'If things fall apart there'll always be something.' The Branded Affect of Gary Shteyngart's Writing

• In Event: Gary Shteyngart: Multicultural Literary Intersections

Abstract

Gary Shteyngart is identified as a humorist as often as he is identified as a writer. Indeed, for Shteyngart, humor and writing are what allowed him, in his words, to “redefin[e] the terms under which I am a hated freak” (Little Failure 151). This paper will argue that Shteyngart’s writing subjects, including his own writerly persona, define their alienation, and find affirmation, within the discursive modes characteristic of “branded affect” (Grindstaff and Murray, 2015). In this way, Shteyngart’s writing and performances, like other popular contemporary modalities of self-presentation in various media, depend upon systems of signification that present a state of affect as at once ordinary and remarkable, woeful and entrepreneurial.

Author

• Lisa Ryoko Wakamiya, Florida State U