UC Irvine

This dissertation is dedicated to the idea that the cultural phenomenon of wellness—understood as an ethos of self-directed healthcare—provides a generative framework for thinking through the formal and critical dimensions of a diverse selection of novels published in the years between 2013-2019. How, it asks, do the novels examined in each chapter serve as a social and formal site for analyzing the zeitgeist of wellness? In what ways do these fictional accounts of wellness influence the novel on the level of genre? How does the history, culture, and politics of wellness work discursively to shape these fictional worlds? To what effect? And how might the critical concerns of these novels be enriched or best understood from the perspective of wellness? These formal questions open up an equally compelling set of broader sociopolitical critiques of wellness including the manifold ways it obfuscates the structural violence of the U.S. healthcare system, the decline of the welfare state, and the disappearance of social services. Moreover, the formal presence of wellness in the novels prompts readers to consider how it operates as a moral and ethical framework for judging and stigmatizing those who “fail” to embody signs of wellness or to take control of their health, allowing larger systemic failures to be redirected back onto the individual. At stake in wellness’ incorporation and ubiquity is the continued shift away from alternative systems of care whereby a reified model of self-directed healthcare maintains rather than subverts the hegemony of western biomedicine. Within these texts, one finds an urgency to articulate new modes of wellbeing rooted in collectivity and interdependence. In answering these questions, my dissertation hopes to make the case for the usefulness of wellness to critical discussions of recent literary production.