Capital Distress: Productive Citizenship and Mental Health in Adolescent Literature
Abstract
This dissertation explores the complexities of adolescent mental health under neoliberal capitalism in twentieth- and twenty-first-century U.S. fiction about and for adolescents. Drawn on research that defines youth citizenship as responsibilities-based in nature, this project outlines the ways contemporary young adult (YA) novels of mental distress reveal an inextricable link between adolescent mental health and the conditions of what I term productive citizenship. Constituting my theorization of productive citizenship are three distinct tenets adolescents must adhere to: (1) displaying the motivation to achieve specific goals; (2) showing a propensity for self-reliance and individuality; and (3) accepting the translation of political concerns into personal, psychological issues and resolving those issues through individual treatments. Should an adolescent refuse or be unable to uphold any of these tenets, they become a risk to society and must be tamed. I contend that contemporary YA novels of mental distress detail this taming process. My introduction reviews the relevant research to this discussion, which includes but is not limited to Marxist and Youth criticism, as well as contemporary YA scholarship. Chapter one considers how the history of productive citizenship threads together with the literary roots of adolescent mental distress in novels by J.D. Salinger, Joanne Greenberg, John Neufeld, and Virginia Hamilton. In Chapter two, I interpret therapeutic treatment as a contemporary disciplinary practice of femininity in novels by Julie Halpern, Laurie Halse Anderson, and Meg Haston, while in chapter three I examine how masculine silence informs adolescent mental health in novels by Stephen Chobksy, Michael Thomas Ford, and Adib Khorram. Lastly, chapter four explores the use of psychiatric spaces in novels by Ned Vizzini and Francisco X. Stork to argue how the depiction of these facilities undermines the neoliberal definitions of “health” by replicating the living conditions of a pre-industrial society. Collectively, these novels inevitably urge the acceptance of broader political concerns as individual issues by centring the symptoms of distress rather than its root causes. As a result, the model of young adulthood encouraged within the neoliberal capitalism of many recent YA novels of mental distress is productive citizenship.