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Life's Second Chances is a roller-coaster ride of love, heartbreak & renewal. Enjoy the ride!!!

The media uses "Bartleby, the Scrivener" as an ominous allegory to dismiss protests like Occupy! Wall Street as "passive" and "idle" resistance. The "Bartleby" critical industry's authority endorses this simplistic interpretation, which in the media not only exacerbates American skepticism towards democratic protest; it distracts from larger questions about a Wall Street-serving political order that privileges private property over people. This essay uses Jean-Luc Nancy's theoretical differentiation of myth from literature, first to expose how media uses literary analogy to mythologize national histories with protestors as villains, then secondly to demonstrate how literature's interpretative nature invites populist disruption of authoritarian narratives to reclaim political representation and subjectivity---as social-media protest movements uniquely have. This essay reimagines an entire "Bartleby" critical heritage by challenging its unanimous verdict of Bartleby's "passive resistance," instead revealing subjectivities made possible outside of capitalism as imagined both in "Bartleby" and social-media movements like Occupy! Wall Street.