American Literature and Therapeutic Cultures

Abstract

International audienceThis volume investigates the myriad interactions between American literature and psychological discourses in the United States, ranging from self-help to alternative health practices, and from psychotherapeutic interventions to cognitive behaviorism. Tracing these interactions between the modernist period and the present day, it seeks to shed new light on the development and conceptualization of therapeutic culture during a century in which therapeutics have shuttled rapidly between clinical and cultural practice. In analysing different framings of therapeutic culture, the volume brings together a cross-generational group of scholars from France, the UK and US to discuss writers as varied as William Carlos Williams, Lionel Trilling, Sylvia Plath, Colson Whitehead, Daniel Suarez and Ottessa Moshfegh. In doing so, the collection moves beyond traditionally privileged relationships between literature and psychoanalysis to embrace the much broader engagement of American literature with therapeutic models and trajectories. At stake is not only the historical linkages of modern and contemporary literature to theories, practices and institutions of psychology, but the increasingly prevalent neoliberal vision of literary texts as a restorative tool for the self