Unhappy Beginnings

Isabel González-Díaz is a PhD lecturer at the University of La Laguna, where she teaches US literature. Her research interests include gender, literature, and cultural studies, with a special focus on life narratives. She has published various articles on life writing and gender, on feminism and cultural studies, and on transgender narratives. Fabián Orán-Llarena is a PhD lecturer at the University of La Laguna. His research interests include cultural studies and film studies, with a special focus on contemporary US film and its representation of the politics and history of neoliberalism, the rise of right-wing populism, and the post-9/11 context.

Acknowledgments

List of Contributors

An Approach to Unhappy Beginnings.

Isabel González-Díaz and Fabián Orán-Llarena

1. Nomadland: A Narrative of Class and Age Vulnerability in the 21st Century.

Aitor Ibarrola-Armendariz

2. “They endured”: Precarity, Vulnerability, and Resistance in the Works of Jesmyn Ward.

Paula Granda

3. Happy Endings and Unhappy Beginnings: Representing Precarity and Vulnerability in Recessionary Comedies.

Elena Oliete-Aldea

4. The Road to Serfdom: The (Unhappy) Neoliberal Workplace in The Assistant.

Fabián Orán-Llarena

5. Disaffected Archives: Jacqueline Woodson’s Cruel Attachments in Red at the Bone. Paula Barba Guerrero

6. The (Un)happiness of Urban Indigeneity in Tommy Orange’s There There.

Martina Horáková

7. Trans-forming Transness: The Failed Dissident Body as (Non)Human Political Possibility in Kai Cheng Thom’s Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars.

Juan Carlos Hidalgo-Ciudad

8. Of Morrissey and Other Antisocial Icons: Unhappiness and Failure in Elliott DeLine’s Refuse.

Isabel González-Díaz

9. Stigma, Vulnerability, Unhappiness, and Abjection: How Angels in America Reconstructs AIDS Politics of Silence.

J. Javier Torres-Fernández

10. Powers of Failure: The Catcher in the Rye Against Early Neoliberal Rationality.

Julia Rojo de Castro

11. Reimagining Hope in the Age of Despair: The Films of Roberto Minervini.

Juan A. Tarancón

12. Affect Theory and Life Narratives: Mohamed Abdulkarim Ali’s Angry Queer Somali Boy: A Complicated Memoir and Samra Habib’s We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir.

Silvia Caporale-Bizzini

13. Run, Rabbits, Run: Post-Racialism, Modern Slavery, and Slow Violence in Jordan Peele’s Get Out.

Víctor Junco Ezquerra

14. Cold Feelings: Apathy, Difference, and Withdrawal in Herman Melville’s White-Jacket. Arturo Corujo

Index