Look at (The New) Me: The Economic and Sociopolitical Atmosphere of Image Culture

Jennifer Egan's 2001 novel, Look at Me, depicts multiple intersecting storylines and instantiations of image culture - or, as Egan describes it, "the tendency to create 'identity' from the outside - to see ourselves as images that need to be manipulated."By highlighting the setting in Rockford, Illinois, in the wake of de-industrialization, the novel demonstrates how post-industrialism perpetuates the neoliberal tendency to approach life as a project to be managed. After arguing for the importance of setting in the production of neoliberal image culture, this article concludes with a brief reading of Halle Butler's The New Me (2019), which considers many of the same themes nearly twenty years later, but through disillusioned characters for whom the constant pressure to makeover oneself adds insult to economic injury.