“Something about this job and many other kinds of jobs is essentially rotten”: Autofiction in the Amazon Fulfilment Centre

In German novelist Heike Geissler’s Seasonal Associate (translated into English in 2018), the author details her time working as a temporary labourer in an Amazon fulfilment centre. As a work of autofiction, Geissler’s novel offers an unconventional twist: the novel is written in the second person, addressing the reader and interpellating them into its accounts of labour. In this talk, we discuss how autofiction might be a form of the novel uniquely suited to critiques of capitalism, and how Geissler’s novel renders the circulation of affect between different authorial and readerly subjectivities, and between distinct class positions, as its ultimate subject.

Dr Josh Jewell is a Lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Exeter. His work focuses on the impact of uneven and combined global development on the world novel. His first monograph Economic Informality and World Literature is out now with Palgrave.

Dr Chloe Green is a Lecturer in English at the Australian National University, where she researches life writing and the medical humanities. Her first book, Writing Contested Illness: Experimentation in Contemporary Women's Life Writing, is published with Edinburgh University Press.  

Zoom link: https://anu.zoom.us/j/83928830882?pwd=4hBJ8hHLelM9Cdxtb4FFaSTwUDUgbM.1