Bartleby at the Wall
How can fiction and popular culture inform the way we promulgate or refuse crisis & scarcity narratives in librarianship?
Why does Bartleby's story still resonate with creatives?
As Andrew Delbanco comments, [It's] “An old pice of writing by a guy who lived almost two hundred years ago and was describing a world that in some ways is very far from our own but it connects intimately and immediately to our own experience. (Giamatti & Delbanco 2020)“
From Bartleby can we learn how to say:
I prefer not to take you up on your offer to expand my duties.
I prefer not to be the beneficiary of others' largess if the strings are too tight.
I can fully occupy my role, my space, my destiny.
