First, Megha Anwer considers how Kiran Desai's The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (2025) distributes formal resources: the realist mode renders the labor of cooks, cleaners, and caretakers with material precision whereas magical realism grants the novel's aspirational protagonists a freedom that their precarious counterparts are denied. Reading the early years of Indian neoliberalism through its latter-day failures, Anwer shows how formal restraint imposed on working-class characters becomes the source of their power. Rendered as workers rather than subjects, they retain resistance the protagonists lack — withholding expertise to torpedo the securely constituted lives of the bourgeois families they serve. The paper considers why the novel's most resistant characters are also its most formally constrained — and whether withholding self-authorship might itself constitute agency.
Where Desai's precariat resists legibility through withholding, Sujin Youn argues that Ocean Vuong's The Emperor of Gladness (2025) enacts non-compliance by responding to precarity as ordinary condition rather than crisis. Set in a declining Connecticut town in 2009, the novel follows low-wage service workers — immigrants, the elderly, the ill, the addicted — whose lives unfold without mobility, redemption, or collective awakening. While traditional working-class writing often focuses on class consciousness, Vuong foregrounds labor that is racialized, immigrant, and queer-inflected, replacing political awakening with idiosyncratic forms of care and sincerity. Youn asks whether lives organized around care rather than productivity advances a form of collective life that institutional legibility — and the self-authoring it demands — cannot accommodate.
While Vuong's characters persist without narrating themselves into legibility, Simon Lee considers how John Tottenham's Service (2025) stages sardonic defiance. Reading the novel through Kathi Weeks' critique of work as a demand not just for labor but for the performance of the appropriate affects, attitudes, and identities, Lee argues that the narrator's non-compliance in a Los Angeles bookstore — his contempt for Yelp reviews, his resistance to managerial scrutiny, his refusal to perform the affective labor the role requires — is not simply a character trait but a response to the contemporary demand for a readable, serviceable self. The paper asks whether such Bartleby-esque rejections constitute anything more than survival, and what it means to forgo self-authorship when institutions have already decided how that self should appear.
Last, Ben Clarke extends the inquiry from fiction to autofiction, asking whether a genre organized around self-authorship offers a different relationship to compulsory self-narration — or whether it merely makes that compulsion visible in ways conventional fiction cannot. Reading Tabitha Lasley's Sea State (2021), Clarke argues that as income, consumption, and regional background each prove insufficient to render working-class identity stable, gender and sexuality consolidate class through a conservative model of heterosexual masculinity — one whose values echo the Thatcherite ethos it nominally rejects — that Lasley's account of her relationship with Caden simultaneously depends on and undermines. The paper asks when first-person testimony becomes curated authenticity — and when its partiality refuses that closure, declining to convert precarious experience into stable, consumable identity.
Each panelist will speak for thirteen minutes, leaving time for introductions, transitions, and fifteen minutes of discussion. Together the papers offer comparative and international perspectives — drawn from South Asian, East Asian, British, and American literary traditions — on what it costs, formally and ethically, to represent lives organized around compulsory self-narration. The session advances an ongoing MLA conversation about literary criticism's responsibilities in an era in which institutions are already doing the work of narrating the subjects that fiction seeks to represent.