This panel will open new lines of inquiry into the prevalence of “uselessness” as a thematic focal point and a stylistic ambition of twenty-first-century American literature. The contributions of each panelist pivot around a shared attempt to understand why an increasing number of literary works seem to gesture so emphatically toward their own aesthetic and conceptual limitations. What remains to be determined, through the conversation that this session will generate, is whether contemporary fiction’s preoccupation with its own pointlessness signifies a sincere renunciation of political and social relevance or whether, by contrast, it lays the foundation for new modes of cultural critique.

This investigation into the significance of literary uselessness is timely, building as it does on a flurry of recent attempts to determine the implications of twenty-first-century fiction’s refusal of instrumentality. Among the many studies that inform this panel’s approach, the most notable are Timothy Bewes’s Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age (2021), Mark McGurl’s Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon (2021), and Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy, or the Style of Too Late Capitalism (2023). These scholars agree that fiction has undergone a radical transformation in the contemporary era, with an increasing number of writers embracing algorithmically enforced generic categories and foregrounding the limits of their own creative capacities. Each presenter in this session interprets the stakes of this shift differently, illuminating a range of new directions that future studies of literary uselessness might take.

Louisa Toxvaerd Munch will open this discussion by establishing the specific historical conditions underlying the emergence of uselessness as an object of literary fascination. Using Otessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), Munch will show how uselessness—which, in Moshfegh’s text, takes the form of drug-induced sleep—becomes a site of escape from a late capitalist culture that insists on endless productivity. While Munch is attentive to the limits of such liberation, noting that the experiments with sleeping pills conducted by Moshfegh’s wealthy White protagonist could be considered the sheltered inverse of the forms of opioid addiction that have recently ravaged North America, her presentation will ultimately suggest that contemporary fiction champions uselessness as a means of evading the “growth mindset” that underlies twenty-first-century expressions of selfhood.

Responding to these opening provocations, Connor Bennett will draw on his expertise in theories of literary minimalism to interrogate the stylistic dimensions of uselessness. In particular, Bennett will show how authors such as Julie Otsuka deploy a pared-down and seemingly hyper-efficient form of prose writing as a way of putting utility itself under a microscope: Otsuka’s repetitive, minimalist style, Bennett argues, engages in a heightened pantomime of transparent communication as a way of implicitly critiquing harmful stereotypes about the unstinting efficiency of Japanese American migrants. In addition to illuminating how questions of utility intersect with processes of racialization and dehumanization, Bennett’s work identifies literary style as a site at which distinctions between use and uselessness become productively blurred.

If the panel’s first two papers maintain a degree of faith in the political and intellectual affordances of literary uselessness, Esme Feurtado’s overview of “The Political Futility of Autofiction” concludes the panel’s formal presentations with a polemical counterargument sure to ignite further discussion. According to Feurtado, contemporary literature has dead-ended in an embrace of what she views as the “useless form” of autofiction, which sacrifices an analysis of external conditions in favor of an emphasis on interior landscapes. Through a reading of Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection (2024), Feurtado argues for a re-embrace of irony and parody that would allow twenty-first-century fiction to humorously interrogate the pitfalls of its ongoing infatuation with uselessness.

By setting a 15-minute time limit on each of its presentations, this session will leave space for all attendees to participate in an open-ended discussion of its major themes. The panel’s design also deliberately foregrounds the voices of emerging scholars: as individuals especially exposed to the precarity generated by shrinking humanities budgets, growing threats to academic freedom, and the mass adoption of AI-powered writing tools, these thinkers have a decidedly personal stake in considerations of literature’s perceived uselessness. Yet, as their varied responses demonstrate, there is more than one way to understand the political and ethical implications of uselessness. Does contemporary American literature’s increasingly intense fixation on its own lack of purpose reinforce apocalyptic predictions about the future of fiction, or does it point the way toward a new efflorescence of exuberantly useless creative activity? This panel will chart the beginnings of an answer.