Economy and Pathology in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger and Monica Ali’s In the Kitchen
Economy and Pathology in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger and Monica Ali’s In the Kitchen
This chapter discusses the success of narratives that focus on a protagonist's therapeutic trajectory from suffering self to successful entrepreneur, and suggests that writers have themselves been crucial models of this therapeutic biography. It begins by discussing Aravind Agida's 2008 novel The White Tiger as a critique of the neoliberal rhetoric of entrepreneurial innovation. The novel suggests that this rhetoric downplays dependence on an expanding service class, and requires its protagonist's anti-social conception of the flexible self as an engine of capital accumulation. The chapter compares Adiga's work to Monica Ali's 2009 novel In the Kitchen, homing in on its depiction of the breakdown of Gabriel, an aspiring restaurant owner who embodies many of the features of the creative worker imagined by New Labour policy.
Keywords: Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger, neoliberalism, popular psychology, therapeutic self, Monica Ali, In the Kitchen, Brick Lane, creative labor
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