Self-Reflection and Social Awareness in Contemporary American Literature
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Therapeutic Reading: Self-Reflection and Social Awareness in Contemporary American Literature by Robert Mousseau A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Language and Literature Carleton University Ottawa, Ontario © 2016, Robert Mousseau Abstract This dissertation examines the social function of literature for Oprah’s Book Club (OBC) in comparison to how Dave Eggers’s imagined audience approaches his fiction and nonfiction. By comparing these two groups of ideal readers, this project explores how certain reading communities understand reading and authorship to relate to therapeutic culture, self-transformation, social awareness, and, in some cases, social engagement. Understanding “therapy” broadly to mean the effort to transform oneself in response to emotional or physical distress, this project builds on scholarship which argues therapy sits at the heart of many contemporary approaches to literature. When reading therapeutically, literature is a tool used to understand the self in relation to others and in response to current events. Reading selections of work by Jonathan Franzen and Dave Eggers as well as engaging with episodes of The Oprah Winfrey Show and OBC discussions, this project explores how OBC and Eggers encourage their ideal audiences to improve themselves therapeutically by reading in similar but distinct ways. OBC and Eggers similarly direct their ideal audiences to transform themselves while reading by identifying with a work’s author or characters. Likewise, they similarly believe literature holds the potential to inspire social awareness and a sense of social responsibility for their respective literary communities. For OBC, however, readers benefit from books by connecting literary works to their authors’s biographies to identify with however an author seems to improve him- or herself by writing. In contrast, ii Eggers’s writing encourages its ideal readers to reject the importance of Eggers’s biography to his work in favor of identifying with his narrators and protagonists as discrete people separate from Eggers. By identifying with Eggers’s characters rather than with Eggers himself, Eggers’s texts encourage his imagined audience to understand his characters’ problems as their own, pushing his ideal readers to improve themselves by becoming more empathetic, socially aware people. In comparing these two literary communities, this project explains how OBC’s and Eggers’s approaches to literature share a belief in literature’s self- and socially transformative potentials despite encouraging readers to improve themselves while reading by identifying with different aspects of literary work. iii Acknowledgements A small group of people were invaluable assets to me throughout this project. Most significantly, I would like to thank Dr. Franny Nudelman for her stalwart supervision. She remained enthusiastic and encouraging throughout my work’s various shifts in direction and quality, and she constantly pushed me to improve my writing and to complicate my thinking to the benefit of my dissertation as well as to my scholarly abilities more broadly. Without her, this project would be vastly different, if it existed at all. I will greatly miss our discussions and debates. I am similarly grateful to Dr. Sarah Brouillette for our various small but insightful discussions as well as for her quick and detailed feedback during my revisions. Thanks are in order for Dr. Brian Johnson for his comments and feedback at various stages throughout my project and degree. I am appreciative to Dr. Robert Holton for his support in the earliest stages of my degree as well as for his enduring encouragement. I wish to thank Dr. Timothy Aubry and Dr. Debra Graham for agreeing to act as external examiners. I would like to express my gratitude to my entire dissertation committee for accommodating various schedule changes and delays to my submission and defense dates. I am further indebted to Dr. Franny Nudelman, Dr. Sarah Brouillette, and Dr. Percy Walton for entrusting me with various research assistantships throughout my degree, as well as to Dr. Grant Williams, Dr. Barbara Leckie, and Dr. Brian Johnson for their guidance and assistance in obtaining various iv bursaries and financial awards. Special thanks to Lana Keon for her reliably positive encouragement and for her help resolving any and all of my bureaucratic and/or administrative questions and requests over the past few years. This dissertation would not have been finished without the boundless support of my partner, Géraldine Dion St-Pierre. Far beyond the pieces of my work she read and offered feedback on, she has remained a constant pillar of encouragement throughout my dissertation despite facing the brunt of my anxiety and self-doubt. I hit some low lows throughout this process, but I know she always had/has my back. Finally, thank you to my parents, Peter and Patsy Mousseau. It is too easy to say I could not have achieved any of this without them, but there it is. v Table of Contents Abstract................................................................................................................ii Acknowledgements............................................................................................iii Introduction..........................................................................................................1 Chapter One: Popularizing Therapeutic Reading and Writing With Oprah’s Book Club...........................................................................................................17 Chapter Two: Charting OBC’s Influence on Authorship................................60 Chapter Three: Framing Literature as Testimony.........................................100 Chapter Four: The Benefits and Limits of Reading Dave Eggers’s Fiction...............................................................................................................142 Epilogue............................................................................................................195 Works Cited......................................................................................................202 vi Introduction This dissertation examines the social function of literature for certain imagined groups of middle class readers, exploring how readers understand reading and authorship to relate to therapeutic culture, self-transformation, social awareness, and, in some cases, social engagement. How does literature perform a therapeutic function for readers? How do readers understand literature to function for authors? What role, if any, does narrative play in helping readers to digest their experiences, or to understand the experiences of others? Is literature a useful tool for responding to current events or social anxieties? The following project speaks to these questions, presenting two approaches to reading concerned with self-improving therapy which suggest what circumstances might enable literature to influence social awareness. Therapy sits at the heart of many contemporary approaches to literature. “Contemporary fiction offers emotional gratifications by dramatizing desires, anxieties, losses, and hopes, which readers experience as intensely personal,” Timothy Aubry writes (2). Literature designed to speak to “the personal and the psychological” asserts what Aubry calls a “common therapeutic vocabulary” for many readers which informs how they interpret narratives in relation to themselves as well as in relation to society at large (2). When reading therapeutically, literature is a tool used to understand the self in relation to others and in response to current events. As anthropologists Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman write, “trauma has become a major signifier of our age” (xi). As a 1 result, therapy has emerged as a dominant social interest. Bearing in mind therapy’s cultural prevalence, this project seeks to define what therapeutic reading looks like for particular reading audiences, and what therapeutic reading’s different personal and social effects might be depending on how readers identify with a literary work. In addition, I intend to explore if and how therapeutic interests influence recent acts of authorship. For the purposes of this study, I understand therapy broadly to mean the effort to transform oneself in response to emotional or physical distress. This transformation typically occurs by reflecting on the self in discussion with or in relation to another person or group of people. I historicize therapy in the context of postwar era efforts to respond to soldiers’ trauma: as historian Ellen Herman explains, modern understandings of therapy extend from institutional efforts in the postwar period to respond to the needs of traumatized soldiers returning from service. To meet the needs of traumatized soldiers, institutional structures were established to help depressed or distressed individuals by placing them in dialogue with therapeutic experts. As institutional therapy was normalized, therapeutic methods emphasized by psychological study, for example introspection and self-improvement, were positioned as popular practices employed by the American public, coloring how many people perceived the world. It “no longer suffices to think of psychology as merely one category of expertise among others,” Herman writes. “Psychology in our time is a veritable worldview” (4). As psychology developed into a “worldview” applied outside