Start Making Sense: Summary & Key Insights

At the heart of this book lies a concept I call ‘affective individualism.’ It refers to the cultural expectation that emotions serve as the most authentic markers of personal identity. Contemporary literary culture celebrates emotional self-expression as a moral and artistic ideal: to feel intensely and personally is to be real. Yet this logic subtly mirrors neoliberal subjectivity, in which individuals are isolated agents responsible for their own fates, happiness, and authenticity. Just as neoliberal economies demand self-enterprising, self-managing subjects, so too does affective individualism ask us to invest in our feelings as personal property.

Historically, this is a shift from earlier conceptions of emotion as relational or collective. In the modernist period, aesthetic autonomy often implied distance from the market and from the everyday traffic of feeling. But in contemporary literary culture, emotional accessibility and authenticity are key selling points. A novel’s worth is often gauged by how it makes readers feel seen, not how it questions the conditions under which feelings are made possible. In workshops and reviews alike, we ask for sincerity, transparency, relatability—all affective registers that reflect neoliberal ideals of the self-sufficient, expressive individual.

Through reading contemporary novels, I explore how this ideology shapes form and reception. Authors like Jonathan Franzen or Zadie Smith are often praised or critiqued in terms of their emotional honesty or their characters’ authenticity. These judgments may seem aesthetic, but they reveal a deeper political alignment between emotional legibility and neoliberal individualism. The danger is not that emotions are false but that they are privatized, turned into currencies of personal value. By naming this process, I seek to loosen its grip—to create space for forms of feeling that move beyond the individualized self toward something more generative and shared.

Literary production does not exist apart from economic structures; it is produced within them. The neoliberal era has reshaped the entire field of literature—from how books are funded and published to how they are marketed and read. Publishers brand novels through affective appeal, promising experiences that are personal, relatable, or cathartic. Critics, in turn, privilege accessibility and emotional clarity, aligning aesthetic value with market reach. The literary field thus becomes a mirror of neoliberal rationality, where emotion operates as both commodity and moral justification.

This is not simply a matter of commerce; it transforms the ontology of literature itself. When affect becomes both the medium and the measure of value, novels are read less as aesthetic explorations and more as vehicles for personalized feeling. This explains why discussions about ‘empathy’ in contemporary fiction have gained such traction. Empathy sounds humane, but within neoliberal logic, it can function as a substitute for political solidarity—a soft, individualized mode of connection that replaces collective action with compassionate spectatorship.

In examining the literary field this way, I highlight how institutions—publishers, universities, cultural foundations—participate in the reproduction of these values. The push toward ‘relevance’ and emotional immediacy in creative writing programs and literary prizes reflects an underlying economic rationality: emotional accessibility sells. Recognizing this structural embeddedness allows us to see emotion not as pure expression, but as a mediated, historically determined phenomenon. When we acknowledge this, we can start to imagine aesthetic practices that resist commodification rather than reproduce it.