Failure states

Failure States is comprised of ten short stories that interrogate how late-capitalist ethics complicate the human experience of self-actualization. The protagonists in these stories struggle to become “authentic” or virtuous people against virtuosity’s entanglement in fluctuating capitalist and neoliberal ideals. In one story, for example, a woman enters a multi-level marketing scheme peddling essential oils to liberate herself from a dependent relationship with her ex-husband. In another, a teenage boy reckons with his own feelings of alienation against his community’s performed hysteria over a missing girl. I researched classical philosophical texts and contemporary critical theory to ground my understanding of virtue and late-capitalist affects of failure. Ultimately, this understanding informs the conflicts driving the stories in Failure States. I also communicate these themes through language—specifically, employing language that moves poetically and creates moments that challenge the “real,” alongside elements of satire and the uncanny to challenge normative discourses of work and the self. While the individual conflicts vary between stories, the collection ultimately asserts that the commodification of modern life makes failed self-improvement projects of us all. Characters see ideals of disposability, productivity, and consumerism signaled in online discourse, replicated in real-life dialogue, then replicated again in their most human parts: their relationships, their identities, their desires. What it means to be a good person is often changing or conflicting for these characters—as a result, they each exist in a state of feeling out-of-step with the rest of the world, never quite sure if they’re doing “it” (life) the right way, each in their own state of failure.Arts, Faculty ofGraduat