UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA, IRVINE Literature in the Age Of
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE Literature in the Age of Wellness DISSERTATION submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in English Literature by Jacob William Baumgartner Dissertation Committee: Associate Professor Theodore Martin, Chair Assistant Professor Christopher Fan Professor Daniel M. Gross Associate Professor Allison Perlman 2021 © 2021 Jacob William Baumgartner DEDICATION To my Dad Mark William Baumgartner ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iv VITA v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION vi INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1: The Office Novel and Workplace Wellness Programs 28 CHAPTER 2: The Millennial Novel and Wellness Without Work 71 CHAPTER 3: The Dystopian Novel and Wellness at the End of the World 121 CONCLUSION 165 BIBLIOGRAPHY 167 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I want to thank my chair Dr. Theodore Martin for his support, patience, and guidance throughout this process. I would also like to thank my committee members Dr. Christopher Fan, Dr. Daniel Gross, and Dr. Allison Perlman for volunteering their time and energy and for supporting me throughout my time here at UCI. Finally, thank you to Dr. Rodrigo Lazo for being such a generous mentor during my first years in the program. It has been an honor and a privilege to work with all of you, and I am grateful for having had the opportunity to do so. I would be remiss not to include my heartfelt gratitude to the English department at Orange Coast College. No matter how many times I was on academic probation (twice, last I counted) or failed to show up for class, you never wavered in your support and continued to believe in my potential. Thank you for changing my life. Equally formative and deserving of mention here are the many instructors at California State University, Long Beach who continued to nurture my intellectual growth and supported me on my path to graduate school. Thank you for insisting that I believe in myself and my work. None of this is possible, however, without my family. Thank you to my mother Laura, my father Mark, and my sister LeighAnne. To my wife Leah and my son Jonah, every day spent with you two is a life well lived—you are both everything, and I love you, always. iv VITA Jacob William Baumgartner 2015 B.A. in English Literature, California State University, Long Beach 2018 M.A. in English Literature, University of California, Irvine 2017-2020 Teaching Assistant, Composition Department, University of California, Irvine 2019-2020 Teaching Assistant, University Studies 84, University of California, Irvine 2020 Teaching Assistant, English 398: Rhetoric and the Teaching of Composition 2020 Reader for UCI Composition Programmatic Assessment and Attunement 2020 UCI Division of Teaching Excellence and Innovation (DTEI) Pedagogical Fellow 2021 Ph.D. in English Literature, University of California, Irvine 2021 Mellon Humanities Faculty Fellow FIELD OF STUDY 20th- and 21st-Century American Literature v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Literature in the Age of Wellness by Jacob William Baumgartner Doctor of Philosophy in English Literature University of California, Irvine, 2021 Associate Professor Theodore Martin, Chair 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 vi 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. vii INTRODUCTION Chances are you have recently encountered “wellness” in one form or another. You may have read a blog post or an article in a popular magazine about the best foods to eat to feel better and have more energy. Maybe you participated in a yoga or “mindfulness” session sponsored by the wellness program at your workplace or university. Looking for something to watch on Netflix, you may have stumbled across The Goop Lab, a docuseries following Gwyneth Paltrow’s new age wellness empire or come across its critical counterpart Unwell. At the very least, you have met someone with a FitBit, an Apple Watch, or an app on their smartphone that tracks some biometric data like steps, calories, sleep, hydration, “mindful” minutes, or mood. In a now oft-cited segment of a 1979 episode of 60 Minutes, Dan Rather observes “Wellness, there’s a word you don’t hear everyday.”1 Reflecting on Rather’s opening comment in a piece written for the New York Times, Ben Zimmer rightly points out that “More than three decades later, wellness is, in fact, a word that Americans might hear every day, or close to it.”2 Indeed, wellness appears to be everywhere. But what about wellness and literature? 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 1 WellnessAssoc, “Wellness Resource Center with Dan Rather on 60 Minutes,” YouTube Video, 5:00, July 4, 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAorj2U7PR4. 2 Ben Zimmer, “Wellness,” The New York Times, April 16, 2010, sec. Magazine, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/magazine/18FOB-onlanguage-t.html. 1 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 literature and to serve as a starting point for thinking through their relationship. First, however, it is necessary to explain the historical and theoretical foundations undergirding my literary examination. Defining Wellness: An Abridged History The capaciousness of wellness makes it difficult to define. Historically, this has not been the case. Its origin traces back to 1654 and the diary entry of Scottish aristocrat Archibald Johnston thanking God for his “daughter’s wealnesse.”3 In its original usage, wellness denoted 3 “wellness, n.”. OED Online. Oxford University Press. https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/227459?redirectedFrom=wellness. 2 only “The state or condition of being well or in good health, in contrast to being ill” or simply “the absence of sickness.”4 It was in America during the mid-twentieth century that wellness began to take on its complex of additional meanings. Here, it is worth lingering on the work of Dr. Halbert Louis Dunn who laid the foundation for the term’s twentieth-century expansion in the late 1950s through his philosophy of “high-level wellness.” The so-called “father of the wellness movement,” Dunn is a crucial figure for understanding how wellness came to be such a loaded term as well as how it became a mainstream phenomenon. Born in New Paris, Ohio in 1896, Dunn held a variety of positions in the healthcare field throughout his life including working at the Mayo Clinic, the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, and the University of Minnesota Hospital.