing romance and beauty—and its idrealist aesthetic. To begin with, their

protagonists often resemble Instagram influencers in one key respect: that their lives, as

presented, are almost entirely consumed by leisure, life maintenance, or self-care activities. Just

as Instagram influencers mostly use their platforms to represent the daily life of an influencer

without the influencing (despite some “relatable” behind the scenes content), these authors

largely use their quasi-autobiographical autofiction to describe the daily life of a writer without

the writing. As it turns out, influencing without the influencing and writing without the writing

look very much the same: the heroines spend most of their time eating, exercising, musing,

dating, or socializing. Kleeman’s A, for example, is employed as a copy-writer, but her days, as

we witness them, are devoted entirely to worrying over food consumption, interacting with her

roommate or boyfriend, and, eventually, joining her wellness cult; Heti’s Sheila, despite

allusions to the work (or lack thereof) that she is doing on her play, lives a life of perpetual

socializing.

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Tao Lin—a presiding influence for many of these writers—jokes on Twitter: “I

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want to have a clone of myself who only writes about my other, original self, who doesn't

write.”

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These women, too, preoccupy themselves with Instagram’s preferred self-help topics:

beauty, fitness, and romance. The three earlier books, by Heti, Batuman, and Kleeman, center, to

different degrees, on those themes. Heti’s Sheila is working through a divorce, Batuman’s Selin

hopes to woo her crush Ivan, and Kleeman’s A and B obsess over diets and beauty regimens.

The three later books, however—by Lacey, Rooney, and, as we shall see, Moshfegh—conjure

those thematics in manners more specifically suggestive of the Instagram era:

In Lacey’s The Answers, for example, Mary’s new, mysterious job turns out to be

contributing to a project aimed at designing the perfect girlfriend for a famous actor named Kurt,

who is also reminiscent of Silicon Valley’s tech-entrepreneurs. She and a collection of other

women work together to create this bionic woman, each playing separate roles in the process:

Mary will be the “Emotional Girlfriend”; other participants will be “Mundanity Girlfriend,”

“Maternal Girlfriend,” “Anger Girlfriend” or members of the “Intimacy Team” (which is what it

sounds like). The experiment itself is associated with women’s Instagram-based efforts to self-

optimize as romantic partners. When Kurt’s assistant Matheson, for example, introduces the

project, he alludes to a world in which everything is “data” (“knowledge is always second to

data”), in which everyone is asked to scrutinize and improve their own sex and love lives

(“adults are taught to be anxious about not having enough sex while teenagers are shamed for

wanting to have it all the time”), and in which the methods of doing so resemble those currently

peddled on Instagram (“toddlers are wearing high heels and doing abdominal exercises”).

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Moreover, the women who participate in the experiment come to resemble social media content

creators, or prosumers, in one important respect: that while they provide the raw content for Kurt

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and Matheson’s project—the simulated experience of ideal partnership—they are also having

their data-harvested to other ends. Unbeknownst to the project’s girlfriends, Matheson and his

team are also filming these women and collecting information about their bodies and minds (via

questionnaires and brain-scans) in an effort to determine how people’s emotions can be

manipulated in love. Without the women’s consent, they produce a film displaying their

findings.

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Meanwhile, in her private life, Mary is surrounded by people who also resemble

Instagram influencers, and engage in their recognizable wellness-oriented activities. Her close

friend and guru Chandra, for example, is a woman who, ever since winning a settlement for

being hit by a bus, has devoted herself full time to “traveling [from] illness [to] wellness.” To

combat her “anxiety, caffeine dependence, pollen allergies…commitment issues” and so on, she

has an “herbalist, a Reiki master, a Rolfer, a speech therapist, a movement therapist, an art

therapist, and a therapist.”

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She divides her time between doing yoga, traveling to Bali (a

popular influencer destination since its appearance in the “love” sequence of Eat Pray Love”),

and whipping up snacks like “pepita paste.”

Allusions to similar themes in Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends are subtler and

more atmospheric. The books’ opening chapter announces that we are living in a post-Facebook,

post-Instagram world, in which characters encounter one another as digitally and visually

mediated beings. In its first few sentences, we learn that the narrator Frances and her friend

Bobbi, aspiring writers in their early twenties, first met the thirty-something photographer

Melissa—whose work they had already “come across on the internet”—when she snapped their

stylized photo: “Bobbi smoking and me self-consciously holding my left wrist in my right hand.”

The chapter then focuses, throughout, on the characters’ visual posturing (Frances puts on

“certain facial expressions” to “make [her]self seem charming”) and ends by reinforcing the

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theme: “Good,” Frances tells Bobbi, in response to a question about Bobbi’s blouse, “it looks

good.”

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The novel that follows focuses, primarily, on these young people’s romantic

entanglements—Bobbi and Frances, themselves former lovers, enter separate affairs with the

older Melissa and Nick, who are married to one another. Throughout its pages, the book

emphasizes the importance that appearance—and appearances—play in these relationships.

Frances mentions Nick’s model-esque looks almost every time she discusses him, and fixates,

too, on Bobbi’s beauty, in one scene taking pleasure in beholding them side by side. The book,

too, makes some reference to the social-media era self-help that characters might use to perfect

their appearances. Nick, Bobbi jokingly tells Frances, seems like the kind of guy who

“unironically reads articles called ‘one weird trick for perfect abs.’”

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These six novels, finally, exemplify what I have called “idrealism.” The first three begin

to embody the aesthetic; the latter three embrace it more completely. All achieve this aesthetic

effect, first, on the level of character, conjuring protagonists who, in their cool confusion,

resemble cutting-edge influencers like Emma Chamberlain. Some embody it, too, on the level of

form, by way of their particular modes of representing “reality.”

All of the books protagonists, to begin with, are at once ideal and “relatable” in much the

same manner as Instagram’s cool, confused influencers: they are, in certain ways, successful or

enviable, and yet utterly bewildered regarding how they became so. In the earlier three books,

the effect is real, but less pronounced. Batuman’s Selin, for example, is—as per the book’s

title—a textbook example of a “holy fool”: she is, on the one hand, “relatable” and unthreatening

in her general confusion; and yet this confusion is also a covert sort of wisdom, ironically

winning her success in the spheres of which she is ignorant. Selin, for example, can’t understand

why, in her college literature class, only certain topics can be discussed. “You wanted to know

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why Anna had to die,” she thinks, regarding Tolstoy, “and instead they told you that nineteenth

century Russian landowners felt conflicted about whether they were really a part of Europe.”

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Of course, it is precisely Selin’s density when it comes to the norms of professionalized literary

criticism, the text implies, that makes her the more sensitive reader—her incomprehension, here,

is her higher understanding. Selin displays a similar sort of spiritual purity—an utter inability to

comprehend venality—when she chooses to take five classes in her first semester. Her

unknowing peers, she assumes, believe that one can “only take four classes,” but when she

“find[s] out they [don’t] charge extra for five,” she signs up for another.

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What Selin doesn’t

realize, of course, is that Harvard students typically choose four over five classes, not because

they believe they must, but rather to ensure that they can maintain high grades or make room for

intense extra-curricular pursuits; in her innocence of such pragmatic motivations, Selin reveals

herself to be the “better” student: more curious for more knowledge. Her purity, too, is rewarded.

We watch, for example, in the novel’s opening scenes, as Selin shows her art portfolio to the

teacher of a studio art class and wins him over—eventually gaining acceptance into the class—

through her naïve wisdom. He says that her paintings are “girlish”; she explains that she was

recently a girl. At this point in the novel, given the bewilderment that Selin has expressed about

nearly everything, it’s hard to imagine how she managed to put together a portfolio and attend

this meeting in the first place, let alone go through the rigorous process of applying to and

getting into Harvard.

Heti’s Sheila and Kleeman’s A, by contrast, are not innocent of all superficial aims. To

the contrary, they are almost comically straightforward in their venal desires, as if unquestioning

acolytes of mainstream cultural brainwashing. “How should a person be?” Sheila asks on the

first pages of her novel. “A celebrity,” she offers by way of initial answer, declaring her desire

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for a life of “undying fame.”

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A, meanwhile, never questions the value of the sort of existence

that she has—it would seem—to some degree chosen, as the normatively attractive, thin woman

that the text suggests she is. And yet there is something stilted, obtuse, or indeliberate in the

manner in which these women pursue success. Sheila’s very literalism, in her identification of

her superficial goal, is part and parcel of the ditziness that makes her harmless in its pursuit. In

one scene, for example, she looks through a book called Important Artists, collates the cities that

the artists lived in during the “important” phases of their careers, and then decides to travel to

New York because it boasts the highest number. Of course, this is not a great plan (however cute

the heuristic)—so much so that, as James Wood has noted, it marks the manner in which this

work of “autofiction” is in fact quite unrealistic (“The scene is amusing enough; but it isn’t

real.”)

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Sheila’s fuzzy brain, however, much like Selin’s, does seem to lead her to some

success—especially in spheres where appearing effortlessness is a boon. Sheila, for example,

though failing to write her play, does enjoy an overtly “cool” bohemian lifestyle, passing most of

her nights at parties, hobnobbing with clever, artistic types. Indeed, her power to attract attention

in these circles seems linked to her very bewilderment, a simple confusion that, the text suggests,

reads to others as indifference. If Sheila continually hurts, intimidates, and attracts her friend

Margaux—whom the text presents as palpably cool—it is because she does not realize that she

has any power over Margaux. “It’s like you never believe you have any effect on people,”

Margaux tells Sheila, toward the end of the novel.

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In a trope that will repeat throughout these

novels—a favorite, in particular, of Rooney and Lacey’s—Sheila lets it be known that her

willowy physique is effortless. On one day, she tells us, she is fasting, because a woman she

knows who is “slender and glamorous in pictures” told her that “when she has been eating badly,

she will fast for a day or two.”

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It’s as if Sheila, who has been alive for almost three decades, in

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the year 2012, has never heard of a diet. Tomorrow, she’ll return to her blither habits, satisfied

by her momentary efforts. Indeed, at least one of Rooney’s readers has expressed comic

frustration with this trope, tweeting: “Sally Rooney novel generator: Skinnily, I sadly and hotly

forgot to eat for seven days and I only realized when I fell over in front of trinity college and

everyone was worried about me.”

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Kleeman’s A, meanwhile, isn’t so much innocent or

incompetent in her designs as she is inhuman. An alien creature, she seems to eat almost nothing,

not for the avowed purpose of staying thin, but because she hails from some planet where this

behavior is commonplace. What makes B the minor character to A’s protagonist—the sidekick,

rather than the heroine—is that she seems to want or need to strive more self-consciously in the

pursuit of what A calls her “catastrophically” thin physique.

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It is B who asks A to bring her to

the store to buy beauty products as well as to prepare her appropriately minimalist meals. The

effect of this type of characterization, in all three novels, is to defang these women’s success,

however minimal it may be. They enjoy their share of good fortune, to be sure; but they are not

the type of intimidating creatures who might actually have engineered it.

The later phase authors write characters who even more dramatically embody Instagram-

era idrealism. Lacey’s female protagonists, for example, and particularly The Answers’ Mary, are

idrealist in nature. Mary is something of a relatable “holy fool” in the vein of Batuman’s Selin: a

woman perennially confused, and yet, in this confusion, in possession of a higher wisdom.

There’s much that this character doesn’t understand, but she is ignorant, particularly, of the venal

world that the actor Kurt inhabits, of celebrity and popular media. Mary, we are told, grew up in

a remote, rural environment, and rarely consumed television or popular culture. Her parents, she

explains, wanted to raise her “off every grid” in a “state of complete purity,” to “protect [her]

from the terrible world”—indeed, they “called themselves holy.”

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For this reason, she finds

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herself particularly confused during her interview for the position of Kurt’s “emotional

girlfriend,” in which multiple aspects of contemporary celebrity and popular culture—often

suggestive of social media—are discussed. “None of this made sense to me but I nodded as if I

understood,” she thinks, after Matheson lectures her on some fairly simple and widely

comprehended contemporary topics, like the eroding effects of social media, celebrity culture,

and data capitalism. “I would never understand this world.”

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And yet, it is precisely her

innocent ignorance—of course—that gets her the job. Matheson and his team seem particularly

taken with the fact that she does not know who Kurt is, and can barely name a television show or

celebrity; they give her the job. Soon, Mary comes to embody, not just the “relatable” holy fool,

but a woman who still more perfectly resembles Instagram’s idrealist influencers. After

interacting with Kurt for a few weeks she—of course—manages to defy the laws of the

experiment, which dictates that he should love all of his girlfriends equally, and begins to attract

his particular attention. He begins to turn her into his one true girlfriend and to offer her the life

of a glamorous celebrity. They walk the red carpet together, the “paparazzi keep[ing] apace” and

inspire “countless think pieces.”

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And yet, there is no true love between Mary and the—

ultimately—emotionally bankrupt Kurt, and she finds herself no better off than she was before

(all the distress, too, sure does make her skinny—“my appetite had disappeared,” she bemoans,

lachrymose; “I’d become so absurdly thin.”

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) In the novel’s final scenes, she foregoes her life

with Kurt to seek happiness elsewhere. Indeed, the novel’s very premise embodies idrealism’s

lesson: that there is really no such thing as a perfect woman; look more closely, and you’ll find a

collection of down and out girls.

In Rooney’s book, the effect is subtlest—though, as we will see, perhaps most

aesthetically pervasive. Her Frances has much in common with Heti’s Sheila: she is emotionally

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deadened and obtuse, and at times baldly superficial in her aims. Throughout the novel, she

channels that clear precursor, telling us, for example, that she feels she “has no real personality”

and could, at any time, “do or say anything at all”; she “hate[s] that everything [she] does is so

ugly,” and wants to compensate for this by “try[ing] to be a person worthy of praise and love” (in

that order).

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Like Sheila, though, she is also fairly confused about how to achieve what she

desires, and avowedly shiftless and aimless—“I’ve never worked hard at anything in my life,”

she confesses. “I’m never going to get a job.”

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As in Sheila’s case, however, the confusion that

makes Frances relatable-y unthreatening is also key to her success. In a theme borrowed, again,

from Heti’s book, Frances appears perpetually unaware of her effect on other people, unable

(perhaps along with the reader) to understand why Nick and others seem to find her so

immediately entrancing. What she thinks of as her own social awkwardness seems to read to

others, conveniently, as aloofness. “You have a real coolness about you,” Melissa tells her.

Frances is surprised at this assessment, but cannot argue with the evidence. “Men,” she explains,

“are always telling me I’m cool.”

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In her aimlessness, too, she begins to accrue professional

success—once, she quickly jots off a story and sends it to a magazine; to her surprise it is

accepted, without revisions. And yet as Frances gets more and more of what she wants—Nick’s

love and other accolades—she, like Instagram’s idreal women, suffers. She is preoccupied,

emotionally, with a malaise that manifest in physical, symbolic form: she bleeds, inexplicably,

internally, and copiously, due to what is eventually diagnosed as endometriosis.

The effect of idrealism, in these novels, is much the same as on social media. It allows

author and reader to have it both ways. For Rooney and Lacey, this simultaneity of value-

systems plays out, also, on the level of genre. Lacey’s book, for example, might be called an

anti-romance novel. Much of its narrative excitement comes in the form of watching Mary win

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over the dashing, powerful Kurt. And yet, by its end, it dutifully disavows Kurt’s libidinal pull.

The same is true, to a more extreme degree, of Rooney’s book. Claire Jarvis, a fan of Rooney’s

novels, has recently argued, in an article called “The Sweet Stuff,” that they redeem heterosexual

love, rendering it a topic again appropriate for the contemporary novel, in the model of George

Eliot’s Middlemarch. Rebecca Rothfeld, a dissenter, argues that these novels are little more than

glorified romances, in the model of Twilight or Fifty Shades of Gray. I would argue, instead, that

their genre is “idrealism.” In much the same way that the “Instagram” vs. “Reality” meme brings

together two conflicting visions, one ideal and one real, and allows them to exist simultaneously,

Conversations With Friends yokes together two genres—that of the romance novel and the

grittier work of domestic realism—in an oddly frictionless fashion. The two exist, side by side, in

all their contradictory nature, without eroding one another’s effects. Consider, for example, two

juxtaposed scenes, that take place toward the novel’s end. In the first, Nick and Frances, who

have been playing an extended game of cat and mouse, finally state their feelings for one another

in the baldest and most romantic fashion: “I love you,” he tells her. Frances’s narration

continues: “It felt good to be wrong about everything. ‘Since when have you loved me?’ I said.

‘Since I met you, I would think. If I wanted to be philosophical about it, I’d say I loved before I

met you.’” In the next scene, Frances receives a letter from Melissa, Nick’s wife, explaining that

she knows about the affair, and cutting Nick down to size. Nick, she says, “doesn’t want to

leave” Melissa, but “can’t be straight about that” with Frances because he is “pathologically

submissive”; she comments on how pathetic it is that Nick, a man in his thirties, is attracted to a

21 year old college student; she points out Nick’s weaknesses of character, explaining that, prior

to meeting Frances, she would find him “sitting in front of the TV not having changed the

channel since he woke up,” and that he is simply using Frances to escape his mid-life funk.

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These are the two, parallel tracks on which the novel proceeds: on one, there is the idyllic,

romance-novel-style communion between Nick and Frances; on the other are all the reminders of

the grittier facts about the seediness of their affair. Rather than one prevailing over, or even

interpenetrating with, the other, both claim separate realities. We are told that Nick and Frances’s

love is less than ideal, for all of the reasons that extramarital affairs are. But we never see it. The

seedy and vaguely pathetic reality of a thirty-five-year-old married man’s affair with a woman

who, to him, should seem a quasi-child, is asserted, but never colors Nick’s behavior as we

observe it. The only problem with Nick and Frances’ romance that we actually see firsthand—as

in Rooney’s other romantic novel, Normal People—is that the two lovers have trouble admitting

to one another how much they really do love each other. Rather than genuinely feeling

ambivalence—as the “real” Nick, and the man that Melissa describes, might—the Nick whom

we watch interact with Frances only seems incapable of confessing that he doesn’t (“I’m sorry I

didn’t tell you before. But I didn’t know if you wanted to hear it”).

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This is the ardent, only-

ever-half-true fantasy, not only of both of Rooney’s novels, but of embattled relationships

everywhere: they can’t love me because they love me too much. The reader gets to have her cake

and eat it too; she gets a vision of ideal romance, and the reassurance of its impossibility.

IV. My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, like most of the books under discussion,

embodies idrealist qualities. The book, like many of its contemporaries, is set in a (largely) pre-

social-media moment (2001), and follows the activity of two young women: a nameless,

protagonist, who is young, beautiful, and dejected, and her best friend, Reva. But though billed

as a 9/11 novel, My Year feels palpably post-Instagram. Both women are, in different ways, in

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manic pursuit of wellness, self-optimization, and photographically mediated perfection. The

narrative, moreover, is steeped in self-help, both analog and digital. Reva, in particular, is an

acolyte of the wellness and advice industries, and says things like “Oprah says we women rush

into decisions because we don’t have faith that something better will come along…Sometimes

you need to act as if.”

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Even the novel itself mimics the viral, self-help genre that one might

call “gonzo self-help” (as in: “I tried the X diet”), by recounting its protagonist’s completion of

the absurd therapeutic feat of sleeping for a year—the name of the drug that she uses to do so,

“Infermiterol,” echoes both “Internet” and “Instagram.” (Lacey’s The Answers also resembles

the genre, through Mary’s participation in the central experiment).

My Year’s young protagonist, herself, as Jia Tolentino first noted, feels very much like an

influencer. The New York in which she lives is a city whose denizens are “slave[s] to vanity and

status,”

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and, during her gonzo-therapeutic project, she becomes obsessed with perfecting her

own surface, “some superficial part of [her] taking aim at a life of beauty and sex appeal.”

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her sleep, she purchases designer jeans and lingerie and attends glamorous parties where she is

photographed. Her moonlight career, moreover, like that of many influencers—as well as of the

“girlfiend” employees in Lacey’s The Answers—is surveilled and exploited by (male) managers

and higher ups. An artist films and observes her as she sleeps, turning his recordings of her

activities into an exhibit. She is also, finally, surrounded by a glut of romance, beauty, and

fitness-related advice—which, as noted, mainly comes from her best friend Reva (Reva quotes,

for example, “how to attract your dream man using hypnosis.”)

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More to the point, the protagonist is palpably idreal. On the one hand, like the composite

woman of which The Answers’ Mary is part, she represents the Instagram-era ideal: she is

twenty-six, works at a trendy art gallery, “[isn’t] worried about money,” and resembles a “blonde

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Angelina Jolie.”

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Moreover, her success has—like that of many confused female characters—

been oddly effortless—she got into Columbia by writing one draft of “a mediocre essay” about

an artist whom she fabricated; she then “made the dean’s list despite skipping half [her]

classes.”

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In this respect, she is a person more challengingly enviable than Batuman’s Selin or

Heti’s Sheila. Rather than being adorably confused, and somehow—as if by chance—prevailing

anyway, she is, instead, so blessed by both genetic and economic good fortune that success

comes easily. “Studied grace is not grace,” she tells Reva, who is this novel’s striving “B” to her

effortless “A.” “Nothing hurt Reva more,” she explains, “than effortless beauty, like mine.”

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But there is one art that this formidable woman cannot master: the art of being happy. For all her

superficial good fortune, she is “dead” inside, and—quite literally—wants to sleep through life.

Reva sees the narrator’s “struggle with misery as a cruel parody of her own misfortunes”;

nonetheless, she “enjoy[s]…watching her squander her luxuries.”

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In writing this protagonist,

Moshfegh has said, she wanted to produce the effect of witnessing “Kate Moss take a shit”— the

effect, too, perhaps, of an influencer like Tavi Gevenson’s self-conscious idrealism (“Here’s me

posing at the Met Ball; I sent my therapist an email declaring my spiritual crisis…”).

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At times, the novel reproduces some of the idrealist trope’s more pernicious operations,

upholding superficial aims, even while denying their obtainability. On the surface, the book

thematizes the emptiness of worldly success. The woman who achieves it is miserable on the

inside, and while there may be no one true path to happiness, she realizes, a path to misery is

empty the pursuit of a glossy veneer. “Beauty and meaning have nothing to do with one

another.”

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And yet the text continues to invest value in this character’s superficial status, taking

somewhat clear and ebullient pleasure in her dominance over Reva. Indeed, it gets much of its

comedic traction from mocking this minor character—a woman who has the audacity to try, and

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worse still, to fail. The narrator’s disdain for Reva is typically played for conspiratorial laughs—

“I knew she masturbated with an electric neck massager because she was too embarrassed to buy

a proper vibrator from a sex shop,” she sneers. “She was obsessed with brand names, conformity,

‘fitting in.’ She made regular trips to Chinatown for the latest knock off designer handbags…She

bought us matching fake Coach key rings.”

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Moshfegh conveys the same mixed value-system

in her own audacious interviews, themselves resembling performance art (though, apparently,

intended to be read as sincere). She critiques the superficial, visually-oriented New York literary

world and its digital culture, explaining that she wrote My Year because she saw “New York was

a ridiculous place full of pathetic egomaniacs, and…wanted to lash out and take a big shit on all

that,” continuing on to the observation: “If I could unplug the internet I would.” In almost the

same breath, however, she brags (as is her frequent practice) about how conventionally attractive

her boyfriend is (“I mean look at him!”

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At other times, however, Moshfegh’s novel more critically revises the idrealist trope—

and particularly in its closing sequences. Consider, for example, the final conversation between

the protagonist and Reva. Reva, in this scene, is preoccupied with a piece of proto-content: a

short, magazine story about a teenage boy who, after he fails the PSAT, attempts suicide. “I

really identity with this kid” Reva says. And the effect of her confession is surprising. For the

first time in the novel, the protagonist shows Reva affection. She narrates:

“The white glare off the overhead light gleamed across [Reva’s] collarbones. She was

beautiful, with all her nerves, and all her complicated circuitous feelings and

contradictions and fears. This would be the last time I’d see her in person.

‘I love you,’ I said.

“I love you too”

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Reva, here, performs idrealism; she shows us, and the narrator, that despite her beauty, despite

her success, she struggles. And the maneuver has its typical, intended effect: a brief, cathartic

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outpouring. The scene appears an apotheosis. It seems that, perhaps, our cold, cruel narrator is

growing a heart. But she is not, Moshfegh suggests. Her brand of sympathy is unsettlingly

visually fetishistic—an admiration of the physical beauty of Reva’s vulnerability, frozen, and

perfectly lit, as in a well-curated photo. And the women’s communion, Moshfegh implies, is

ultimately as shallow as a share or a like; their impending estrangement is already declared—"I

never saw her again”—in their mutual “I love yous” (conjuring Instagram hearts); a few pages

later, after they’ve lost touch, the narrator will learn that Reva has died; and she’ll meet the news,

in the novel’s final scene, with indifference. We as readers, meanwhile, will have trouble feeling

anything like real sympathy for this monstrous protagonist, who, in her unrelenting, and

ultimately unrepenting cruelty, repels it. Moshfegh, then, in these final moments, channels the

idrealist trope, but to distinct effect: not to inspire the shallow catharsis on which the content

economy runs, but to short circuit it. There’s a protest, perhaps, not only against the position that

the social media influencer occupies—as “sister” or “guru,” in Heti’s words—but also against a

publishing industry, and public, that demands this performance of its female authors.

V. Conclusion: Two Paths for the Non-Idrealist Novel

Fortunately, not all contemporary novels by and about women are predominantly idrealist.

Rather, many of the most compelling novels now being written about female characters stand out

precisely because they are not. In the space that remains, I’d like to flag two oeuvres that have

force because they eschew idrealism’s artificial tendencies.

On the one hand, there are the novels of Jenny Offill—Department of Speculation and,

more recently, Weather—which, I would argue, dispense with idrealism’s investment in a

superficial ideal. Take, for example, Department of Speculation, the story of a woman whose

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husband has an affair. On the surface, this novel has much in common with the six that I have

been discussing. It is apparently auto-fictional, based on real events and narrated by a

contemporary female writer of about Offill’s age. It is also therapeutic in orientation, and in

manners that conjure social media’s wellness culture. The book is narrated in short fragments

reminiscent of internet-based forms (e.g. tweets, or status updates) and it frequently quotes or

refers to self-help, therapy, or contemporary therapeutic culture. The protagonist, for example,

skims a book called Thriving Not Surviving, goes to weekly therapy, which she calls the “little

theatre of hurt feelings,” and comments in one scene:

How has she become one of those people who wears yoga pants all day? She used to

make fun of those people. With their happiness maps and their gratitude journals and

their bags made out of recycled tire treads. But now it seems possible that the truth about

getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is

nothing you are sure you will never be.

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She, too, like many contemporary female protagonists, is a bit confused, aware of all that she

does not know. “I’d never taught anyone a single thing,” she tells us, and confesses, too—in a

scene that recurs throughout contemporary female-authored fiction—her sense of bewilderment

in the grocery store (“It’s true that I am feebleminded in the grocery store.”).

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She refers to the

year of her husband’s affair, during which she is so distracted that she cannot seem to do

anything correctly, as the “year of wrong living.”

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But Offill’s protagonist’s confusion is different from that of the six other female

characters that I have surveyed, in this respect: it is not palpably a posture or pose. There is no

humblebrag covertly embedded in this character’s confusion. Nor is she, through its means,

inadvertently accruing superficial boons: the social capital that attaches to the apparently

indifferent, the lithe physique that is the product of forgetting to eat. As a result, Department of

Speculation pays no subtle fealty to social media’s superficial value system—instead, it works

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outside that value system toward a more genuine form of wisdom. In her searching, that is to say,

Offill’s protagonist may find no final answers. But she has more penetrating thoughts, about life

and love, to impart. One scene, in Weather, neatly captures this fact. Its married protagonist, who

is similar to Department of Speculation’s, talks with a friend who serially dates, and suffers at

the hands of, handsome and charming but horrible men. “You need someone kind,” the narrator

tells her friend, and then describes the subsequent exchange: “Something in her eyes, then,

something hard to read. Finally, it registers. She feels sorry for me and for all the rest who have

thrown in their lot with kindness and decency. ‘Sure, sure, I suppose I could go for someone

safe,’ she says. ‘But I’ve never felt like this before. Never.’” The narrator, in an aside, delivers

the piercing punchline: “But no one is safe, I want to tell her. Safe?”

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Elena Ferrante’s oeuvre, meanwhile—and particularly her Neapolitan Series—dispenses

with idrealism’s artificial conception of the “real.” These books have less in common with the

others that I have surveyed. They are not, particularly, therapeutic in orientation (despite inviting

empathetic identification) nor do they conjure thoughts of social media or its self-help (I doubt

Ferrante uses Twitter). Rather, these four novels, which describe the lifelong friendship between

two Neapolitan girls named Lenù and Lila, provide an instructive comparison with the other six

simply because what they describe is, by contrast, so bizarrely rare in contemporary fiction:

young women who seem actually invested in the courses of their lives. Idrealism, as we have

seen, offers viewers a vision of the “real” that is as artificial as its ideal—idrealist women are

“relatable” in the sense that they are dizzily, disaffectedly confused. And yet where, in the world,

are all these dreamy waifish drifters, these ironically alienated women who seem to care so very

little about the courses of their own lives? I rarely meet them. It’s the vaguely remarkable

product of a few decades of Postmodern irony that, in contemporary Anglo-American women’s

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fiction, we find so few female characters who seem, on the most basic level, to actually care

about what might happen to them.

Enter Ferrante’s Lenù and Lila, overt strivers who are passionately, intensely invested in

their own personal flourishing. The narrator Lenù, internally, appears to have no sense of

irony—she suffers and schemes, histrionically, over the everyday events of her adolescent life.

But who, after all, is ironic inside their own head? Who is internally blasé about their triumphs

and afflictions? When Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend first appeared in English, in 2011, Anglo-

American female readers proclaimed, en masse, how truly “relatable” these young women

were—real, that is to say, rather than, as the word more typically suggests, unthreatening.

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And

if Ferrante has succeeded, more than most other contemporary authors, in creating characters

with whom many women identify, then I would guess that it is just for this reason: because these

characters—shockingly, radically—actually seem to care.

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4. The Depressive Comic: Viral Aesthetics and Paranoid Politics

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Of all the webcomics that have gone viral throughout the past decade, one has been

especially ubiquitous: “This is Fine,” by KC Green (Figure 5.1). In this widely circulated,

commonly remixed strip, a dapper dog sits

at his table, sipping a cup of coffee. Behind

him, pillars of flame are visible, beginning

to engulf the room in which he sits. And

yet he remains motionless, smiling

myopically, and announcing: “This is fine.”

Even as the flames reach his body, igniting

his chapeau, burning through the fur on his

left arm, and revealing the raw, red skin

underneath, he says: “That’s okay, things

are going to be okay.” Persistently, he

pursues this “positive self-talk,” of the type

which a well-meaning therapist, friend, or

self-help book might suggest. But his

words cannot change his grim reality. Smiling, he is consumed by the flames, melting the skin

from his skull and pushing the eyes from his sockets.

More than a single mega-viral webcomic, “This is Fine” is as an example of the popular

content genre which I call the “depressive comic”: a short, graphic narrative, typically oriented

toward male audiences, and confirming the anxious or depressive’s conviction—that things are

as bad, even worse, than they seem. Green’s strip is marked by many of the genre’s thematic and

formal features. It focuses on a solo, male protagonist, struggling with mental health (the dog

Figure 5.1

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attempts to calm his own anxieties); its aesthetics are basic (he is simply rendered, with minimal

detail and shading); its content is violent or disturbing (his skin and eyeballs ooze off). Most

importantly, “This is Fine” embraces the depressive comic’s pessimistic epistemology, feeding

hopeless thoughts. The dogs’ reassurances to himself that things will be “fine” are depicted as,

not only inaccurate, but dangerous. The more anxious assumption is confirmed: that things will

not be “fine,” and that to forget this fact, even for a moment, is to eschew the hyper-vigilance

necessary to survive. The comic’s mindset mirrors the concept, popularized in multiple male-

oriented digital forums, of taking the “black pill,” or accepting the worst-case scenario, both

personal and political. In the words of a Mad Max-themed meme: “Hope is a mistake.”

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Webcomics may seem a niche genre, consumed only by quirky teens or obscure fan

communities. But with the rise of viral media between the years 2008-2012, short graphic

narratives became ubiquitous, flitting through users’ newsfeeds. My content database, for

example, contains many widely-circulated webcomics, earning more than 500,000 shares

between 2014 and 2019. One particularly viral comic, titled “The Mental Load,” explains the

extra burdens that women bear in the household, even when their husbands pitch in (the “mental

load” of domestic management); another concerns a sad black cat.

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Many of these webcomics,

though not themselves memes, have been converted into meme templates, allowing users to

remix or recreate them. Green’s “This is Fine,” for example, quickly became a formula into

which users could insert their own dialogue or imagery, as in the meta “This is a Reference to an

Internet Meme” (Figure 5.2)

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or ironic “This is Unbearable” (Figure 5.3).

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Many viral

comics, moreover, though not themselves explicitly political, were repurposed in the name of

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various causes. In 2016, for example, the Republican National Committee posted an image of the

two-panel “This is Fine” meme from their Twitter account, @GOP, under the hashtag

#DemsinPhilly, to mock the chaos of the first day of

the Democratic National Convention in

Philadelphia. Green, a self-identifying liberal and

Hillary supporter, expressed his dismay at this

particular use of his comic, tweeting: “everyone is

in their right to use this is fine on social media

posts, but man oh man

I personally would like

@GOP to delete their

stupid post.”

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Green’s was

not the first depressive

comic to be repurposed

for political aims. Indeed, iterations of the viral genre have repeatedly captured the imaginations

of alt-right and Trump supporters—often over-and-against their creators’ (claimed) intents.

Beginning in 2005, for example, a cartoonist named Matt Furie created a strip called “Boy’s

Club,” about four, anthropomorphic teenage male animals—Andy, Brett, Landwolf, and Pepe—

living a puerile existence of video-game playing, pizza-eating, obscene joking, and casual drug

use. Though “Boy’s Club,” as a whole, was not a “depressive comic,” many of its strips

embodied the genre, playing youthful male dejection for laughs, and with deliberate crudeness or

Figure 5.2

Figure 5.3

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vulgarity (bathroom humor, violence, etc.). See,

for example, the comic in which a high Pepe has a

dark vision of “The Future” (Figure 5.4),

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or a

forlorn Andy reflects: “I wish I knew some girls.

A girl.” (Figure 5.5).

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Furie, however, claimed

to be horrified when, in 2015, Pepe was

appropriated by members of the alt-right, and

eventually declared a hate symbol (in response, he

filed multiple lawsuits). Similarly, in the later-

2010s, a popular, and seemingly apolitical

expression of male despair—the meme taken from

a depressive comic about a sad young man called

“Wojak” —transformed into an alt-right avatar. In

2018, the Wojak meme, in a form known as “NPC

Wojak” (an acronym from videogaming), was

used by hundreds of Trump-supporting Twitter-

users as part of a coordinated effort to spread fake

news and troll political opponents.

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What connects the depressive comic to

far-right politics? In this chapter, I address that

question, tracing the path between two phenomena: viral aesthetics and political paranoia. More

particularly, I examine: first, how the depressive comic’s aesthetics and ethics have been shaped

by the viral economy; and second, how they have become linked to—and fueled the flames of—

Figure 5.4

Figure 5.5

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far-right politics. To aid in my analysis, I turn to the work of Chicago cartoonist Nick Drnaso,

whose meditations on depressive, corrosive aesthetics inform my own. Drnaso, strictly speaking,

is not a creator of the depressive comic—for one thing, he writes print-based, full length graphic

novels, rather than viral webcomics. But his two major works, the 2016 Beverly and the 2018

Sabrina, channel the genre’s aesthetics, and reflect on their ethics and politics.

This is particularly true of Sabrina, due largely to the circumstances of its publication.

The book began, in many ways, as a long-from depressive comic, enacting Drnaso’s indulgence

of a gruesome worst-case-scenario: his own, crippling anxiety that his girlfriend might be fatally

harmed. Through the composition of Sabrina, he indulged, rather than dismissed, that anxiety’

reality, telling the story of a man named Teddy whose girlfriend is kidnapped and murdered by a

men’s rights activist (loosely based on “incel” terrorist Elliot Rodger). After completing the

manuscript, however—in an event which coincided with the 2016 election—Drnaso became

worried that Sabrina (like Pepe or Wojak) had stumbled, through its aesthetic choices, into an

unintended politics. He now felt, he told the New Yorker, that “there was no point in putting

something like this out in a world that’s drowning in negative subject matter.”

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Reluctantly, he

decided to pull the book from Drawn and Quarterly’s publication schedule. Only after a full

year, and multiple revisions, did he reconsider, and proceed with Sabrina’s publication. The final

product was not only a celebrated work—the first graphic novel to be nominated for the Booker

Prize—but also a probing meditation on the uses and abuses of pessimistic graphic art. In reading

it alongside the earlier Beverly, my aim is not, as in prior chapters, to prove that Drnaso’s oeuvre

has been directly influenced by the depressive comic—though there is good reason to believe

that it has been (like Drnaso’s self-described digital media diet). Rather, it is to use his work as a

theoretical lens through which to better understand the genre’s operations.

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I begin, in part one, by examining the broader category of viral content to which the

depressive comic belongs: craft content, most generally, and webcomics, more particularly. I

unpack this content’s general features, as conditioned by the viral environment, with particular

attention to the genre that I call the “didactic comic”—a foil against which the depressive comic

can be better understood. In section two, I turn to the depressive comic, and to its interrelated

aesthetics, ethics, and politics. The depressive comics’ own deployment of viral webcomics’

general features, I argue, encourages parallel forms of ethics and politics: an apparent embrace of

“brute facts,” which actually enables outlandish theorizing. Whereas, in chapter three, I argued

that the “idrealist post” inculcated, in its consumers, an ethics—or therapeutic practice—of

“cruel optimism,” I here argue that the depressive comic encourages something more like a kind

pessimism: an embrace of the darkest possible outcome that, at the very least, evades the

discomforts of embracing a more ambiguous reality, like hope, uncertainty, or vulnerability.

This, I also suggest, has a political corollary, in the embrace of paranoid, conspiracy-theory-

oriented thinking. In sections three and four, I read Drnaso’s two graphic novels—Beverly and

then Sabrina—as meditations on those ideas. Sabrina, in particular, illuminates the links

between the depressive comic’s aesthetic simplicity and apocalyptic political thinking. At the

same time, it develops an alternative genre of depressive graphic narrative, addressing white

male despair, but without succumbing to the attendant political pitfalls.

I. Craft Content, Webcomics, and Viral Aesthetics

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Four major categories of content, as I show in this

project’s introduction, dominate the viral media in

my database (content earning more than 500,000

shares, on Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms,

2014-2019). The fourth category, to which

webcomics belong, comprises “fictional” or

“craft” content, involving or displaying different

types of made artifacts. While some of these

artifacts are professionally created (music videos,

most prominently), most are amateur in origins.

Between 2014 and 2019, newsfeeds were flooded with content showcasing kitschy amateur

crafts or feats of homespun ingenuity, like Can You Actually’s “Guy Spends Six Months

Recreating A Van Gogh Painting Using Plants in a 1.2 Acre Field” and a page displaying “The

Winning Sand Sculpture of the 2019 Texas Sand Sculpture Festival” (a giant Abraham

Lincoln).

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Like most content genres, such craft content is both suited to and shaped by the

particulars of the viral medium. The “democratizing” effect of the world wide web, enabling

average users to create publicly accessible media (first via blogs, and then later through social

networking sites), helps explain a widespread emphasis on amateur as opposed to professional

creation. Moreover, popular content hubs (as I argued in chapter one, in relation to Bored Panda)

have incentives to circulate content that celebrates amateur craft, encouraging users to do the free

labor of creating viral media. Craft content, too, serves the viral economy by creating media

suited to produce “quick hits” of emotional response—an article showcasing festive “beard

baubles” (Figure 5.6) or “naked gardeners” is meant to inspire, not hours of thoughtful

Figure 5.6

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examination (as a museum painting might),

but brief moments of wonder, delight, or

surprise at ordinary human ingenuity.

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The most popular webcomics, as

reflected in my archive, embody many of

craft content’s broader features: first, they

celebrate amateur creation. As many have

noted, webcomics are distinguished from

their precursors—like comic books or

popular newspaper strips—by their more frequent use of deliberately crude or simplistic

aesthetics. What is arguably the most pervasive short-form webcomic of all time, Randall

Monroe’s XKCD, features mere stick figures (Figure 5.7).

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Allie

Brosch’s Hyperbole and a Half, in addition to playing a significant

role in mainstreaming webcomics’ consumption, popularized the use

of the MS Paintbrush tool to make simple, cartoon avatars (Figure

5.8).

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As James Kochalka, the creator of one of the most popular

early internet-based strips (“American Elf”) put it: “craft is the

enemy.”

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This anti-craft aesthetic pervades the most popular

webcomics in my database, as well as those listed in a

similarly compiled database of the most shared content with

the word “comic” or “comics” in the title.

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These include,

for example, Upworthy’s “Fifteen Hilarious Parenting

Comics” (Figure 5.9), featuring deliberately crudely drawn

Figure 5.7

Figure 5.8

Figure 5.9

Figure 5.10

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ducks (note the overlapping circles of their eyes, and discontinuous lines)

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, or Cheezburger’s

“This Brilliant Comic Reminds Us How Weird Our Human Habits Are” (Figure 5.10), depicting

similarly simplistic aliens.

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These comics, too, court a brief, “quick-hit” response, not of

wonder at the ingenuity of their craft (like, say, the beard baubles or Van Gogh garden), but

instead at the unexpected aptness of their punchlines. Comics like Brightside’s “Fourteen

Comics on How Today’s Childhoods Differ From Ours” (classed in the “Wonder and Curiosities

Category”) or their “Ten Hilariously Truthful Comic Strips About How Manufacturers See Us,”

are meant, through their single panels, to inspire thoughtful “Huhs”

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(The prevalence of the

listicle form, needless to say, is also a corollary of the viral context).

Such webcomics also embody other characteristic features of viral media, suited to its

modes of circulation and monetization: namely, a “relatable” emphasis on personal identity.

Viral content, as I’ve argued, thanks to its drive toward “prosumption,” is often designed to be

used as a vehicle of confessional, personal expression (e.g., a mom shares a piece of content

about the struggles of being a mom). Webcomics do the same. For this reason, those collected in

my database are dominated by the following two features: First, they tend to focus on the

personal experiences of members of different identity groups—indeed, they most often

emphasize gender roles in the context of romance (see, for example, “Nine Comics Strips that

Prove Women Actually Use Magic” and “Thirteen Comics What Love Looks like Before and

After 30”

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). Second, they tend to enact the confessional vulnerability through which readers

might be able to see themselves, or “relate.” Often, this means an explicit emphasis on mental

health, with a plurality of comics focusing on anxiety or depression (See note for examples)

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;

Even more frequently, appearing “relatable” involves the use of deflationary punchlines (call it

the “womp womp” effect), through which the banality of experience is acknowledged with a

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shrug and a smile. Cartoonist Yehuda Devir’s widely-shared and imitated comics about his own

marriage, for example, tend to resolve into warmhearted jokes about the less than ideal—if

ultimately satisfying—realities of comfortable, long-term relationships. In one, for example—

typical of this genre of “couple” comics—Devir’s wife shields herself from view and covers her

face, as if agonizing over the confession of an awful crime. We quickly learn, however, that

rather than having committed any sort of serious amorous infraction (like an infidelity), she has

simply rushed ahead, solo, in the couple’s shared TV watching agenda. In the panel’s punchline,

Devir cries, distraught: “Five episodes without me?!”.

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Two genres of webcomic, in this vein, are especially prominent, each representing what

Angela Nagle, in Kill All Normies, has described as the poles of internet culture: a (once)

Tumblr-based world of identity-focused, often female, non-white, or gender-queer individuals,

and an originally 4chan, reddit-oriented sphere of white masculinity (or: “the manosphere”).

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The more ubiquitous of the two genres, associated with the first pole, is the particularly

pervasive genre (perhaps the most pervasive) that I call the “didactic comic”: a graphic narrative

educating the reader in sensitive treatment toward some subaltern identity group. Representatives

of the genre listed in my database are abundant, and include, in addition to the above-described

“Mental Load,” Upworthy’s “This Artist Brilliantly Tackles the Concept of Being Offended in a

Colorful Comic” (explaining to readers the experience of being “offended”) and graphics on

IntrovertDoodles.com, instructing readers what it’s like to be an anxious introvert.

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In its own,

distinct way, the didactic comic embodies two of webcomics’ characteristic features: their

embodiment of the simple, crude, or opaque, and their thematic emphases on identity and

relatability. Like most webcomics, didactic comics are typically more or less aesthetically

simple. But they are also deliberately opaque on a thematic level, conveying the sense that, when

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it comes to the issues discussed, the truth is

uncomplicated. Their wide-eyed narrators stare matter-

of-factly at the reader and say phrases like, “the thing

is…” in a patient (or sometimes strident) tone.

Consider, for example, the avatar’s dialogue in the

popular Fat Acceptance comic, “Dang I’m Cute,” and

its sequels (Figure 5.11), which is peppered with

phrases like “That’s a Fact” and “No Ifs, No Buts, No

Modifiers on That Statement.”

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Didactic comics also,

like most webcomics, foreground personal identity, and

vulnerable, confessional relatability. Though treating

multiple different identities, they most frequently

convey struggles associated with being with a woman,

as in the mega-viral “Mental Load” comic, and an

abundance of other iterations of the genre represented in my database (see note for examples).

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For this reason, it makes sense that they have been particularly popular on two slightly female-

dominated platforms: Facebook and Instagram (the didactic comics in my database earn the

majority of their 500,000+ shares each from Facebook). If these therapeutically “relatable”

comics possess an inherent ethics—or, in the sense of the term that I use in this chapter, a

philosophy of self-care (as opposed to moral theory)—then it is one of optimism and connection.

Through their earnest instruction, they embody the idea that relief can and must be pursued

through empathic understanding (an idea embodied in the title of one of the most popular

freestanding hubs for didactic comics, called “Empathize This”). If they possess a politics, then it

Figure 5.11

138

is the centrist, liberal progressivism of the Obama-era and Hilary Campaign. Indeed, when not

discussing issues of feminist or LGBQT justice, they often lend their

explicit support to liberal causes, like climate activism or

reproductive rights (see note for examples).

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I. The Depressive Comic

The didactic comics’ shadowy foil, representing the web’s

“manosphere” pole (in Nagle’s dichotomy), is the depressive comic:

a graphic narrative which confirms the worst-case scenario. In one

viral iteration, for example, by the popular digital cartoonist “Shen,”

(Figure 5.12) the autobiographical protagonist, an infant in his crib,

is visited by the “artistic talent fairy”: an adorable, spritely creature

who giggles and declares “Yaaaaay! Hee hee, a little aspiring artist,

hee hee!” while holding her hand over the lid of a jar labeled

“talent.” “Give me lots!” the infant begs, with excitement. But in the

final panel—visible only to the reader—the fairy closes her hand

over the jar’s lid, transforms into a Goblin, and darkly declares:

“Good luck, friend.” In another, a young boy named Timmy sits

before a box on Christmas morning, flanked by his smiling parents, and exclaims: “Oh boy, oh

boy, I wonder what my Christmas present is!” When he discovers that the box is empty, his

parents tell him: “That’s right Timmy, we gave your present to the toy drive down the street.”

Timmy accepts this news with equanimity (“that’s actually quite sweet of you,” he says), until

his parents deliver the cruel punchline: “Yep, we gave them nothing as well.”

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Other, widely-

Figure 5.12

139

shared iterations of the genre include: a dog revealing that his fitness-obsessed owner, despite

working tirelessly on his body, just has an “ugly face”; a man decapitating himself after being

told that his depression is “just in his head”; a man being woken up by his brain composing a list

of every bad decision that he’s made; a man being murdered by a cow, in the ocean, after his

friend tells him that he’s “more

likely to be killed by a cow

than a shark!” (All depicted in

Figure 5.13).

The depressive comic, like its

didactic cousin, embodies

webcomics’ more general

features of simplicity and

“relatability,” if in opposing

ways. It too embraces not only

aesthetic, but philosophical

opacity, conveying an (alleged)

simple truth: in this case, not

the necessity of empathy, but the idea that the worst-case scenario is the reality (The artist is

predestined to lack talent; the fitness-obsessed man is inescapably ugly; the swimmer will be

murdered on this day, if not by a shark). The genre also, in keeping with this nihilistic

philosophy, exposes ugly, taboo phenomena, reveling in the depiction of grotesque violence (as

in the cow-shark and decapitation comics) and all other manner of verboten vulgarity: vomit,

shit, rape, pedophilia, foul-language, “anti-pc” ideas. The depressive comic also, like the didactic

Figure 5.13

140

comic, enacts vulnerable confession, revealing hidden

forms of human suffering. But whereas the protagonist

of the didactic comic is most often either female or

queer, the protagonist of the depressive comic is

typically a young, white male, engaged in activities like

lonely video-game playing or longing to become more

attractive to the opposite sex (Figure 5.14).

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For this

reason, these comics have been widely-shared, not only on mainstrean platforms, but also in

more obscure corners of the “manosphere,” like 4chan and reddit threads for “incels” and “men’s

rights activists.”

Perhaps the two best known avatars of the depressive comic, as shared in the

“manosphere,” are “Wojak” and “Sad Pepe.”

Wojak, or the character known as “Feels

Guy,” is the subject of memes and cartoons

that first became prominent on 4chan in

2010, and then pervaded incel forums. The

first known Wojak cartoon (Fig. 5.15)—a

depressive comic—appeared on a humor

site called “Sad and Useless” in 2009, under the title “I Wish I Was Home.” In it, a lonely, bored

looking Wojak stands at a party, watching while a handsome boy flirts with an attractive girl.

Over his head, the thought bubbles loom: “I’m hungry,” “my feet hurt,” “the music is too loud,”

“I wish I was at home playing video games.” The cartoon then became a meme referred to as

“They don’t know I’m…” in which users could fill in Wojak’s reflections on what makes him

Figure 5.14

Figure 5.15

141

different, or his (implicitly pathetic) consideration of details that might shore up his ego (i.e.

“They don’t know I’m mildly popular on

left Twitter.”)

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Snce then, Wojak has

featured in countless homespun comics

or memes about adolescent or adult male

depression, isolation, and difficulty

attracting the opposite sex. Closely

related to the Wojak universe are comics

concerning Pepe the Frog and “Chad and

Stacy.” Pepe, originally a character in

Matt Furie’s sometimes-depressive

“Boy’s Club,” is often associated with Wojak in his “Sad Frog” form. Sad Pepe features in

meme-ified iterations of the depressive comic, like the particularly literal: “Depressed Pepe?

You’re in Touch with Reality” (Figure 5.16).

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Chad and Stacy, meanwhile, operate as stand-ins

for popular, sexually attractive men and women, who unjustly—and this is their comic’s

depressive reality—enjoy all advantages in life. In the original form of the comic, Chad is

contrasted with his “virgin” counterpart.

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The manosphere’s versions of the depressive comic

tend particularly toward the vulgar and corrosive, displaying not only graphic violence or

sexuality, but also indulging in the expression of racist, sexist, violent, or other “non-PC”

thoughts or attitudes (Figure 5.17, Figure 5.18).

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Figure 5.16

142

Depressive comics

have also catered to

hybridized communities,

uniting mainstream and

“geek,” nerd, or alternative

male cultures. Indeed, many

of today’s most widely read

webcomics—embodying varied features of the depressive

comic—have their origins in the techy, nerdish fora that

populated the early internet. The first webcomics to appear

on the internet, on platforms like Usenet and Compuserve,

addressed the mostly-male, tech-oriented audiences who,

at the time, had access to those platforms (the two strips

most commonly cited as the first webcomics, Where the

Buffalo Roam, on Usenet, and Witches and Stitches, on

Compuserve, involved geeky, nerd-oriented humor; a next

generation of early, computer-nerd-oriented webcomics included “User Friendly” and “the Joy of

Tech”). Even when the world wide web went mainstream, in the early 2000s, it remained largely

male-dominated (gender parity did not arrive online until 2005),

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and its media still often

addressed “nerdcore” audiences. Three of the most popular and recognizable webcomics of all

time, for example, XKCD, Cyanide and Happiness, and Penny Arcade, all had early associations

with geek, nerd, or gamer culture (The first two make science-y in jokes, the third is thematically

focused on video games). All three, moreover, though not synonymous with the depressive

Figure 5.17

Figure 5.18

143

comic, produce multiple strips that share some—if not all—of its features. XKCD, for example,

often focuses on geeky male isolation, if remaining more wholesome than the average depressive

comic (cf. “eventually your friends will stop calling to hang out…” Figure 5.19).

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Cyanide and

Happiness, meanwhile, does the same, but is also known (as per

the title) for its corrosive crudeness; unlike xkcd, it uses its

simple stick figures to joke about themes like abortion and

necrophilia.

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(The comic also hosts a digital event called

“depressing comics week”). Penny Arcade, finally, is also both

geeky and crude: it centers on the lives of two awkward male

gamers, and became mired in a rape joke controversy. Though

not overwhelmingly depressive in tenor, it is best known for a

single-panel comic that, in its pessimistic theorizing, embodies

the depressive comics’ nihilistic

philosophy: the “Greater Internet

Fuckwad Theory” (Figure 5.20).

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More recent, mega-viral strips

have followed in these three

precursors’ footsteps. Founded at

the advent of the heyday of viral

content in 2009, for example, Matthew Inman’s mega-viral The Oatmeal is a “crudely drawn

comic” featuring corrosive, vulgar, and unsettling subject matter like: “being chained to a bunk

bed with a velociraptor, evil scheming kittens, people being sodomized by Bigfoot, and babies

Figure 5.19

Figure 5.20

144

that taste like nachos.” It has recently been anthologized in a book titled “How to Be Perfectly

Unhappy,” referring to one of its most popular strips about depression.

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Corrosive, confessional, and depressing comics are, of course, not a new type of media.

The underground comix of R. Crumb, for example, written in the 1960s, pioneered a vulgar,

autiobiographical style in which lonely, sad men exposed or enacted their sexual longings. The

internet and its viral economy, however, have

exacerbated emphases on those types of

thematics, and channeled them into viral forms—

so much so that, according to Hilary Chute,

webcomics are the new “comix.”

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So-called

“Rage Comics” or memes, for example, which

were popular and influential in the early 2000s,

embody the ways in which the web has transformed work like R. Crumb’s (Figure 5.21). These

comics, in which a man called “Rage Guy”—a mere angry face—spews profanities, embody

underground comix’ obscene expressivity. But they do so in forms conditioned by their web-

based context. The Rage Comics’ simple, re-usable graphic (created in MS paint, and turned into

a meme-style template), embodies the net’s democratization of comic-creation. Its single panel

reflects the viral economy’s encouragement of “bite-size,” shareable media.

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Rage Guy’s

obscene language, moreover—like much webcomic vulgarity—marks the internet’s lack of

restrictions on content, by way of publishers and other middlemen (a major reason, according to

Chute, why webcomics mirror “comix”). Two subsequent pioneers of the depressive comic owed

their origins to Rage Guy: Wojak memes and Allie Brosh’s Hyperbole and a Half. Wojak was an

offshoot of Rage Guy (Feels Guy vs Rage Guy).

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Brosh’s comic, meanwhile, which did a great

Figure 5.21

145

deal to popularize, not only digital comics, but those about depression and mental health, was

inspired by his crude outbursts. Brosh recalled: “When I first discovered Rage Guy I laughed for

ten minutes straight at just the one picture. I literally could not get myself under control. I don’t

know what it is about it, but it triggered something in me that made me want to start drawing

again.”

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Like the didactic comic, the depressive comic embodies a particular ethics, cultivating a

therapeutic practice. Here, however, that practice is not one of optimistic interconnection, but of

pessimistic commiseration. By poking the wound of white male isolation, the strip provides two

types of cold comfort: first, the sensation that by confronting the awful “truth,” one protects

oneself from the dangers of false, foolish, or disappointed expectations—of saying “This Is

Fine,” while the living room burns. Second,

the comradery and connection involved in

the acknowledgement of this shared

experience. The first Wojak memes, for

example, depicting “Feels Guy” in all

manner of sad circumstances, were often

accompanied by a depiction of two Wojaks

embracing, with the caption: “I know that feel bro” (Figure 5.22). As one fan of XKCD put it,

regarding the comic’s appeal: “Rare is the body of work—any body of work—that can make me

laugh, but then also make me feel a hollow sadness. It speaks to the loneliness of growing up

geeky, and remaining so as an adult.”

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And yet this shared confrontation with “reality,” rather than pure, therapeutic honesty, is

also often, in its way, a defensive deflection. The depressive comics’ cruel conclusions typically

Figure 5.22

146

arrive, not in scrupulously realistic form, but rather via the distortive mechanisms of hyperbole

and humor. The comic’s dark Occam’s razor—the masochistic idea that the worst-case scenario

is the true one—is only, in rare cases, an exacting realism. More

often, it is as fantastic a mode of thinking as blind optimism,

conferring the sense of control that comes along with tempering

expectations and neutralizing uncertainty (I will never find love,

because I am objectively ugly, and all women are too superficial

to love someone like me). A brash, cartoonish depiction of male

isolation—in the form of, say, splattering blood or a demonic

visitation (Figure 5.13)—distracts from its more banal

manifestations. So too does humor and irony, which takes the

edge off a balder confrontation with conditions as they are. One

single-panel depressive comic (Figure 5.23) literalizes this

mechanism: when a dark depression kills the healthy plant that symbolizes the protagonist’s

happiness, he turns, for prickly relief, to a cactus labeled “humor.”

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In sum: hyperbole,

vulgarity, and “dark humor,” taken together, provide the deflection necessary to enable

therapeutic male sociality. Even the phrase “I know that feel bro,” at once an earnest expression

of comradery, and amused invocation of (ironically) shared masculinity (“bro”), embodies the

depressive comic’s use of humor to both permit and restrain male vulnerability.

This ethics, too, entails a politics. On one level, simply by embracing a depressive,

nihilistic worldview from the white, male perspective, the comic links up easily with alt-right,

Trumpist ideas: its often self-righteous invocation of unspoken realities slides easily into “anti-

pc” racism and misogyny. Its apocalyptic ideology coincides with right-wing aggression and

Figure 5.23

147

nostalgia (make America great again). More subtly, however, the comic inculcates susceptibility

to paranoid, conspiratorial thinking, which—when it doesn’t embrace the alt-right—transcends

the mainstream political divide. On a therapeutic level, as we have seen, the genre encourages a

confrontation with simple, dark “reality” that enables deflection. On a political level, it can

operate similarly. Readers in search of “brute facts”

find absurdist, doomsday scenarios. These offer a

firmer grasp on reality, that is actually an illusion of

certainty and control. We see this idea illustrated,

first, in the form of Wojak’s “doomer” persona, the

depressed young man who slowly embraces darker

and darker political ideologies. These often, as

Joshua Citarella has shown, have a “post-left” flavor,

coming by far right ideologies by way of an at first apparently

liberal confrontation with societal problems—the “doomer”

meme depicted, for example, embodies an embrace of

paranoid antisemitism (“Redpilled on Jews”) that is the result

of becoming “blackpilled on climate change” (Figure 5.24);

another shows a simple, stick figure man looking sadder and

sadder, while embracing a more and more radical political

futilism (Figure 5.25). Indeed, the commonly depicted progression from “redpill” to

“blackpill”—see Figure 5.26— embodies the notion of, first, embracing a depressive philosophy

Figure 5.24

Figure 5.25

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(“Prefer the truth, no matter how painful”) which

leads, next, to an apocalyptic politics

(“catastrophic outlook).” These political worst-

case scenarios, arguably, provide the same

deflective satisfaction as do their personal

corollaries: the cold comforts of certainty and control that come with hyperbolic simplicity (as

well as corrosive humor). The graphic novelist, Nick Drnaso, explores these ideas in more detail.

I turn now to his body of work.

II. Beverly

Drnaso’s work has consistently mirrored the depressive comic. During his teenage years, in the

early 2000s, the artist was absorbed, not only by the works of R. Crumb, but also by the

internet’s darker realms. As he told the New Yorker: “There would be a beheading video, and I

kind of couldn’t help myself and would be compelled to watch...”

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Whether Drnaso read

depressive comics is unclear (Indeed, his biography—unlike that of many other authors in this

study—is too undocumented to corroborate direct influence). But the comics that he composed,

during this period, conformed to the genre’s contours: they told gloomy tales of male dejection,

laced with violence and obscenity, and landing on deadpan punchlines. One, which Drnaso wrote

when he was eighteen, and has since destroyed, he describes as follows: “the whole strip is this

young man speaking to the reader about how he’s lovelorn and this sensitive guy, and how he

has this great new relationship. And then the clever reveal—‘clever,’ in huge quotes—is that it’s

this kidnapped woman. He’s tied up a girl and left her in a closet.”

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Another, which Drnaso

wrote for a class with his early mentor Ivan Brunetti, has been described, by Brunetti, as “a

Figure 5.26

149

perverse backstory to ‘It’s a Wonderful Life.’” Rather than focusing on George Bailey, it focuses

on the boy that “Bailey sweeps Mary away from at the Bedford Falls High School dance. The

jilted classmate tries to poison Bailey, then commits suicide.”

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Drnaso’s first published work, a 2016 book called Beverly, continued to share key

features with the depressive comic. The book’s brief, interlaced tales, which follow the

inhabitants of an American

suburb, focus largely on themes

of depression and isolation. In

Beverly’s second story, for

example, titled “The Saddest

Story Ever Told,” a girl and her

mother are excited to receive an

invitation in the mail to watch a

VHS tape of a yet-to-be-released

TV show, and then respond to a

questionnaire. “What if the show

becomes a big hit?” the mother

tells the girl. “We got to see it

before anyone else! Maybe we

can do this as a regular thing, like a hobby.” The show is a family sitcom and while it plays, the

mother takes diligent notes. But when she puts down her pen and opens the questionnaire, she

realizes that all of the questions are about the commercials: “huh,” she says, disappointed, “I

thought we were going to be part of the decision-making process.” While the happy, sitcom

Figure 5.27

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family, who have been engaged in small conflicts, reconcile their differences and resolve their

bad feelings with simulacra of loving communication (“Thanks, dad”), the real-life mother and

daughter retreat, in silence, to separate spheres. In the story’s final panel, the daughter sits alone

on her bed, stares blankly for a few moments, and then buries her head in a pillow (Figure

5.27).

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Other stories in the collection concern similarly unsettled characters, struggling to

connect. One, called “Pudding,” tells the tale of a teenage girl who is stonewalled by her female

friend when she broaches the topic of a previous sexual encounter between them. Another, called

“Jane the Virgin,” tells the story of a girl who, to appease the older boyfriend who has illegally

impregnated her, captivates the town’s attention with a fake account of being abducted and raped

by an Arab man.

The collection, more particularly—and like the

depressive comic—centers on youthful, male isolation, of

the type described and experienced by citizens of the

manosphere. Beverly’s first story, for example, “Grassy

Knoll,” features a teenage boy’s encounter with a

troubled coworker named Sal, who, in many ways,

resembles an “incel”: geeky, socially awkward, and, for

all the pathos that he inspires, vaguely menacing. Though Sal attempts to connect with the

protagonist, his strange statements, at once overly-intimate and solipsistic (“These wires will be

perfect for my machine”), unsettle his new companion.

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When some girls arrive to hang out

with the male employees, Sal burrows into himself, by keeping his distance and talking to the

protagonist—who clearly wants to go greet the girls—about a “first-person shooter” videogame

that he enjoys playing. His dialogue reveals his simultaneous sexual desire and repression (he

Figure 5.28

151

describes the protagonist’s erotic exploits and then says: “not all of us are controlled by our

genitals”), as well as his defensive permutation of social frustration into aggressive paranoia

(“sometimes I think there are universal forces conspiring against me, gaming is simply a tool to

hone my alertness”).

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After the protagonist asks his

boss to be transferred away from Sal’s team—a not

uncommon request, the boss says—he catches a

glimpse of Sal, on a nearby hill, pantomiming shooting

him with a shotgun (hence the title, Grassy Knoll”).

(Figure 5.28). In a second story, called “The Lil’ King”

a family of four—the mother and daughter from

“Saddest Story,” along with the family’s father and

brother—goes on a cross country road trip to a coastal

town, where they stay in a hotel for a few evenings.

Though the activities are wholesome—going to the

beach, buying ice cream, watching TV—the young

boy, Tyler, spends the whole trip engaged in gruesome

fantasizing, both sexual and violent, and depicted for

the reader (characters from passing billboards

copulate, boys who mock Tyler and flirt with his sister are disemboweled) (Figure 5.29). When

Tyler’s parents catch him, on his own, pantomiming sex with a pillow dressed up in his sister’s

clothes, they respond by sweeping the incident under the carpet; but they then reveal their

frustration—not only with the uncomfortable event, but with their family life, as a whole—in

other ways. “Oh just forget it,” the father ends up angrily announcing the next day, in the middle

Figure 5.29

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of a trip to the ice cream store. Let’s “get this goddamn trip over with.”

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“King Me,” a later

story, follows the isolated, adult version of Tyler through the course of an evening. “Jane the

Virgin” features the appearance of another “incel”-like character, who, in response to the

circulating story of the young girl’s abduction and rape, reads his high school class a personal

narrative that he has written from the perspective of the perpetrator: “I looked her in the eyes and

realized she was like all the rest. A phony. A fake. I knew then what I had to do.”

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Beverly also, in addition to focusing on youthful male dejection, resembles the depressive

comic in other ways. Like the viral genre, for example, it is either simple or crude—in certain

respects—on levels formal and thematic. Aesthetically, like the depressive comic, the book is

minimalist, contributing to its anesthetized atmosphere. The characters are bluntly rendered, with

only a few dots and lines typically

forming their subtly forlorn faces.

The book’s two, opening pages

feature full-size, more detailed

portraits of characters, whose

strained smiles introduce the twin

thematics of anguish and repression

(Figure 5.30). On a conceptual

level, moreover, the book, if not

simplistically pessimistic, shares

the depressive comic’s bleak

vision. Stories tend to progress

from hopeful, optimistic starts to

Figure 5.30

153

deflated, disappointing endings—a mother and daughter’s attempt to find purpose by assessing a

new TV show falls flat; a family vacation ends in mortification. Characters’ attempts to connect

consistently fail (the girl is rebuffed by her previous sexual partner; the older Tyler is bid adieu

by a woman whom he accompanies home). Conclusions repeatedly confirm sad worst-case

scenarios (the girl has not been raped by a stranger, but, somehow, even more bleakly, has made

up the story; Sal has been driven, by his own alienating behavior, even further into crippling

isolation). The book, too, like the depressive comic, focuses on–and sometimes foregrounds—

dark, unspoken realities (if without the attendant corrosive humor). Stories consistently

emphasize the sorts of sexual or violent events or impulses that typically remain in the dark. We

witness firsthand, for example, each of Tyler’s many unsavory fantasies: a rat’s nest of naked,

embracing bodies; a pile of bloody, disemboweled limbs. We glimpse violent scenes between

Beverly’s panels (“Pudding,” for example, briefly alights on the roadside image of a girl killed in

a car accident—the careful reader will note that she is Tyler’s sister, Cara).

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The volume

dwells, particularly, on the aspects of childhood sexuality—masturbation, homoeroticism,

abuse—that remain most taboo, at least in the types of repressed, midwestern suburb where the

book is set.

Beverly, then, shares the depressive comics’ aesthetic features, like its emphasis on white

male isolation, bleak outlook, and disturbing themes. At the same time, it theorizes those

aesthetic features on a meta level, considering the implications of depicting ugly feelings. The

book, to begin with, does not simply focus on depression, but also on its varied palliatives. When

feeling dejected or disconnected, the volume’s characters quietly reach for sugary foods,

alcoholic beverages, or other muffling mechanisms. (The adult Tyler, for example, spends his

time eating pizza, thumbing through tabloids, and paying for professional massages). Media, in

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particular, cater to these characters’ discontent, offering different types of relief. In “Saddest

Story,” for example, each sequence of programming that crosses the mother and daughter’s TV

screen distinctly addresses their malaise. The sitcom offers a sentimental mirror, simplifying and

resolving family problems. Each cute little conflict is banished with a brief bedside chat—mom

to daughter (“Thanks, mom”), dad to son (“Thanks, dad”) and husband to wife (“Sorry for the

way I acted earlier. You and the kids are too good to me.”).

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The intervening commercials,

meanwhile, address bad feelings in other ways: medicinally (an ad for an anti-depressant),

fantastically (ads for lipsticks and jeans that turn distracted husbands’ heads), fetishistically (a

mom waltzes with a stylish mop). In “Jane the Virgin,” a whole community channels its

dissatisfaction into obsession with a girl’s (falsified) abduction and rape. As Drnaso explained in

one interview: “[The characters] aren’t open with their feeling or emotions at all, but when they

have a scapegoat, they go all out.….People seem attracted to morbid, scandalous stories they can

rally around….In a way it brings closeness.”

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These types of depression-oriented media, for Drnaso, appear to fall into two categories,

addressing bad feelings in imperfect ways. The first category of popular, often sentimental media

ignores, represses, or papers over the uglier aspects of domestic, suburban, and adolescent life.

Drnaso suggests this, for example, of “Saddest Story’s” sitcom and intervening advertisements.

The sitcom, on the one hand, when juxtaposed with the mother and daughter’s own malaise,

seems a sentimental parody of suburban anguish. The show’s mother worries about cutesy,

manageable problems, like her daughters’ crush and son’s minor delinquency. The real-life

mother searches for purpose in a consumer survey and suffers from a more impalpable unease.

The commercials, similarly, caricature domestic dissatisfaction, to offer material solutions—a

woman’s husband is distracted, so she woos him back with lipstick; a housewife is bored

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cleaning, so she re-enlivens things with a fancy mop. This

type of avoidance, Drnaso suggests, is at the source of

adolescent male anguish, driving it toward violent outlets.

Throughout “The Lil King,” for example, when Tyler

mentally departs from the real world, and imagines himself

in sexual or violent scenarios, he envisions himself as a

hulking executioner, shirtless, fully-grown, and donning a ski mask. In real-life scenes, however,

he remains a little boy. Toward the story’s end, this changes. As Tyler’s father addresses him

about his humiliating experience—obliquely, and far too late, with phrases like “I still remember

how confusing it was”—the real-life Tyler transforms into the executioner. He remains that way,

visually, through the remainder of the story, sitting in the backseat of his parents’ car (Figure

5.31).

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The family’s repression, Drnaso suggests, and their inability to directly confront taboo

topics like sex and violence, only drive Tyler deeper into his brutal fantasies.

The second category of entertainment, as if responding to the first, crudely dwells on

taboo topics in their most explicit or salacious forms. We encounter this media, for example, in

the form of Sal’s violent and sexual “first person shooter,” in the aggressive, misogynist rap

music that a boy listens to in “Pudding,” and in the story of “Virgin Mary’s” abduction and rape,

as circulated by various news sources. Characters dwell on this media, Drnaso suggests, as a

preferable alternative to repression and emptiness. As he put it of his own, youthful attraction to

gruesome digital spectacles, the satisfaction came simply from feeling something and not

nothing (“a lot of times you’d end up in tears, but you’d feel something visceral. The feeling is

something.”).

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And yet the problem with this media, among others, is its exaggerated nature.

The depressive comic, as we have seen, provides readers with an opportunity to confront some of

Figure 5.31

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life’s bleaker realities—like the experience of quiet, male desperation. But it does so,

deceptively, by means of deflection, using hyperbole and humor to take the edge off more

vulnerable confrontations with ugly feelings. A genre that professes to show the dark reality, is,

in its way, another form of fantasy. Similarly, Beverly’s grotesque media may at first appear to

reckon with what sentimental sitcoms paper over (sex, violence). But its hyperbolic, salacious

nature renders it another distraction. The story “Virgin Mary” begins to show the political

dangers of this type of deflection (to be addressed further in Sabrina). Through Mary’s story,

community members—like the boy who reads a narrative about being a rapist, or the girl who

dwells on Mary’s fate while making out with her boyfriend—can confront disturbing aspects of

their own psyches. But the story itself is apocryphal, in pernicious ways. It stokes a racist

fantasy, that the community is menaced by an Arab abuser, rather than exposing the realer (and

therefore perhaps more uncomfortable) local problem of statutory rape.

These polarities point the way to an aesthetic middle ground: an art that addresses

obscure, unpleasant realities, but without the attendant deflection. Beverly begins to do this work

by focusing, not on salacious tales of rape or murder—like that of “Virgin Mary”—but rather on

more everyday types of taboo: the sitcom-watching mother’s purposelessness; Tyler’s horrific—

if not unrealistic—experience of humiliation. It does so, too, by stripping media like the

depressive comic of its corrosive humor. Drnaso’s early comics, as we saw, played male

isolation—and, in some cases, its attendant violence—for laughs. But before writing Beverly, he

abandoned this strategy. He wanted, after graduating college, to “record the world around him,

rather than satirize it” (he was partially inspired by his teacher Brunetti’s comment that he was

“funnier when he wasn’t funny.”).

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Throughout Beverly, characters attempt to use casual

joking as a way of broaching forbidden topics with others, in a safe way—Sal’s coworker points

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at a discarded condom and laughs; the masseuse massaging Tyler, as if referencing the tension

between them, tells a joke about a sexual scenario between a doctor and his patient (“I think you

should stop masturbating.” “Why?” “Because I’m trying to examine you.”).

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But Beverly

itself—which never lands on its story’s sad conclusions as comic punchlines—foregoes the

safety of corrosive humor, in pursuit of a deeper connection.

III. Sabrina

Drnaso’s next work, Sabrina, deepens Beverly’s critiques of depressive, corrosive media, as well

as its pursuit of aesthetic alternatives—here, such media’s politics come to the fore. Sabrina, to

begin with, like Beverly, mirrors the depressive comic, in multiple respects. It focuses, first, on

dejection, and on “manosphere”-style male isolation, in particular. The book centers on two male

characters, both of whom are struggling emotionally and socially. First, there, is Teddy, a young

man whose girlfriend, Sabrina, has recently disappeared—later, we learn, she has been abducted

and murdered. Then there is Calvin, a high school friend of Teddy’s who, though he hasn’t seen

Teddy in years, has agreed to let the grieving man stay with him in his house in Colorado.

Teddy, throughout, is catatonic. He spends most of the book sitting silent, motionless, and

expressionless on Calvin’s couch, listening to the radio in his bedroom, or, occasionally, crying

out in anguish. Calvin, meanwhile, struggles in less acute respects: he has recently separated

from his wife, with whom he has a daughter, but, though he clearly misses both, is not capable of

processing the loss. His ex-wife’s description of his emotional disconnection—“you completely

ignored [our daughter]”

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—resonates with the reader’s impression. Calvin struggles to converse

with Teddy, as well as with others in his life (a few co-workers, who are his only other points of

contact) beyond tinny small talk, or limited attempts at consolation (To Teddy: “Ok

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well…everything’s going to be alight”).

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The man who murders Sabrina, “Timmy Yancy,” is

not just reminiscent of, but directly based on, an “incel”; Drnaso dreamed him up after watching

videos of Elliot Rodger, the young man who, in 2014, went on a shooting rampage at a UC Santa

Barbara sorority house. Like Rodger, who frequented r/incels, Yancy spends his time on male-

oriented message boards (these include boards on topics from “body building and men’s rights to

theoretical physics”).

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Like Beverly, Sabrina also shares the genre’s simplicity—or even crude opacity—on

levels formal and thematic. The simply drawn, block-like characters (the visual aesthetics are

largely the same as Beverly’s), live in a world that—as mentioned in this chapter’s

introduction—literally embodies the indulgence of a worst-case scenario: Drnaso’s anxiety that

his own girlfriend might be murdered. In this case, the details of the tale, as in the depressive

comic, are particularly brutal. In the first, unpublished draft of the book, according to Drnaso,

readers witness the scene of Sabrina’s death, as recorded in a video of the event that Yancey

mails to a newspaper, and which later leaks and circulates online. In the newer, published draft,

this sequence is omitted (for reasons to be discussed). But the book still centers on the lurid

event, and its halo of disturbing soundbites and

images: a few lines of Yancey’s final words to

Sabrina (“no one is going to enjoy this less than

me”),

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and image of his suicide (Figure

5.32).

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Like Beverly, Sabrina is also littered

with glimpses of, or allusions to, other acts of

violence (the murders described in In Cold

Blood, an attempted rape, a mass shooting).

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Figure 5.32

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Sabrina, too, like Beverly, self-consciously reflects on the media that we turn to for relief

from depressive feelings, dividing it between sentimental and corrosive poles. Here, more than in

the prior book, the media addressed is digital and viral. Indeed, Drnaso’s prime example of tinny,

treacly media, in Sabrina, is not the sitcom, but the uplifting anecdote. He charges the genre, too,

with empty evasion. One evening, for example, when Calvin is feeling particularly low—in part

due to his crumbling marriage, in part due to Teddy’s distress—he decides to surf the internet.

Drnaso reproduces what he finds there, in panel-by-panel form: an uplifting anecdote about a

teenage boy who buys a little girl a doll at the grocery store (headline: “teen surprises mom and

toddler with good deed at the mall”). Drnaso’s ear for viral genres is uncanny, and he reproduces

each, characteristic element of the uplifting anecdote one precisely. The story begins, in meta-

fashion (as I showed these anecdotes typically do, in chapter one), with a reference to the digital

reception that the event is already receiving: “A Northwest-Indiana teen is being praised on

social media after his random act of kindness went viral.” It then proceeds through the details of

the narrative, and, in its conclusion, again places an emphasis on the ethical value of sharing the

story (“Her hope is that sharing this story will inspire others to do good in the community”).

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The story, however, does nothing to address Calvin’s feelings. Perhaps due to its disconnection

from them, it worsens them. In the panel following the anecdote, he looks up at the ceiling in

exasperated despair. (Drnaso also references uplifting anecdotes in his New Yorker profile, and

riffs on the genre throughout his work). Other childlike, sentimental genres offer characters mere

distraction from inner torment—Teddy, for example, spends some of his lowest moments

reading a children’s picture book.

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Like Beverly’s characters, Sabrina’s look for alternatives, to the nothingness of both

depression and its sentimental palliatives, in an opposing extreme: media that, like the depressive

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comic and its cousins, depicts worst-case-scenarios and other grotesque horrors. The book

introduces the theme of public fascination with horrific events in its early pages, as we, along

with Calvin and Teddy, watch a televised tour—otherwise disconnected from the plot—of the

9/11 memorial. Here, as rendered by Drnaso, the memorial is almost masochistic in its conjuring

of the tragedy. As the announcer describes: “A tour of the museum is a virtual history of vivid

sights and sounds designed to transport visitors back to that day. Viewers relive the tragedy in

painful detail through 23,000 pictures and over 1,000 artifacts, creating an overwhelmingly

visceral sensation. Behind this wall is a repository housing some 8,000 unidentified human

remains.”

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The wide-eyed, saddened, and yet ever-so-subtly smiling expression that Calvin

wears while watching this program—especially when contrasted with his anguished exasperation

after reading the uplifting anecdote—reflects Drnaso’s observation, that people pursue horrific

media to feel something, rather than nothing (On watching digital horrors: “you’d just end up in

tears, but you’d feel something visceral. The feeling is something”). And that they do it, too, the

subsequent panels confirm, to connect. In an attempt to commune with Teddy, Calvin brings up a

news story, from their childhood, about a cop who murdered his wives, and then asks Teddy if he

ever, strangely, feels nostalgia about such events.

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Similarly, Calvin passes his time, in the

evenings, by playing a violent, first-person shooter with his military co-workers (ironically, it has

little to do with the bureaucratic desk jobs that they work every day, dressed up in fatigues).

Here, however, as in Beverly, the confrontation with horrific realities becomes deflective. Calvin

discusses the 9/11 memorial, and remembered murder, with Teddy, rather than the real tragedy

that currently tortures his young companion’s psyche. He plays the first-person shooter, rather

than—in an act of more realist masochism—clicking on a folder containing photos of a family

vacation (we watch as his cursor pauses over it).

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Of course, the book’s central example of grotesque media is that which surrounds

Sabrina’s abduction and murder, and mostly manifests in the world of viral, digital content.

After Timmy Yancey murders Sabrina, the story becomes an object of public fascination, in the

form of click-bait style content.

Drnaso includes depictions of the

web-based headlines, articles, and

social media comments that

surround the event. We see, for

example, a list of trending news

topics that includes “Sabrina

Gallo,” “Avengers,” and “Salmon

Recall” (here, again, Drnaso’s eye

for viral media is uncanny, closely

paralleling the contents of my

archive). The list is surrounded by

articles and comments obsessing

over the details of Yancey’s identity

(“Lost a significant amount of weight…active on various message boards”; “I HAVE to see

this”). (Figure 5.33). The frenzy only heightens when Yancey’s video of Sabrina’s murder—

mailed to a local news station—leaks online, inspiring multiple characters (Calvin and his

coworkers, among them) to reluctantly download and watch. Again, the viewing of such

grotesque media is depicted as, at once, the pursuit of an alternative to emptiness, and, at the

same time, a deflection. Poignantly, for example, the page that coincides with the release of the

Figure 5.33

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tape depicts the following sequence of images: a billboard with a sign that says “ad here,”

suggesting the vacuity of everyday content, and then an image of Calvin’s coworker guiltily

clicking on the link.

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Calvin, too, succumbs to his own desire to watch the video, immediately

after experiencing a painful, face to face encounter with Teddy (Teddy yells “get the fuck out of

my face” rebuffing Calvin’s attempts at connection, and repaying his generosity with hostility).

By clicking on the video, he chooses a visceral nausea (he vomits in the toilet), over the

discomfort of dwelling on the vision of Teddy’s angry face (For the reader, too, this is an

unusually detailed glimpse of Teddy’s visage).

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Indeed, Sabrina—more than Beverly—dwells on the connections between pursuing

horrific media, as a form of deflection, and conspiratorial political thinking. Shortly after the

news of Sabrina’s murder emerges, Teddy begins to spend all of his time listening to a radio

show that dwells on the topic. The show is hosted by an Alex-Jones style conspiracy theorist

whose name is Alfred Douglass. Douglass’s very first lines, uttered in response to hearing the

news of Sabrina’s death, crystallize the connections between the consumption of horrific media,

simplistically depressive thinking, and political paranoia. “Let’s face the facts,” he says,

invoking a universe of clear and simple truths. Those truths, he then reveals, are the bleakest

possible: “society is in a state of hopeless anomie. Man commits a terrific atrocity, and the rest of

us have to suffer the day with a little less ardor, a little less sympathy.” They are also, he

continues (in lines reminiscent of “This is Fine”), concordant with apocalyptic thinking: “I’m

prone to alarming doomsday predictions…but I don’t cry fire unless I see smoke. Literally and

figuratively, I have been seeing a hell of a lot of smoke lately.”

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Similarly, throughout the

book, a website called “Iron Truth Report” becomes a hub for the circulation of outlandish

theories about Sabrina’s death (often under clickbait headlines like “Sabrina Gallo Alive! You

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Won’t Believe it” or “Calvin Wrobel: CRISIS ACTOR”

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): for example, that she is a victim of a

political murder, and that Calvin and Teddy are paid actors pretending to mourn her death.

Inspired by such clickbait, men’s rights activists, including one who refers to himself “Truth

Warrior,” begin to harass Calvin, sending him death threats in the mail.

For Douglass, Drnaso suggests, the embrace of conspiracy theories surrounding

Sabrina’s death (and otherwise) confer the illusion of control in a frightening world (if also,

more cynically, profits earned). Douglass, we learn, began to show shortly after being fired from

his job at the post-office, and frequently refers to his own fears for the wellbeing of his family,

laced with nostalgic yearning for the comforts of childhood (“You’re always fretting about

something” his mother says to him, in a described anecdote, to which he responds: “My little

girls are growing up in a perverse world. I worry about them constantly”; after she offer shim

comfort in the form of kind words and key lime pie he says: “Thanks for giving me strength

mom, I love you”).

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Discussing apocalyptic scenarios, he is palpably empowered by the sense

that in real mortal danger—at least—he will be able to fight to carve out his own destiny: “you

will have frightened and defenseless groups of people shepherded together, and they will be

completely dependent on those in control. Game over….if someone is coming after me and my

family, I will retaliate.” The men who comment on “Iron Truth Report” convey this same

(gendered) sense of empowerment: “I will not bow to a master. I will not cower in fear”; “This is

what it means to be a man. To assert yourself.” As the “Truth Warrior” puts it to Calvin,

regarding his opportunity to reveal the "truth” of his identity as an actor, “You’re wielding real

power.” That such a feeling could scarce attend a more realistic confrontation with social or

personal crises is reinforced by the ironic fact: that it is only when the most palpable proof of

Sabrina’s death emerges, in the form of the video, that Douglass’s followers begin to deny its

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reality, picking apart the footage frame by frame to discover inconsistencies, and then subjecting

any news footage of Calvin and Teddy to the same process. Easier to embrace a grand, near

theory than real life’s quirks and ambiguities—that Calvin gets Sabrina’s name wrong on TV, for

example, must mean that the murder has been elaborately faked, rather than that a grown man

could be that vaguely dazed and emotionally disconnected.

Indeed, even the very subjects of the circulating false theories—Teddy and Calvin—find

a perverse comfort in the evasion they enable. Teddy smiles, calmly, as he listens to Douglass

describe the apocryphal nature of Sabrina’s murder. A few scenes later, we are reminded of the

more difficult confrontation with reality that he is avoiding, which might offer him the

possibility of a deeper interpersonal connection—Sabrina’s sister Sandra yells at him over the

phone for cutting off contact with her after Sabrina’s death, saying: “You didn’t come to her

funeral. No condolences…we could have supported each other.”

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Similarly, Drnaso suggests

that, for all his distress, Calvin is using his enmeshment in Teddy’s personal and public crisis—

Teddy, after all, is a friend he hasn’t seen since childhood—as a way of avoiding his own

loneliness after his wife’s departure. He succumbs to the paranoid thinking surrounding

Sabrina’s death, calling his wife to ensure that his daughter is safe (perhaps she has been

kidnapped, like Sabrina). But the more palpable problem is that, alive and well, the girl cannot

hold his attention for more than a moment. As his wife scolds him: “You call once every two

weeks, sometimes in the middle of the night, and you talk to her for about ten minutes.”

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Drnaso’s insights, about the relationships between worst-case-scenario media and

conspiratorial thinking, undoubtedly informed his own concerns about the first draft of Sabrina,

and particularly the elements it had in common with the depressive comic. Reflecting on the

problems with the initial work—so palpable to him after Trump’s election—Drnaso mentioned,

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in particular, his dissatisfaction with the book’s dark and lurid subject matter. As he put it to one

interviewer: “I just looked at the product and looked at what was going on in the culture and just

said, I just made this book about an innocent person who’s abducted and slaughtered and her

death is disseminated online and sorta looked at my own life and my own behavior and really

just didn’t feel that good.” The problem with embracing this subject matter, Drnaso suggested,

was not simply the problem of becoming complicit with a prevailing, negative climate

(associated with Trump, by implication), but also of succumbing, in anxious depression, to

media-inspired paranoia. As he put it, regarding his “concerns about [his] wife”: If you choose to

read a certain kind of news story, then they’re not unreasonable at all and it’s perfectly logical to

have a gun in your house because home invasions happen. So that was sort of the feeling:

waffling between how accurately I’m seeing the world, the city I live in.”

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Through the final, post-revision version of Sabrina, however, Drnaso works out an

alternative to the depressive comic, attempting to evade its implicit politics. Beverly, as I’ve

noted, eschews one of the depressive comic’s evasive tactics: deflective humor. And so too does

Sabrina (even in its pre-revision form), never playing sad realities for cathartic laughs. But

Sabrina further transcends the depressive comics’ deflection through two revisions. First, by

choosing to occlude, rather than reveal, grotesque spectacles, Sabrina emphasizes a more banal

type of difficult reality. In the original draft of Sabrina, Drnaso included a full rendering of the

video of Sabrina’s death which, as he told the New Yorker, he had had to “get drunk to draw.” In

revision, he decided “he could publish the book, if he removed the murder scene, and added

small moments of grace—including several panels in which Sabrina’s sister talks about her

trauma, at an open-mike night.”

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Indeed, Drnaso also, he later explained, added most of the

scenes that involve Sabrina’s sister Sandra. At first, it may appear that, in making this choice,

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Drnaso chose sunny optimism over brutal accuracy (the very choice that a depressive comic like

“This is Fine” protests). But the scene of the open-mike night, in which a deadpan Sandra reads

from letters she’s received accusing her of fraud, to a largely unresponsive audience, is hardly an

optimistic or uplifting one. Rather, it is simply a more everyday depiction of grief. The same is

true of the novel’s final scene, in which Sandra, alone on her bicycle, rides by a lake, and takes a

deep breath (Figure 5.34). Her

face is neither elated or, as it

has been throughout the book,

anguished. It is neutral, and

simply alive. She has not

recovered from her grief, the

image suggests, and perhaps

never will; but nor will her

life be unrelenting agony.

These final, aesthetic choices

emphasize not blind optimism

over clear-eyed pessimism;

they simple stress a rarer

realism, confronting everyday

difficulty rather than

outlandish catastrophe.

Figure 5.34

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Conclusion

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New media forms, Neil Postman once argued, affect a culture by reshaping what is

seeable and sayable, or “what ideas we can conveniently express.”

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What does content compel

us to see and say? In this dissertation, I’ve used a mixture of “close” and “distant” reading

methods to argue that major new genres of viral content—from the uplifting anecdote and

iWitness account, to the idrealist post and depressive comic—embrace aesthetic tactics that

promote unique ways of thinking about ethics. In a world of “prosumption,” virtuous action and

self-care alike are reduced to the types of activities involved in sharing, commenting, liking,

producing data, and creating content. To do good, the uplifting anecdote subtly conveys, is to

engage in acts of self-expression, and particularly those involving erotic or aesthetic recognition

(like acknowledging uncommon beauty). The iWitness account, meanwhile, often (if sometimes

rightly) encourages apprehension of official sources of information or authority, like print-

journalism or the legal system, as a way of generating audience commentary. The idrealist post

and depressive comic alike, through their vulnerable “relatability,” equate self-care and self-

development with interpersonal relating—but forms of relating that, in both cases, are empty or

pernicious. In the case of the idrealist post, the comforting vision of an influencer’s failure—as

juxtaposed with her perfect veneer—stokes cruel optimism. In the case of the depressive comic,

the deflection required to enable male vulnerability, in the form of both hyperbole and humor,

can encourage the sort of paranoid thinking that fuels conspiracy theories.

English-language and American authors have imitated these viral genre’s aesthetics,

often earnestly emulating their appeal, and embracing classically “unliterary” qualities: Saunders

happily takes on the uplifting anecdote’s sentimentalism; Rankine, as a result of her engagement

with the iWitness account, embraces the didactic; Various female authors imitate the “humble

brag” of the idrealist post; and Drnaso channels the depressive comics’ deliberately vulgar

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emphasis on taboo or grotesque worst-case scenarios. And yet, these authors have transformed

these viral genres into “good content,” by revising their ethical implications. Perhaps most

insistently, they have altered these genres so as to more honestly confront reality (at least by

these authors’ lights). For Saunders, this means eschewing the happy endings that encourage

self-celebratory, exhibitionism in favor of the confrontations with tragedy that inspire more

other-directed empathy. For Rankine, it means making a strong case, where it needs to be made,

rather than letting audiences reach their own (faulty) conclusions. For non-idrealist authors, like

Offill or Ferrante, it means rejecting one or the other side of the genre’s false coin: its artificial

vision of the ideal, or its equally inaccurate vision of reality. For Drnaso, it means overcoming

deflective tactics, to more baldly represent depressive feelings.

These analyses supplement broader, media theoretical and social scientific conversations

about the internet’s effects. Moving past media theory’s emphasis on the “medium” at the

expense of the “message,” they home in on viral content’s symbolic features. By analyzing those

features aesthetically, they supplement social scientific methods (content analysis, surveys, and

so on). Consider, for example, the conversations which now largely dominate social scientific

internet studies, surrounding citizen journalism and fake news. Questions that vex these inquiries

include: should all news circulated by unofficial sources be censored, labeled, or algorithmically

de-prioritized? Or should only that which is “fake” be sanctioned? And if so, what standards,

both conceptual and computational, should be used to identify falsity? Because researchers

addressing these questions focus largely on actors, institutions, and information, they categorize

digital content by who produces it—as in the designation of citizen vs. non-citizen journalism—

or by factual accuracy—as in fake vs. real news.

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By contrast, when “Content Culture” has

proceeded, from a humanist perspective, to scour content, it has focused, first, not on who

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produced the content or its veracity, but instead on its generic features: sets of linguistic,

narrative, and formal patterns that persist across the data. This has led to an analysis of the

distinct categories of the iWitness account and depressive comic. And this analysis has shed

alternative light on digital misinformation, showing how viral media’s “prosumption-driven”

aesthetics, rather than simply its institutional organization (lack of gatekeepers and legal

restrictions etc.), have encouraged susceptibility to falsity. The iWitness account, for example, is

a genre that, in pursuit of audience response, undermines the authority of journalistic and other

institutions. And indeed, even professional news sources—rather than simply amateur ones—

make use of the genre. The depressive comic, meanwhile, through its deflective indulgence of

the worst-case scenario, has spread rapidly because it encourages interactive, digital catharsis.

But it has also, in the process, subtly advocated paranoid thinking.

The literary response to this content, too, supplements our understanding of the internet’s

cultural effects. To measure the ways in which new, popular media impact culture or society,

sociologists often rely on audience surveys, asking viewers of a film, for example, how it has

altered their feelings or thoughts. But humanistic studies of influence, too—showing how one

type of cultural artifact impacts another—differently document a new medium’s effects. By

tracing the trajectory of viral tropes through literary writing, “Content Culture” has provided a

distinct type of evidence of their cultural impact. The scale of that impact, moreover, transcends

the project’s limited scope. The four genres treated, for example, have left their mark, not only

on the books under discussion, but also on a broader array of literary works. Consider, for

example, two poems, beyond Rankine’s, that have been directly influenced by the iWitness

account: Ross Gay’s “A Small Needful Fact,” responding to the video of Eric Garner’s death, or

Evie Shockley’s “what’s not to liken?” based on footage of police tackling a fourteen-year old

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Black girl attending a pool party, while also imitating the form of a quiz. (Indeed, much poetry—

perhaps due to its emphasis on crucial moments—has channeled or been related to the iWitness

account, from Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic to Kenneth Goldsmith’s controversial “The Body

of Michael Brown”). Or, consider graphic novelist Chris Ware’s capsule versions of the

depressive comic (for example, the brief, excisable strip included in the early pages of Jimmy

Corrigan, whose brutal punchline involves the death of an infant).

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Multiple other novels could

have been included in the chapter on the “idrealist post” (For example: Christine Smallwood’s

The Life of the Mind or Raven Leilani’s Luster).

The viral genres, too, reverberate through other media. To name only a few examples:

The uplifting anecdote—as I’ve argued elsewhere—shapes NBC’s sitcom The Good Place as

much as Saunders’ oeuvre. Janicza Bravo’s recent film, Zola, was based on a tweeted iWitness

account, describing one woman’s journey to Florida with a prostitute, and rendering the guilt and

innocence of each ambiguous (The viral tweet, notoriously, begins: “Y’all wanna hear a story

about why me & this b*tch here fell out?”).

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Artist Amalia Ulman’s Excellences and

Perfections stages the artist as a female influencer, and makes ample use of the “idrealist trope”

(she becomes more and more beautiful, throughout the project, while exposing the ”ugly” side of

the process, like her hospitalization during a breast augmentation surgery). The depressive comic

finds particularly close reflection in Don Hertzfeldt’s animated film “It’s Going to Be a Beautiful

Day,” which tells multiple, short, interlinked, and darkly comic stories about a neuro-atypical

male stick figure (A more well-known example is Netflix’s BoJack Horseman). Other versions

of this project might have focused on these other artforms. They, too, are a testament to the ways

in which viral “content” has been reshaping what we see and say.

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This process is described in José Van Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2013). Van Dijck calls the contemporary social media economy of data sharing, and its

concomitant cultural manifestations, the "Culture of Connectivity." He explains how various early 2000s

developments, like YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook's growing size and going public, gave it birth. The whole book

describes the process. For a good overview, see section 2 of the first chapter, 5-9

Adam Bowie, “Content,” Adambowie.com, October 4, 2009.

This word is used widely across the literature. I may have first encountered it, in particularly well-defined form, in

Christian Fuchs, Social Media: A Critical Introduction (London: SAGE Publications, 2013).

Adam Gaines, “The Business of the ‘Broad City’ Creators Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer,” Forbes, Jan 23, 2019,

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamgaines/2019/01/23/the-business-of-the-broad-city-creators/?sh=671a28e93446

David Kushner, “Zola Tells All: The Real Story Behind the Greatest Stripper Saga Ever Tweeted,” Rolling Stone,

https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/zola-tells-all-the-real-story-behind-the-greatest-stripper-saga-ever-tweeted-

73048/

Margaret E. Atwood (@MargaretAtwood), 2021, “Must see!! The long-lost Lord of the Rings adaptation from

Soviet Russia is a glorious fever dream,” Twitter, April 9, 2021,

https://twitter.com/margaretatwood/status/1380714318820429829

“The Danger of a Single Story,” Filmed July 2009, TED Video, 18:33,

https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?language=en

Brandon Taylor (@bldgtaylor), 2021, “Those are my stories!!!!” Twitter, April 16, 2021, https://twitter.com/blgtylr

TN Viral Desk, “Viral Video: Construction Workers Cleverly Use Digger To Rescue Dog Drowning in Irrigation

Channel“ TimesNowNews, April 24, 2022, https://www.timesnownews.com/viral/viral-video-construction-workers-

cleverly-use-digger-to-rescue-dog-drowning-in-an-irrigation-channel-article-91050186

This lady keeps stealing my mail,” Youtube, accessed on March 31, 2022,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bu9N3jeXwtY

I compiled this database using two different methods. First, I looked at lists published on the content analysis

service Newswhip's blog. See "The Whip: Social Data and Ideas From the Newswhip Team," Newswhip, accessed

June 25, 2019., newswhip.com/blog/. These lists, published (approximately) monthly and annually between 2014

and 2019, indicate the most shared/engaged with pieces of content, and top performing outlets (i.e., producing the

most shared/engaged with content total) on Facebook or Twitter during individual months or years. (Blogposts

might be titled, for example, "These Were the Top Shared Publishers on Facebook in June 2019," or "The Most

Shared Stories on Twitter in 2015"). I collected data from all lists from the period July 2018-2019. Second, I

conducted searches using a proprietary tool called Buzzsumo (Harvard's Charles Warren center funded my

subscription), which lets subscribers discover how many times pieces of content were shared on four platforms:

Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Pinterest, during some specified period within the past five years. Users can use the

tool to search by content domains (NYTimes), by article title, by author, or by title keywords (No blank search,

returning the most shared content writ large, is permitted; this is also true on Facebook's similar CrowdTangle tool;

that is, going directly to the Facebook API/Crowdtangle tool would not circumvent this issue). Restricting my

searches to the period of July 2014 to July 2019, I searched, first, for content published by all of the domains listed

by Newswhip as ever having produced the most shared content during a month between July 2014 to July 2019, and

added all resultant pieces of content earning 500,000 or more total shares to my database. I then searched the content

by generic title keywords (the top 100 most frequently used words in the English language, according to the OED,

except "a" and "I" as one letter searches were not permitted), to get viral content from a broader sample of outlets;

again, I added all pieces of content earning 500,000 or more shares to my database. On the topic of “virality”: while

the common definition in circulation online and in criticism, for many years, has been more than 500,000 shares, it

173

is merely a heuristic because a) distinct platforms tend to have distinct share counts and b) other factors can be taken

into account beyond shares, like spread across networks, etc.

Oscar Schwartz, “Unpopular Content: Outsmarting the Youtube Agorithm,” The Baffler, May 31, 2022,

https://thebaffler.com/latest/unpopular-content-schwartz

Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford Univ. Press,

1990); Gayatri Spivak, “Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain Scenes of Teaching,” Diacritics 32, no.

3–4 (2002): 17–31 ,

Emma Chamberlain (@emmachamberlain), 2020, Instagram, August 23, 2020

https://www.instagram.com/p/CEQErFcpWoD/?epik=dj0yJnU9ekdCOThvMUpWZVRRejdxc3dFZkxWMUlocmg0

S1NrOU4mcD0wJm49TUk0aWtwWUJ6eldIN3hDX3NEeVNidyZ0PUFBQUFBR0owYWlJ

Ed Finn, What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017), Zara

Dinnen, The Digital Banal: New Media and American Literature and Culture (New York: Columbia UP, 2018),

Alan Liu, Friending the Past: The Sense of History in the Digital Age (Chicago: UChicago Press, 2018), Mark

McGurl, Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon (New York: Verso, 2021); Simone Murray, The

Digital Literary Sphere: Reading, Writing, and Selling Books in the Internet Era (Baltimore: JHU Press, 2018).

Aarthi Vadde, “Platform or Publisher,” PMLA 136, no. 3 (2021): 455-62, Melanie Walsh and Maria Antoniak,

“The Goodreads Classics: A Computational Study of Readers, Amazon, and Crowdsourced Amateur Criticism,”

Cultural Analytics 6, no.2 (2021): 243-287, Kinohi Nishikawa, “Do it For the Vine: Literary Views and Online

Amplification,” Post45 Contemporaries September 17, 2019, https://post45.org/2019/09/do-it-for-the-vine-literary-

reviews-and-online-amplification/

Pascale Casanova The World Republic of Letters (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999)

Alexander Manshel, “The Lag: Technology and Fiction in the Twentieth Century” PMLA 135, no. 1 (2020): 40-58

Andrew Piper, Enumerations: Data and Literary Studies (Chicago: UChicago Press, 2018).

James Joyce, Ulysses (Bangalore: True Sign Publishing House, 2021)

Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2014), 25-6

Mark McGurl, “The Novel’s Forking Paths,” Public Books, April 1, 2015, https://www.publicbooks.org/the-

novels-forking-path/

Dan N. Sinykin, “The Conglomerate Era: Publishing, Authorship, and Literary Form, 1965-2007,” Contemporary

Literature 58, no. 4 (2017): 462-491

Rachel Greenwald Smith, “Six Propositions on Compromise Aesthetics,” The Account, accessed on May 6, 2022,

https://theaccountmagazine.com/article/six-propositions-on-compromise-aesthetics/

Suzanne Clark, Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word (Bloomington: Indiana

UP, 1991)

Serpell, Seven Modes; Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge; Dorothy J. Hale, “Aesthetics and the New Ethics:

Theorizing the Novel in the Twenty-First Century,” PMLA 124, no. 3 (2009); Geoffrey Harpham, Shadows of

Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society (Durham: Duke UP, 1999); J. Hillis Miller, The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de

Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin (New York: Columbia UP, 1987).

174

Lev Manovich, “Instagram and the Contemporary Image,” accessed on May 6, 2022,

http://manovich.net/index.php/projects/instagram-and-contemporary-image, and Lisa Gitelman, Paper Knowledge:

Toward a Media History of Documents (Durham, Duke UP: 2014)

In a recent special issue of Critical Inquiry, Alexander Galloway has called for a turn from the “analog” logics of

much, recent media theory, emphasizing materiality, to a more “digital” approach, emphasizing structures and

symbols. Alexander R. Galloway, “Golden Age of Analog,” Critical Inquiry 48, no. 2 (2022): 211-233. In the same

issue, Matthew Handelman calls for a return, in media theory, to attention to the “meaning[s]” conveyed by

technical forms, in the model of the Frankfurt school. Matthew Handelman, “Artificial Antisemitism: Critical

Theory in the Age of Datafication,” Critical Inquiry 48, no. 2 (2022): 286-313.

Mark Hansen and W.J.T. Mitchell, Critical Terms for Media Studies (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2010): x-xiii; John

Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Towards a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2015):

See, for example, Jessica Pressman, Digital Modernism: Making it New in New Media (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2013), or Rita Raley, Tactical Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).

See, for example, McGurl, Everything, and Murray, Digital Literary Sphere

See, for example, a special issue on “Digital Humanities and Digital Social Reading,” Digital Scholarship in the

Humanities, Volume 36, Issue Supplement 2 (2021): 230-250, or see Penn DH researchers James Fiumara, Peter

Decherney, and Scott Enderle’s development of a DH tool for analyzing fanfiction, as described here: Louisa

Shepard, “May the Force Be With You and Other Fan Fiction Favorites,” Penn Today, December 18, 2019,

https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/penn-digital-humanities-fan-fiction-meter-star-wars

For a more recent lit review of social scientific Meme Studies, one of the earliest, largest subfields of scholarship

on popular digital media, see Constance Iloh “Do It For the Culture: The Case of Memes in Qualitative, “

International Journal of Qualitative Methods 20 (2021), https://doi.org/10.1177/16094069211025896

Jared M. Ott, Naomi Q.P. Tan, Michael D. Slater, “Eudaimonic Media in Lived Experience: Retrospective

Responses to Eudaimonic vs. Non-Eudaimonic Films,” Mass Communication and Society 5 (2021): 725-47

Diana Rieger, Leonard Reinecke, Lena Frischlich, Gary Bente, “Media Entertainment and Well-Being: Linking

Hedonic and Eudaimonic Entertainment Experience to Media-Induced Recovery Vitality,” Journal of

Communication 64, no. 3 (2014), 1-23

Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for the Facts, (New York: Simon &

Schuster, 2019), 117.

Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1977), 3-17,

Philip Fisher, Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987),

Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860, Oxford: Oxford UP,

1986, xvii.

For a recent lit review of fake news research, explaining an absence of emphasis on the “content,” and then

conduct a more sociological content analysis, see: Alyt Damstra, Hajo G. Boomgaarden, Elena Broda et. al, “What

Does Fake Look Like? A Review of the Literature on Intentional Deception in the News on Social Media,”

Journalism Studies 14 (2021): 1947-63

“Content,” Books NGram Viewer, accessed on May 6, 2022,

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=content&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothin

g=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Ccontent%3B%2Cc0

175

Then Corpus of Historical American English is one of the largest “representative” corpora of Historical American

English and most widely used. It collects sources from the 1820s to 2010s and is openly searchable, by word, online.

See: Corpus of Historical American English, accessed on May 6, 2022, https://www.english-corpora.org/coha/

Gates’ Essay was published on Microsoft.com in 1996. It is reproduced here: Craig Bailey, “Content is King by

Bill Gates,” Craig Bailey, May 31, 2010, https://www.craigbailey.net/content-is-king-by-bill-gates/

For discussion, see the introduction of Marjorie Garber, The Use and Abuse of Literature (New York City:

Vintage, 2011): 3-5

Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2020):

1-2

This is an observation from Eichhorn’s forthcoming book. For a preview, see:

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/content

Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked

Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 1-5, 34.

Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion (New York: Random House, 2019), 26, 14.

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016),

21.

Fisher, Hard Facts, 5-6

Stephen Messenger, "Man Builds Dog Train to Take Rescued Pups Out on Little Adventures," The

Dodo, September 22, 2015, https://www.thedodo.com/man-builds-dog-train-for-rescued-pups-1362467342.html; "I

am Faithful Wife, What Kind of Wife Are You?", Bitecharge, accessed on October 27, 2019,

https://bitecharge.com/play/wife/h1

Theodore Shoebat, "Hilary Clinton: Christians in America Must Deny Their Faith in

Christianity," Shoebat.com, April 24, 2015, https://shoebat.com/2015/04/24/hilary-clinton-christians-in-america-

must-deny-their-faith-in-christianity/; Jennifer Rubin, "Donald Trump May Be the Dimmest President the U.S. Has

Ever Had," The Independent, June 1, 2017, https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/donald-trump-dimmest-us-

president-ever-personal-mobile-phone-number-security-concerns-a7766271.html

A topic model is a tool that divides a set of text into the group of “topics” that, in theory, might have been

“behind” them, or guided their composition. Sometimes, these topics are compared to “discourses” in the

Foucauldian sense. For more discussion, see citations at the end of this note. My procedure, here, runs as follows: I

ran this topic model on the 205,147 content headlines in my archive. I used the tool MALLET from the command

line, running the topic model on the 205,147 documents comprising 2,399,270 words. I tried multiple different

numbers of topics (from 50 to 500, by intervals of 50), at multiple different optimization intervals (20-60, by tens). I

used the standard stop-word list. I found that most of these experiments produced very good results (part of why I

didn't need to adjust stop words). The topics were remarkably straightforward and easy to assign labels to, likely due

to the simplicity of the documents. I decided that the most coherent list of topics were 150 topics at an optimization

interval of 20. They are the topics on which this discussion is based. There are problems with the method of Topic

Modelling, as many have discussed. For one thing, the model will produce slightly different results each time it is

run. The topics produced should not be taken as an objective and comprehensive snapshot of all of the topics

appearing in the corpus, but rather as a strong indication of some major themes and a starting point, on that basis, for

closer analysis. Here, the topic model begins to indicate, to me, that the content divides into two major sorts of

categories. Other methods like word counts and, not least, close looking, then confirm this suggestion. For an

introduction of the topic modeling method into humanistic disciplines, and a pattern for my own work, see Andrew

Goldstone and Ted Underwood, "The Quiet Transformations of Literary Studies: What Thirteen Thousand Scholars

176

Could Tell Us," New Literary History 45, no. 3 (2014): 359-384. For more discussion see Ted Underwood, "Topic

Modeling Made Just Simple Enough," The Stone and the Shell, April 7, 2012,

https://tedunderwood.com/2012/04/07/topic-modeling-made-just-simple-enough/

For this analysis, I downloaded Saif Mohammad's NRC Lexicon, a spreadsheet which includes English language

words labeled, via crowdsourcing, by the major emotions that they indicate. There are eight emotions: "Anger,"

"Anticipation," "Disgust," "Fear," "Joy, "Sadness," "Surprise," "Trust." I then used this spreadsheet to tally the

number of words associated with each emotion appearing in each of my content headlines. I could then calculate, by

simple addition, the proportional quantities of words related to each emotion amongst the headlines as a whole. For

more on how Mohammed compiled the Lexicon, as well as the rationale for the choice of these eight emotions (on

the basis of psychological research), and their in-context definitions, see Saif Mohammad and Peter Turney,

"Crowdsourcing a Word-Emotion Association Lexicon," Computational Intelligence, 29 no. 3 (2013): 436-465.

Because sentiment analysis is mostly used to identify whether online reviews are positive or negative, most

sentiment analysis lexicons label words only as positive or negative. Mohammad's is one of the few that attempts

more complex labeling. Obviously, there are flaws with this method. The choice of eight emotions, no matter how

grounded in psychological research, will always be partial. Moreover, however consistent the taggers' abilities to

match words to emotion-labels, those labels will no doubt still fail to capture the words' affective valences in varied

contexts. In sum, these results should not be accepted as independently authoritative, but can, as they do here,

supplement other findings. For examples of prior usage of sentiment analysis in Digital Humanities research, see

Inger Leemans et. al., "Mining Embodied Emotions: A Comparative Analysis of Sentiment and Emotion on Dutch

Texts, 1600-1800," DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly 11, no. 4 (2017) and Matthew Jockers, "The Ancient World

in Nineteenth Century Fiction: or, Correlating Theme, Geography, and Sentiment in the Nineteenth Century Literary

Imagination," DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly 10, no. 2 (2016)

Uplifting/Heartwarming: 4; Politics: 42; Unfortunate Event: 5; Race and Identity/Controversy: 9; Disasters: 1

Uplifting/Heartwarming: 0.05202; Politics: 0.3535; Unfortunate Event: 0.0503; Race and Identity/Controversy:

0.06621; Disasters: 0.00495.

This is a convention of the YouTube How-To Genre, typically appearing in the final seconds. Crafty Gemini

teaches us to bake bread, and then asks us to post about our results: "If you throw in different ingredients or things, I

would love to hear your comments" (The Crafty Gemini, "How to Make Bread From Scratch - No Breadbaker

Needed," YouTube video, 15:15, April 3, 2011), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWOJovFzWfw; Yana Irbe

teaches us to braid hair, and then asks us to indicate that it worked for us with a "like" or comment (Yana

Irbe, "Front Row Braid," YouTube video, 7:49, April 27, 2017),

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11CCrpeaS1Q

George Saunders, “American Psyche,” The Guardian, April 12,2008,

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2008/apr/12/healthandwellbeing1.

Saunders, “Dog Tale,” The Guardian, December 9, 2009,

https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2006/dec/09/weekend7.weekend1; Saunders, “A Bone to Pick,” O

Magazine 8, no. 9 (2007): 250; Saunders, “Woof: A Plea of Sorts,” in The Brain-Dead Megaphone: Essay,

London: Bloomsbury Publishing (2019): 123-126

See, for example, Saunders, “David Foster Wallace,” The Guardian, January 1, 2010,

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jan/02/noughties-writers-obituaries-review; Saunders also discussed

Wallace on Charlie Rose.

Saunders, “George Saunders’s Advice To Graduates,” The 6th Floor, The New York Times, July 31 2013.

https://6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/31/george-saunderss-advice-to-graduates/.

The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, “Are We being Kind Enough to Donald Trump? Author George Saunders

Has Answers,” YouTube video, 7:17, posted February 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5K0Dum_bTk

Ibid.

177

Killian Fox, “George Saunders: ‘It Was Good to Have a Painful Immersion in Capitalism,’” The Guardian, May

26, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/may/26/george-saunders-tenth-december-interview.

The Late Show, “Are We Being Kind Enough.”

Kevin Larimer, “The Very Persistent Mappers of Happenstance, Poets & Writers, July, 2000,

https://www.pw.org/content/the_very_persistent_mapper_of_happenstance_a_qa_with_george_saunders.

Ibid.

The Late Show

“Incredible Dog Who Saved the Life of Newborn Baby Has Lasting Legacy,” Resharewworthy, accessed October

21, 2019, https://www.reshareworthy.com/mzombozi-heroic-dog-saves-baby/; Akvile Petraityte, “30 Suicide

Survivors Share How Happy They Finally Are,” Bored Panda, accessed October 21, 2019.

https://www.boredpanda.com/finally-happy-suicide-

survivors/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic

Abramson, Merchants of Truth, 117.

The database contains a list of 204,154 pieces of content, from the 98 most popular outlets (as listed by

Newswhip), that earned 500,000 or more shares between 2014and 2019. I compiled this database using a proprietary

tool called Buzzsumo, on a grant from the Charles Warren Center. This particular figure is based on my hand

labelling of a sample of 9,000 pieces of content, 1022 of which were uplifting anecdotes.

The Late Show, “Are We Being Kind Enough”

Sinykin, “The Conglomerate Era”

Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media,

Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2008.

José Van Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013).

Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs, xvii.

Joanna Dobson, “Reclaiming Sentimental Literature,” American Literature 69, no. 2(1997): 267.

“About Buzzfeed Community,” Buzzfeed, accessed October 27, 2019,

https://www.buzzfeed.com/community/about.

Greg Miller, “Here’s How Memes Went Viral – In the 1800s,” Wired, November 4, 2013,

https://www.wired.com/2013/11/data-mining-viral-texts-1800s/.

Awr Hawkins, "Concealed Permit Holder Stops Attempted Mass Shooting In Chicago," Breitbart, April 20, 2015;

Tanya Chen, "This Gay Couple Re-created Their Pride Photo 24 Years Later and it Has People

Emotional," Buzzfeed.News, June 20, 2017.

A classifier is a machine learning tool that learns to distinguish between two categories of text (labeled and

separated in advance) on the basis of certain linguistic features (essentially, words). The classic example of a

classifier is the spam filter, which learns to distinguish between normal and “spam” email, typically by identifying

that spam is more frequently marked by particular words (like those concerning money). To run this classifier: I

culled a random selection of 9,000 entries from my archive. I hand labelled the 9,000 entries, producing a labeled

collection of 1022 uplifting anecdotes. I ran a Naïve Bayes classifier, from scikit learn (MultinomialNB), on the

titles of the 1022 uplifting anecdotes and 1022 randomly selected non-uplifting anecdotes to see if it could

distinguish between them with reasonable accuracy. I used tenfold cross-validation and found that the best

178

performing classifier (3603 max features, stopwords included), distinguished between the headlines with 76.71

percent accuracy. I then made a table sorting the features that the classifier used (here, all individual words), in order

of their utility to its operations, or in order from those with the highest ratio of appearances in uplifting anecdote to

non-uplifting anecdote headlines to those with the lowest, adjusted to prevent 0s in the denominator (number of

appearances in uplifting anecdote headlines + 1/number of appearances in non-uplifting anecdote headlines +1).

This data is a good index of which words are most predictive of uplifting anecdote or non-uplifting anecdote

headlines, but it is arguably skewed by the overall abundance of each word in the corpus. For more discussion of

this issue, see the experiment on which I model this one, in the fourth chapter of Andrew Piper, Enumerations: Data

and Literary Study (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2018), 94-118.

Successful Digital Humanities classification experiments often have results in the approximate range of 70-95

percent accuracy. Ted Underwood and Jordan Sellers, for example, have trained two models to distinguish between

high-brow and popular nineteenth-century poetry with 77.5 and 79.2 percent accuracy. See Ted Underwood and

Jordan Sellers, "The Longue Durée of Literary Prestige," Modern Language Quarterly 77, no. 3 (2016): 321-344;

Hoyt Long and Richard Jean So have trained models to distinguish between haiku and non-haiku poems with 91 and

86 percent accuracy. See Hoyt Long and Richard Jean So, "Literary Pattern Recognition: Modernism Between Close

Reading and Machine Learning," Critical Inquiry, 42, no. 2 (2016): 235-267.

Fisher, "Hard Facts," 5-6.

Douglas, Feminization, 3-17; James Baldwin, "Everybody's Protest Novel," in Notes of a Native Son (Boston:

Beacon Press, 2012), 14.

Save The Children, "Tomorrow Advert," YouTube video, 1:00, posted November 2015,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rL7gZ9alh4o; Chloe Farand, "Mexican Bakers make Pan Dulce For Hundreds

of Harvey Victims," The Independent, August 30, 2017,

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/trapped-mexican-bakers-make-pan-dulce-bread-hurricane-

harvey-victims-houston-texas-el-bolillo-a7921106.html

Farand, "Mexican Bakers."

Maycie Thornton, "This Man Travelled the Country in a Pink Tutu Just to Make His Wife Laugh During

Chemo," Buzzfeed, December 10, 2013, https://www.buzzfeed.com/maycie/this-guy-travelled-the-country-in-a-

pink-tutu-just-to-make-h ; Vaiva Vareikaite, "Girlfriend Secretly Illustrates Everyday Life with Her BF, He Uploads

Comics Online and They Go Viral," Bored Panda, accessed October 22, 2019,

https://www.boredpanda.com/couple-comics-

catanacomics/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic ; Lucy Yang, "This Guy Drew

Himself and His Girlfriend as Characters in Ten Famous Cartoon — and the Internet is Loving His

Creativity," Insider, January 10, 2018, https://www.insider.com/guy-draws-girlfriend-famous-cartoon-styles-2018-1;

Tanya Chen, "This Gay Couple"; Bored Panda Staff, "This cat and Dog Love Travelling Together and Their Pictures

Are Absolutely Epic," Bored Panda, accessed October 22, 2019, https://www.boredpanda.com/dog-cat-travelling-

cynthia-bennett-baloo-henry/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic; Matilda

Miranda, "Crushingly Sad Harry Potter Re-edit Makes us Feel Really Bad for Snape," The Loop, accessed October

22, 2019, https://www.ctv.ca/ The Jackson Sun, "Girl Signs Christmas Concert for Deaf Parents," YouTube video,

1:52, posted December 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6F303aNXec; Caroline Bayard, "Dad Refused

to Give Speech at his Daughter's Wedding Did This Instead...OMG," Little Things, accessed October 22, 2019,

https://littlethings.com/lifestyle/dad-i-loved-you-first-surprise ; Lis Neporent, "Mom Invents Harness to Help

Disabled Kids Walk," ABC News, March 25, 2014, https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/2014/03/25/mom-invents-

harness-to-help-disabled-kids-walk ; Kristen Dahlgren and Daniel Arkin, "11-Year Old Texas Boy Invents Device to

Prevent Hot Car Deaths," NBC News, June 29, 2017, https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/hot-cars-and-kids/11-year-

old-texas-boy-invents-device-prevent-hot-car-n777876

Ruta Grasyte, "Girl Mistakes Bride for Real Life Princess From Book She's Holding and the Reaction Melts

Everyone's Hearts," Bored Panda, accessed October 22, 2019, https://www.boredpanda.com/little-girl-thought-

bride-princess-shandace-scott-staphanie-

cristalli/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic; James Caunt, "This Woman Was

179

Nervous About Her Photoshoot With Fiancé, But The Results Won the Internet," Bored Panda, accessed October

22, 2019, https://www.boredpanda.com/body-positive-couple-photoshoot-wolf-rose-

photography/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic; Dovas, "Teen With Down

Syndrome is determined to become a Model," Bored Panda, accessed October 22, 2019,

https://www.boredpanda.com/down-syndrome-model-madeline-stuart-australia/; "Teen Bullied for Her Incredibly

Dark Skin Color Becomes a Model, Takes the Internet By Storm," Artfido, accessed October 22, 2019,

https://www.artfido.com/teen-bullied-for-her-incredibly-dark-skin-color-becomes-a-model-takes-the-internet-by-

storm/; Rokas Laurinavicius, "Rare Kitten Born With Two Faces Grows Into the Most Beautiful Cat Ever," Bored

Panda, accessed October 22, 2019, https://www.boredpanda.com/two-faced-cat-british-short-hair-france-jean-

michel-labat/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic

Farron Cousins, "Republicans Love to Punish People for Being Poor," ROF, August 3, 2019,

https://trofire.com/2019/08/03/republicans-love-to-punish-people-for-being-poor/

Comments include the likes of "I don't know where the donated money goes and it may not matter. What he is

doing for his wife is exceptional. I know he is a photographer, and there may be some ego & narcissism in his

efforts, but you have to give him credit for his efforts to entertain his ailing spouse. Good on ya', Bob." Or, "She's in

chemo and he's galavanting around the world in a tutu and now self-promoting his book/calendar. Uhhhhh, yeah.

That's real love there." alisonw17, letter to the editor, Buzzfeed, December 10, 2013, buzzfeed.com/maycie/this-guy-

travelled-the-country-in-a-pink-tutu-just-to-make-h; Filtered, letter to the editor, Buzzfeed, December 10, 2013,

buzzfeed.com/maycie/this-guy-travelled-the-country-in-a-pink-tutu-just-to-make-h.

Saunders, “Fan mail,” The Guardian, November 10, 2006,

https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2006/nov/11/weekend7.weekend1

Saunders, “The Braindead Megaphone,” in The Braindead Megaphone: Essays George Saunders (New York:

Ricerhead Books, 2007), 6.

Robert Birnbaum, “George Saunders,” TMN, accessed October 22, 2019,

https://themorningnews.org/article/george-saunders1

Saunders, “My Guilty Pleasures,” The New Yorker, February, 3, 2013,

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/02/03/my-guilty-pleasures.

Doug Childers, “The Wag Chats With George Saunders,” The Wag, July 1, 2000,

http://www.thewag.net/interviews/saunders.htm

Adam Kelly, “The New Sincerity,” in Postmodern/Postwar—and After, eds. Jason Gladstone, Andrew Hoberek,

Daniel Worden (Iowa City :U of Iowa Press, 2016), 61.

David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 13, no.

2 (1993): 167.

Kelly, “New Sincerity,” 204-5.

Saunders, “Civilwarland,” 140

Saunders, “Sea Oak”

Larimer, “Very Persistent”

100

Saunders, “American Psyche,” The Guardian, October 20, 2007

https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2007/oct/20/weekend7.weekend

101

My Sister is Lame, “My Sister Freaks Out,” Youtube video, 1:44, posted on [December 2006],

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0_36mXx-mw; Saunders, “American Psyche”

180

102

Saunders, “Braindead,” 6.

103

Saunders, “Oman Ra,” Spin magazine, 1997; George Saunders, “Johnny Tremain,” The New Yorker, December

17, 2000, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/12/25/johnny-tremain

104

Saunders, “Who Are all these Trump Supporters?” The New Yorker, July 4, 2016,

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/11/george-saunders-goes-to-trump-rallies; Saunders, “What Writers

Really Do When They Write,” The Guardian, March 4, 2017,

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/04/what-writers-really-do-when-they-write

105

Saunders, “American Psyche,” The Guardian, July 27, 2007,

https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2007/jul/28/weekend7.weekend1

106

Ibid.

107

Saunders, “American Psyche.”

108

This appears at various points on Saunders Facebook timeline.

109

Saunders, “The Great Divider”

110

See a reprint of the GQ article at: George Saunders, “Bill Clinton Public Citizen,” Issu, accessed on May 6, 2022,

https://issuu.com/conversations/docs/george_saunders_bill_clinton

111

Saunders, “Trump Days.”

112

Hammond, “George Saunders.”

113

Robert Birnbaum, “George Saunders,” Identity Theory, June 5, 2006 - http://www.identitytheory.com/george-

saunders/

114

Ibid.

115

The Late Show, “Are We Being Kind Enough”

116

Saunders, “Tenth of December”, in Tenth of December: Stories, (New York: Random House, 2016), 249.

117

Cara Suglich, “Another Small Good Thing: Booker Prizewinner George Saunders on the Transition from Lincoln

to Trump and How to get Back to Goodness,” Another Chicago Magazine, October 30, 2017,

https://anotherchicagomagazine.net/2017/10/30/every-small-good-thing-george-saunders-on-the-transition-from-

lincoln-to-trump-and-how-to-get-back-to-goodness/

118

Saunders, “A Theory of Funny: Pathos,” The Guardian, July 4, 2008,

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2008/jul/05/healthandwellbeing1

119

Ibid.

120

Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo (New York: Random House, 2017), 3

121

Ibid., 25-7.

122

Saunders, Bardo, 47.

123

Ibid., 70.

181

124

Ibid., 47.

125

Ibid., 255.

126

Ibid., 245.

127

Ibid., 256.

128

Ibid., 257.

129

Ibid., 342.

130

Ibid., 327.

131

David Foster Wallace, This is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, About Living a

Compassionate Life (New York: Little Brown and Company, 2009).

132

Saunders, “George Saunders’s Advice.”

133

In keeping with developing academic and cultural conventions, I capitalize “Black” throughout the text, but

preserve original lowercase capitalization in pre-2021 quotations.

134

Morgan Jenkins, “Claudia Rankine on Death, Reparations, and Becoming a Playwright,” Vulture, accessed

March 31, 2022, https://www.vulture.com/2019/04/claudia-rankine-on-her-new-play-the-white-card.html

135

Claudia Rankine, The White Card: A Play (New York: Graywolf, 2019), 89.

136

Katie Way, “I Went on a Date With Aziz Ansari and it Turned out to Be The Worst Night of My Life,” Babe.net,

accessed on March 31, 2022, https://babe.net/2018/01/13/aziz-ansari-28355.

137

It earned over 3,000 shares – far from true “viral” status, but very high in number for a poetry magazine.

138

“This lady keeps stealing my mail,” Youtube, accessed on March 31, 2022,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bu9N3jeXwtY

139

Heather Love, Small Change: Realism, Immanence and the Politics of the Micro,” MLQ 77, no. 3 (2016): 419-

445; Andrea Long Chu, “Study In Blue: Trauma, Affect, and Event” Women & Performance a Journal of Feminist

Theory 27, no. 3 (2017): 301-315.

140

This procedure is identical to that described in note number 79

141

Mark Berman, Wesley Lowery, and Kimberly Kindy, “South Carolina Officer Charged with Murder After

Shooting Man During Traffic Stop,” The Washington Post, April 7, 2015,

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/04/07/south-carolina-police-officer-will-be-charged-

with-murder-after-shooting/; “A Closer Look at the Walter Scott Shooting,” NBC News, April 8, 2015,

https://www.nbcnews.com/video/a-closer-look-at-the-walter-scott-shooting-424905283706

142

Gavon, Laessig, “George Zimmerman’s Account of What Happened the Night he Killed Trayvon Martin,”

Buzzfeed News, March 26, 2012, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/gavon/george-zimmermans-account-of-

what-happened-the-ni

143

Way, “Aziz Ansari”

144

The New York Times still, for example, favors the heavily edited video format. See, for example, their

presentation of the widely circulated surveillance video of Michael Brown in a convenience store shortly before his

death. Mitch Smith, “New Ferguson Video Adds Wrinkle to Michael Brown Case,” The New Yokr TimesMarch 11,

2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/us/michael-brown-ferguson-police-shooting-video.html

182

145

‘Zack Kopplin, New Video Emerges of Alton Sterling Being Killed by Baton Rouge Police,” The Daily Beast,

April 13, 2017, https://www.thedailybeast.com/new-video-emerges-of-alton-sterling-being-killed-by-baton-rouge-

police

146

She argues that the microaggression, by definition, does not emerge in the “form of discrete, identifiable, and

extraordinary events.” The reader has to judge, on the basis of personal experience and accumulated evidence (i.e.,

many microaggressions), whether or not the discrimination has actually occurred. For Chu, this should not

delegitimize the genre, but is rather an aspect of its strength. Chu, “Study in Blue,” 301.

147

David Badash, “Christian Homeowner Threatens Neighbor Over ‘Relentlessly Gay’ Rainbow Yard Lamps,

Because Children,” New Civil Rights Movement, June 17, 2015,

https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2015/06/_concerned_home_owner_warns_woman_relentlessly_gay_r

ainbow_lamps_don_t_belong_in_christian_neighborhood/.; Goodfullness, “Animal Shelter Puts Down Pitbull

While in Labor and People Are Furious,” The Animal Rescue Site, accessed on March 31, 2022,

https://blog.theanimalrescuesite.greatergood.com/gfl-pitbull-labor/,; Brie Bowen, “A Letter to the Family of My

ICU Patient,” Huffington Post Blog, Dec 6, 2017, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/a-letter-to-the-family-of-my-icu-

patient_b_8484648; Angel Diaz, “How’s Your Favorite Artist in Bed? Reddit Has the Answers,” Complex, April 14,

2015, https://www.complex.com/music/2015/04/groupie-stories-reddit/; “Breastfeeding Yoga Mom,” Little Things,

accessed on March 31, 2022, https://www.littlethings.com/breastfeeding-yoga-mom-fires-back/1; “Texas Police

Believe They Have Identified Woman Who Licked Bluebell Ice Cream,” Fox, July 3, 2019,

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cream

148

David Edwards, “Fox Thanksgiving Special Goes off the Rails When Black Co-host asked of She Makes Kool-

Aid,” RawStory, November 25, 2015, https://www.rawstory.com/2015/11/fox-thanksgiving-segment-goes-off-the-

rails-when-black-co-host-is-asked-if-she-makes-kool-aid/

149

Charles Roberts, “Here’s the Facebook Post that Cost This Single Mom Her New Job,” America Now, September

12, 2018, https://www.americanow.com/story/society/2017/08/13/heres-facebook-post-cost-single-mom-her-new-

job-photo ; Linda Masserella, “CBC Exec Fired For Unsympathetic Vegas Massacre Post,” New York Post, March

31, 2022, https://nypost.com/2017/10/02/cbs-exec-fired-for-unsympathetic-vegas-massacre-post/; Aaron McMann,

“Michigan’s Blake O’Neill receives death threats on social media after botched punt,” Michigan Live, October 18,

2015 https://www.mlive.com/wolverines/2015/10/michigan_punter_blake_oneill_r.html.

150

Nikki Usher, “The Appropriation/Amplification Model of Citizen Journalism,” Journalism Practice 11 no. 2-3

(2017): 247-65.

151

Christian Fuchs, Social Media: A Critical Introduction (London: SAGE Publications, 2013).

152

Travis M. Andrews, “The Story Behind the filming of the fatal Baton Rouge Police Shooting. It was no

Coincidence,” The Washington Post, July 7, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-

mix/wp/2016/07/07/the-story-behind-the-filming-of-the-fatal-baton-rouge-police-shooting/

153

“Alton Sterling,” Breitbart, accessed on March 31, 2022, breitbart.com/tag/alton-sterling/page/1

154

“Alton Sterling,” Buzzfeed, accessed on March 31, 2022, https://www.buzzfeed.com/tag/alton-sterling

155

Donnie O’Sullivan, “The Biggest Black Lives Matter Page on Facebook is Fake,” CNN Tech, April 9, 2018,

https://money.cnn.com/2018/04/09/technology/fake-black-lives-matter-facebook-page/index.html

156

Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (New York: Henry Holt,

2018), 120.

157

Justin Cook, “The Viralization of Black Death and Online Memorialization Practices,” The Collective for Radical

Death Studies, October 5, 2019, https://radicaldeathstudies.com/2019/10/05/the-viralization-of-black-death-online-

memorialization-practices-by-justin-cook/; Sutherland, Tonia. “Making a Killing: On Race, Ritual, and

183

(Re)Membering in Digital Culture.” Preservation, Digital Technology & Culture, special issue of De Gruyter 46,

no. 1 (2017): 32-40; Leonard, David J. “Illegible Black Death, Legible White Pain: Denied Media, Mourning, and

Mobilization in an Era of ‘Post-Racial’ Gun Violence.” Cultural Studies, Critical Methodologies 12, no. 2: 101-109.

158

In her 1993 Nothing in Nature is Private, a lyric speaker describes watching live footage of Reginald Denny’s

assault during the L.A. riots; in her 2001 Plot (composed between 1997 and 2001) a pregnant woman (the narrative

cycle’s protagonist) is disturbed by a 24-hour news cycle story about a mother who has possibly murdered her child

Plot, poem “no solace from the TV”; Rankine, Nothing in Nature is Private (Cleveland: The Cleveland Poetry

Center, 1992); Rankine, Plot (New York: Grove Press, 2001), 21-2.

159

Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2004), 72, 85.

160

Rankine, Citizen, 85, 94.

161

Rankine, White Card

162

Brian Spears, “An Open Letter From Claudia Rankine,” The Rumpus, February 12, 2011,

https://therumpus.net/2011/02/an-open-letter-from-claudia-rankine/

163

Paula Cocozza, “Poet Claudia Rankine: The Invisibility of Black Women is Astounding,” The Guardian, June

13, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jun/29/poet-claudia-rankine-invisibility-black-women-

everyday-racism-citizen

164

Rankine, “The Meaning of Serena Williams: On Tennis and Black Excellence,” The New York Times Magazine,

August 30, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/30/magazine/the-meaning-of-serena-williams.html

165

Laura Regensdorf, “Why Blond Privilege is Real From Barbie to the White House,” Vogue.com, July 24, 2018,

https://www.vogue.com/article/claudia-rankine-john-lucas-stamped-blonde-hair-color-race-brooklyn-new-york

166

Eds Claudia Rankine and Juliana Spahr, American Women poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets

Language (Middletown: Wesleyan U Press, 2002).

167

Rankine, End of the Alphabet, 1.

168

Rankine, Plot, 1

169

Rankine, Lonely, 41

170

Rankine, Citizen, 26

171

Nick Laird, “A New Way of Writing About Race: Claudia Rankine’s Citizen,” New York Review of Books, April

23, 2015, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/04/23/claudia-rankine-new-way-writing-about-race/

172

Rankine, Lonely

173

Ibid., 21-22, 135

174

Ibid., 56

175

Ibid., 18, 10, 41

176

Ibid., 10

177

Ibid., 9

178

Ibid., 41-2

184

179

Ibid., 25-36

180

“Claudia Rankine by Lauren Berlant,” Bomb, October 1, 2014, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/claudia-

rankine/

181

Reed, 66

182

Javadizadeh, Kamran, “The Atlantic Ocean Breaking on Our Heads: Claudia Rankine, Robert Lowell, and the

Whiteness of the Lyric Subject,” PMLA 134, no. 3 (2020): 475-490

183

Lisa Siraganian, “Don’t Let me Be Universal: Or, The Postwar American Poem,” Nonsite.org 16, accessed on

March 21, 22, https://nonsite.org/article/dont-let-me-be-universal

184

Wendy Chun, Updating To Remain The Same: Habitual New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018) ; Jill

Abramson, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for the Facts, (New York: Simon & Schuster,

2019), 117.

185

Rankine, “The Meaning”

186

Rankine, “What Are the Unwritten Bylaws of Black Privilege,” Elle, October 15, 2015,

https://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/q-and-a/a30779/margo-jefferson-negroland-memoir/; Bim Adewunmi,

“An Interview With Claudia Rankine,” Buzzfeed, August 27, 2015 https://www.buzzfeed.com/bimadewunmi/a-

conversation-with-claudia-da-gawd-rankine

187

Kate Kellaway, “Claudia Rankine: Blackness in the White Imagination Has Nothing to Do With Black People,”

The Guardian, December 27, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/dec/27/claudia-rankine-poet-citizen-

american-lyric-feature

188

Rankine, Lonely, 55

189

Ibid., 23

190

Rankine, “The Meaning”

191

Jenkins, “Rankine”

192

“Open Casket,” Wikipedia, accessed on March 31, 2022, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Casket,

193

Rankine, White Card

194

Ibid., 80

195

Ibid., 28

196

Ibid., 43, 26-7, 16, 20

197

Bomb, “Interview”

198

Rankine, White Card, 30

199

Ibid., 47

200

Ibid., 59

201

Ibid., 80

185

202

Ibid., 80

203

Ibid., 76

204

Ibid., 89

205

Ibid., 89

206

Rankine, Just Us: An American Conversation (Minnesota: Graywolf, 2020).

207

Rankine, “The Image of Whiteness: Contemporary Photography and Racialization,” eds., Yasmine Gunaratnam,

George Yancy, Daniel Blight, (SPBH Editions: 2019)

208

Regensdorf, “The Pursuit”

209

Catherine Lacey, The Answers, (New York: FSG, 2017), 42; Elif Batuman, The Idiot (New York: Penguin Press,

2017), 11; Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be? (New York: Picador, 2013), 3; Sally Rooney, Conversations With

Friends (London: Hogarth, 2017), 200, Alexandra Kleeman, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine (New Yokr:

Harper Collins, 2015), 13

210

Catherine Lacey (@CatherineLacey_), 2019, Instagram, July 8, 2019

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211

“Introducing Our Longlisted Authors: Catherine Lacey,” Audible, May 20, 2020,

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212

Lee Konstantinou, Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction (Cambridge, Harvard UP: 2016); Deborah

Nelson, Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy (Chicago: UChicago Press, 2017)

213

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214

Simone Murray, “10 Myths Abouth Digital Literary Culture,” Post45 Contemporaries, April 8, 2020,

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215

Jessica Pressman, Bookishness: Loving Books In The Digital Age (New York: Columbia UP, 2020)

216

Beth Blum, The Self-Help Compulsion: Searching For Advice in Modern Literature (New York: Columbia UP,

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217

Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke UP, 2011).

218

“Which Birthdates are Most Common,” 9gag, July 29, 2014, https://9gag.com/gag/aLQ6mGz

219

“Person Asks Online For Advice On How to Deal With Grief. This Reply is Incredible,” That Eric Alper, August

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220

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Brigette Hyacinth, “Great Leadership Isn’t About Controlling People It’s About Empowering People,” LinkedIN,

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186

222

“5 Effective”

223

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225

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227

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228

Warren Susman, Culture As History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century, (New

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229

Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People (Mumbai: Sanage Publishing, 2020), 1

230

Kenneth Burke, “Literature as Equipment for Living,” in The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic

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231

Ad Bergsma, “Do Self-Help Books Help?” Journal of Happiness Studies 9 (2008): 341-360; Carolyn Gregoire,

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232

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234

“Raising our kids near their grandparents was the greatest gift we could ever give them,” CreativeHealthyFamily,

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235

Then process is the same as described in previous chapters; see note 79

236

Blum, Self-Help

237

Caroline Beaton, “New Good Enough: Why Millenials are Obsessed with Self-Improvement,” Forbes, Feb 25,

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238

Paris Martineau, “Inside the Pricey War to Influence Your Instagram Feed,” Wired, Nov 18, 2018,

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187

239

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241

Martineau, “Inside”

242

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243

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244

Lee Tilghman (@leefromamerica), 2018, Instagram, July 23, 2018, https://www.instagram.com/leefromamerica/

245

Lee Tilghman (@leefromamerica), 2019, Instagram, Sept 5 2019, https://www.instagram.com/leefromamerica/

246

Natasha Adamo (@natashaadamo), 2020, Instagram, May 7, 2020,

https://www.instagram.com/natashaadamo/?hl=en , Kayla Itsiness (@kayla_itsiness), 2020, Instagram, May 19

2020, https://www.instagram.com/kayla_itsines/?hl=en Sjana Elise (@sjanaelise), 2020, Instagram, July 15 2020,

https://www.instagram.com/sjanaelise/?hl=en

247

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248

Cassie Ho (@blogilates), 2020, Instagram, accessed on August 7, 2020, https://www.instagram.com/blogilates/

249

Emma Chamberlain (@emmachamberlain), 2020, Instagram, August 10, 2020,

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https://www.instagram.com/ewww_its_joana/?hl=en

250

Caroline Calloway (@carolinecalloway), Instagram, accessed on August 7, 2020,

https://www.instagram.com/carolinecalloway/?hl=en

251

Niomi Smart (@Niomismart), Instagram, accessed on August 7, 2020, https://www.instagram.com/niomismart/

252

Ibid.

253

Jonah Engel Bromwich, “The Evolution of Emma Chamberlain,” The New York Times, July, 9, 2009,

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/09/style/emma-chamberlain-youtube.html

254

Emma Chamberlain (@emmachamberlain), Instagram, August 28, 2020,

https://www.instagram.com/p/CEcaZ1Ppf1a/?hl=en

255

Emma Chamberlain (@emmachamberlain), 2020, Instagram, August 23, 2020

https://www.instagram.com/p/CEQErFcpWoD/?epik=dj0yJnU9ekdCOThvMUpWZVRRejdxc3dFZkxWMUlocmg0

S1NrOU4mcD0wJm49TUk0aWtwWUJ6eldIN3hDX3NEeVNidyZ0PUFBQUFBR0owYWlJ

256

Emma Chamberlain (@EmmaChamberlain), Instagram, August 19 2020,

https://www.instagram.com/emmachamberlain/?hl=en

188

257

Emma Chamberlain (@EmmaChamberlain), Instagram, March 12, 2020,

https://www.instagram.com/emmachamberlain/?hl=en

258

Sjana Elise (@sjanaelise), Instagram, July 15, 2020, https://www.instagram.com/p/CCq45GOHbPl/

259

Catherine Lacey, Nobody is Ever Missing (New York: FSG, 2014), 8

260

Heti, How, 6

261

Kleeman, You Too, 8

262

Yevgeniya Traps, “The Answers are Not Important: The Interview With Catherine Lacey,” The Paris Review,

August 18, 2018 https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/08/28/the-answers-are-not-important-an-interview-with-

catherine-lacey/

263

Rooney, Conversations, 307

264

Heti, How, 306

265

The typical translation from “real life” to auto-fictional novel—and perhaps unavoidable elision of writerly labor,

therein— is particularly apparent in Lacey’s first novel, Nobody is Ever Missing. In early 2010, Lacey took a trip to

New Zealand, with the specific intention of writing; the trip became the inspiration for the novel, in which the

character Elyria also goes to New Zealand, but spends the whole time not doing much of anything except wandering

aimlessly and chatting with locals, even briefly becoming homeless.

266

Tao Lin—a presiding influence for many of these writers—jokes on Twitter: “I want to have a clone of myself

who only writes about my other, original self, who doesn't write.”

267

Lacey, Answers 41-2

268

Ibid., 280

269

Ibid., 14-15

270

Rooney, Conversations, 3-10

271

Ibid., 81

272

Batuman, Idiot, 17

273

Ibid.

274

Heti, How, 1

275

James Wood, “True Lives: Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be?” The New Yorker, June 18, 2012,

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/06/25/true-lives-2

276

Heti, How, 285

277

Ibid.

278

@castle_gaelskull, 2020, “Sally Rooney novel generator: Skinnily, I sadly and hotly forgot to eat for seven days

and I only realized when I fell over in front of trinity college and everyone was worried about me,” Twitter, July 24,

2020 https://twitter.com/corsie101/status/1286636516312264704?lang=en

279

Kleeman, You Too, 5

189

280

Lacey, Answers, 51

281

Ibid., 42-3

282

Ibid., 238

283

Ibid., 16, 21

284

Ibid., 18, 23, 40

285

Rooney, Conversations, 17

286

Ibid., 44

287

Ibid., 227

288

Ibid.

289

Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation (New York: Penguin, 2018), 55-7

290

Ibid., 9

291

Ibid.

292

Ibid., 77

293

Ibid., 4, 11

294

Ibid., 11-66

295

Ibid., 10

296

Ibid., 14

297

Rita Bullwinkel, “Ottessa Moshfegh on Phoniness, Power, and Aligning Yourself With ‘Rich White People,’”

Vice, Nov 23, 2015; Gevenson, “Instagram”

298

Moshfegh, Rest, 256

299

Ibid., 9

300

Bullwinkel, “Moshfegh”

301

Moshfegh, Rest, 283

302

Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation (New York: Knopf, 2014) 113

303

Ibid., 2, 49

304

Ibid., 52

305

Jenny Offill, Weather (New York: Knopf, 2020)

306

Alexandra Alter, “Ferrante Fever Continues to Spread,” The New York Times, December 7, 2016,

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/07/arts/ferrante-fever-continues-to-spread.html

190

307

“You Know, Hope is a Mistake,” Yard, accessed on May 7, 2022 https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/0fcab9f5-8519-

48df-b7aa-aa083b1b6588/gif

308

Emma, “The Gender Wars of Household Chores: A Feminist Comic,” The Guardian, May 26, 2017,

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/26/gender-wars-household-chores-comic; Rokas Laurinivicius and

Ilona Baliunaite, “The Same Artist Who Made People Cry With Her Comic ‘Good Boy’ Just Shared a New One

About a Black Cat,” Bored Panda, accessed on May 7, 2022, https://www.boredpanda.com/black-cat-comics-jenny-

jinya/

309

“This is Fine – this is a reference to an internet meme,” KnowYourMeme, accessed on May 7, 2022,

https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1397784-this-is-fine

310

“This is Fine – this is unbearable,” KnowYourMeme, accessed on May 7, 2022,

https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1315939-this-is-fine

311

“This is Fine,” KnowYourMeme, accessed on May 7, 2022, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/this-is-fine

312

Matt Furie, Boy’s Club (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2016), 29

313

Ibid., 32

314

Chris Bell, “Why has Twitter Banned 1500 Accounts and What Are NPCs?” BBC News, October 17, 2018

https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-45888176

315

D.T. Max, “The Bleak Brilliance of Nick Drnaso’s Graphic Novels,” The New Yorker, Jan 14, 2019,

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/21/the-bleak-brilliance-of-nick-drnasos-graphic-novels

316

“Guy Spends 6 Months Recreating a Van Gogh Painting Using Plants in a 1.2 Acre Field,” Can You Actually,

accessed on May 7, 2022, https://canyouactually.com/dude-spent-6-months-recreating-a-van-gogh-painting-using-

plants-in-a-1-2-acre-field/; “The Winning Sand Sculpture of the 2019 Texas Sand Sculpture Competition,” Twisted

Sifter, accessed on May 7, 2022, https://twistedsifter.com/2019/05/liberty-crumbling-sand-sculpture-by-damon-

langlois/

317

Dovas, “Beard Baubles Will Turn Your Beard Into a Christmas Tree,” Bored Panda, accessed on May 7, 2022,

https://www.boredpanda.com/beard-baubles-christmas-decoration/; “World Naked Gardening Day Falls on the First

Saturday of May,” Wide Open Spaces, May 1, 2020, https://www.wideopenspaces.com/world-naked-gardening-day-

may-7th/

318

“Vaccinated,” XKCD, accessed on May 7, 2022, https://xkcd.com/2460/

319

Allie Brosch, Hyperbole and a Half, accessed on May 7, 2022, http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/

320

James Kochalka, “Blood and Thunder: Craft is the Enemy,” The Comics Journal, June 5, 2013,

https://www.tcj.com/blood-and-thunder-craft-is-the-enemy/

321

This archive was constructed by searching “Comics” and “Comic” as keywords in Buzzsumo, and ranking results

by shares.

322

Laura Willard, “15 Hilarious Parenting Comics that are Almost Too Real,” Upworthy, accessed on May 7, 2022,

https://www.upworthy.com/15-hilarious-parenting-comics-that-are-almost-too-real?rebelltitem=2#rebelltitem2

323

“This Brilliant Comic Reminds Us How Weird Our Human Habits Are,” Cheezburger, accessed on May 7, 2022,

https://cheezburger.com/7828741/this-brilliant-comic-reminds-us-of-how-weird-our-human-habits-are

191

324

“15 Comics on How Much Today’s Childhood Differs From Ours,” Bright Side, accessed on May 7, 2022,

https://brightside.me/wonder-curiosities/14-comics-on-how-much-todays-childhood-differs-from-ours-382660/; “10

Hilariously Truthful Comic Strips About How Manufacturers See Us,” Brightside, accessed on May 7, 2022

https://brightside.me/creativity-art/10-hilariously-truthful-comic-strips-about-how-manufacturers-see-us-337060/

325

“9 Comic Strips That Prove Women Actually Use Magic,” BrightSide, accessed on May 7, 2022,

https://brightside.me/creativity-art/9-comic-strips-that-prove-women-actually-use-magic-330060/

“13 Comics Showing What Love Looks Like Before and After 30,” Brightside, accessed on May 7, 2022

https://brightside.me/creativity-art/13-comics-showing-what-love-looks-like-before-and-after-30-327660/

326

Popular mental health related comics include the following instagram-based comics: @theweb_comic,

Instagram, accessed on May 7, 2022, https://www.instagram.com/p/CLMoqZYHWvu/; @theweb_comic,

Instagram, Nov. 11, 2022, https://www.instagram.com/p/CHdMl4uHV6X/. Other popular examples have included

Allie Brosch’s Hyperbole and a Half and Ryan Harby’s “Mental health allstars”; More will soon be discussed in the

content of the “depressive comic.”

327

Sara Barnes, “Relatable Illustrations of Every Day Married Life gets Invaded By the Real-Life Couple,” My

Modern Met, July 5, 2018 https://mymodernmet.com/yehuda-devir-one-of-those-days/

328

Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and The Alt-Right,

(New York: Zero Books, 2017)

329

“This artist Brilliantly Tackles the Topic of Being Offended in a Colorful Comic,” Upworthy, accessed on May 7,

2022, https://www.upworthy.com/this-artist-brilliantly-tackles-the-concept-of-being-offended-in-a-colorful-comic;

“If You Don’t Have It Chronic Anxiety Can Be Hard to Understand These Comics Can Help,” Upworthy, accessed

on May 7, 2022,

https://www.upworthy.com/if-you-dont-have-it-chronic-anxiety-can-be-hard-to-understand-these-comics-can-help

330

Megan Kearney, Hit ReBlog: Comics That Caught Fire (Winnipeg: Bedside Press, 2018)

331

Emma, “A Feminist Comic Explains How Benevolent Sexism Holds Women Back,” The Guardian, August 13,

2020, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/aug/13/benevolent-sexism-a-feminist-comic-explains-how-it-holds-

women-back; “Comic Strip Perfectly Depicts Why it Isn’t a Level Playing Field For Men and Women at the

Workplace,” Upworthy, accessed on May 7, 2022, https://scoop.upworthy.com/comic-depicts-not-level-playing-

field-for-men-women-at-workplace; “This Comic Perfectly Explains Rape Culture and the True Story It’s Based on

is Sickening,” Working Mother, May 7, 2022, https://www.workingmother.com/this-comic-perfectly-explains-rape-

culture-and-true-story-its-based-on-is-sickening

332

“This Comic Explains Why America Needs Planned Parenthood,” Upworthy, accessed on May 7 2022,

https://www.upworthy.com/this-comic-explains-why-america-needs-planned-parenthood; Brad Plumber, “Yes, The

Climate Has Always Changed. This Comic Shows Why That’s No Comfort,” Vox, Jan 13, 2017,

https://www.vox.com/2016/9/12/12891814/climate-change-xkcd-graphic

333

(@the_webcomic), 2020, Instagram, December 24, 2020, https://www.instagram.com/p/CJMN8IkHfAM/

334

(@the_webcomic), 2020, Instagram, November 24, 2020, https://www.instagram.com/p/CHana9SnJXd/

335

“I Wish I was At Home/They Don’t Know,” KnowYourMeme, accessed on May 7, 2022,

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-wish-i-was-at-home-they-dont-know

336

“Depressed Pepe?” MakeaMeme, accessed on May 7, 2022, https://makeameme.org/meme/depressed-pepe-youre

337

Christina Cauterucci, “Incel Memes Aren’t a Joke,” Slate, July 19, 2018, https://slate.com/human-

interest/2018/07/incel-memes-like-millimeters-of-bone-and-virgin-vs-chad-mask-a-dangerous-and-toxic-

culture.html

192

338

u/liltrigger, reddit, accessed on May 7, 2022,

https://www.reddit.com/r/virginvschad/comments/ib9zhf/the_virgin_mens_fetishes_vs_the_stacy_womens/

339

T Campbell, The History of Webcomics (San Antonio: Antarctic Press, 2006), 191

340

Lore Sjoberg, “Xkcd: Embodying Nerd Culture to Rule the Webcomics Universe,” Wired, April 16, 2013,

https://www.wired.com/2013/04/xkcd/

341

“Cyanide and Happiness,” Wikipedia, accessed on May 7, 2022,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanide_%26_Happiness

342

“The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory,” KnowYourMeme, accessed on May 7, 2022,

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/greater-internet-fuckwad-theory

343

“The Oatmeal,” Wikipedia, accessed on May 7, 2022, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oatmeal

344

Hilary Chute, Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere (New York: Harper Collins, 2017), 259

345

Shaenon Gaerty, “Guest Column: The Historiography of Webcomics,” The Comics Journal, Nov 2, 2011,

https://www.tcj.com/guest-column-the-historiography-of-webcomics/

346

“Rage Guy,” KnowYourMeme, accessed on May 7, 2022, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/rage-guy-

fffffuuuuuuuu

347

Chute, Why, 266

348

Ibid.

349

James Regan, “Comics About Making it Through Life,” Bored Panda, accessed on May 7, 2022,

https://www.boredpanda.com/dark-humour-comics-about-life-james-regan/

350

D.T. Max, “Drnaso”

351

Ibid.

352

Ibid.

353

Nick Drnaso, Beverly, (Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2016), 17-38

354

Ibid., 7

355

Ibid., 9-10

356

Ibid., 58

357

Ibid., 94

358

Ibid., 81

359

Ibid., 36

360

Ibid. 184-5

361

Ibid. 61-2

193

362

T.D. Max, “Drnaso”

363

Ibid.

364

Drnaso, Beverly, 125

365

Nick Drnaso, Sabrina (Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2018)

366

Ibid., 20

367

Ibid., 81

368

Ibid., 114

369

Ibid. 72

370

Ibid., 4, 9, 143

371

Ibid., 82

372

Ibid., 146

373

Ibid., 40

374

Ibid.

375

Ibid., 45

376

Ibid., 106

377

Ibid., 100

378

Ibid., 88

379

Ibid., 122

380

Ibid., 89

381

Ibid., 127-8

382

Ibid., 171

383

Ibid., 188

384

T.D. Max, “Drnaso”

385

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 6

386

See note 38

387

Chris Ware, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (New York: Pantheon Books, 2000)

388

See note 5

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