

In this way, these cultural productions critique capitalist instrumentalism for reducing human subjectivity to embodied economic struggle. This dissertation examines how these contemporary texts use narrative, generic, and stylistic experiments to represent cynicism and dissatisfaction with everyday life as the consequences of neoliberal capitalist ideology and instrumentalist thinking, which define “work” as labor that produces commodities and profit and “leisure” as consumerism. “Dirty Work: Labor, Dissatisfaction and Everyday Life in Contemporary French Literature and Culture (1975-present),” is an analysis of the representation of everyday activities – namely, of work, leisure, and consumerism – in contemporary French novels and other cultural productions.
