Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14775700.2021.1982587
J. Annesley
ABSTRACT On the confessional pages of her memoirs Prozac Nation and More, Now, Again and in the meditations on popular culture that characterise her journalism and non-fiction, Elizabeth Wurtzel’s writing demonstrates a consistent emphasis on images of iconic rebellion. Recognising the ways these patterns mesh with her wider focus on addiction and depression, this article situates Wurtzel’s vision of outsiderdom in relation to cool’s often explicitly masculine discourses and moves from there to demonstrate the extent to which the focus on cool lifestyles informs her representations of addiction and depression. In terms that connect the cultural with the psychological, ‘Uncomfortably numb’ illuminates not just Wurtzel’s writing and the patterns that shape the interpretation of cool, but the nature of the way a depressive self is narrated, negotiated and understood.
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Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14775700.2021.1996852
Francesca Pierini
ABSTRACT Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation (1994), a memoir that has been mostly read as an “iconic text which encapsulates the disillusioned and cynical tone of Generation X literature and culture” (Wall 2019, 1), has been understandably placed, by literary critics, in continuity with Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963), an influential account of mental illness penned by an illustrious predecessor. Without necessarily challenging these current critical trends, this article aims at situating Wurtzel’s memoir within a wider context in order to contend that ‘unchained’ from its usual collocation as a generational ‘transgressive’ manifesto, and divested of its sensationalist aura, Wurtzel’s memoir comes to light as a thoughtful personal account of struggle across individual as well as generational barriers that mirror momentous changes in the current social order, its forms of social control, and the collective perception of subjectivity. To argue this point, this article will make Prozac Nation dialogue with two European counterparts: The Words to Say It (1975), the diary of a therapeutic process authored by Marie Cardinal, a French writer of the same generation as Plath, and Parla, Mia Paura (2017), an autobiographical tale of depression as well as a generational portrait penned by Italian author Simona Vinci.
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Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14775700.2021.1991747
María Elena Carpintero Torres-Quevedo
ABSTRACT Elizabeth Wurtzel’s memoir Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America is an iconic example of the recovery narrative. The genre of the recovery narrative relies on a prelapsarian origin to which the subject can and should return, and this origin is particularly loaded for narratives about women’s mental health. Wurtzel resists the logic and underlying ideology and teleology of the recovery narrative. She does not recover an identity from before her depression, instead insisting on its fundamental constitution of her subjectivity.This article will argue that Wurtzel’s is a cybogian autobiography in a Harawayian sense. Haraway’s use of the term ‘cyborg’ refers to a post-technology subject with the ability to epistemologically distance themselves from the essentialist, naturalist binaries of western thought. Haraway’s theory resonates with Wurtzel’s memoir; Wurtzel resistance to the teleology of healing within the recovery narrative is a resistance to nostalgia for a prelapsarian selfhood. Wurtzel does not ‘recover’ based on a spiritual or moral overcoming; she finds some peace in Prozac. Wurtzel is an example of American women memoirists writing a subjectivity deeply embedded in the material world and constituted by experiences of alterity and technology – both the technology of antidepressants and the technology of genre.
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Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14775700.2021.1997042
P. Malone
ABSTRACT How do we solve a problem like Elizabeth? This might well have been the title of Elizabeth Wurtzel’s ‘depression memoir,’ Prozac Nation (1994); or rather, it might have been the title if the book had been a memoir, rather than a piece of first-person gonzo-style reporting from the field of chemical imbalance. This reading forms the basis of a deeper reconsideration of Wurtzel’s position in the popular imagination as the ‘voice of a generation.’ In the public imagination, mid-’90s culture in America is inextricably linked with irony, depression, and apathy. It may be a Canadian writer who is credited with popularising the term ‘Generation X’ (Douglas Coupland, in 1991), but the blankness and indeterminacy of its signification seemed to speak directly for a generation approaching adulthood in the nexus between the conservative Republicanism of the Reagan and (first) Bush years and the ostensible liberalism of the saxophone-sound tracked Clinton era. With her keen wit and canny publisher, Elizabeth Wurtzel capitalised on the ‘representative’ function of her writing, which is nowhere clearer than in the epilogue that gives Prozac Nation its title.
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Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14775700.2021.1982327
D. Brauner
ABSTRACT In the Author’s Note to Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wurtzel writes: ‘As far as I am concerned, every word of this book is the complete and total truth. But of course, it’s my truth’. The tension between this absolute claim to ‘truth’ and the acknowledgement that this truth is personal and subjective is one that resonates throughout the memoir. On the one hand, Wurtzel takes great pains to establish the authenticity of her narrative; on the other hand, she is acutely aware of the ways in which it – and the life it describes – is performative, shaped by a confessional impulse that she situates in the tradition of confessional writing. In this article, I explore how Prozac Nation stages and interrogates confessional acts, simultaneously constructing and deconstructing notions of authenticity. I focus on the ways in which Wurtzel deploys cultural references to represent herself as both exceptional and representative, her narrative exemplifying what it is like to be, as the book’s subtitle puts it, ‘Young and Depressed in America’, while at the same time insisting on the singularity of its author’s experience. I conclude by arguing that Prozac Nation rejects the authentic/inauthentic binary, presenting a mediated series of selves that are always in flux.
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Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14775700.2021.1979361
M. Sutton
ABSTRACT Elizabeth Wurtzel’s early career as a music journalist not only gave her a foothold in publishing but also informed her work as a memoirist and cultural critic. Like past music writers, particularly Ellen Willis, Wurtzel broke away from ‘objective’ critical orthodoxy and found musical touchstones to complement and amplify her most introspective writing. Often dispensing with linear narrative (or strict veracity), Wurtzel assembles episodes from her life (in the case of autobiography) or history as one would arrange songs on a mixtape, with subjective impressions and reference points channelled through music. As a medium for young-adult communication, the mixtape thrives on idiosyncrasy and both a deflection and absorption of inchoate emotion. Commiseration and a plea for empathy embed themselves within a mix’s ‘code,’ along with elements of gift-exchange; a similar urge to pack subjectivity into existing discourse distinguishes Wurtzel’s writings. Re-evaluating Wurtzel’s body of work as an outgrowth of her ‘mixtape aesthetics,’ we encounter a bold alternative method for the collection and transmission of knowledge in life writing and cultural criticism.
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Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14775700.2021.1988293
Rachael Mclennan
ABSTRACT This article argues that Elizabeth Wurtzel’s work has been undeservedly neglected by autobiography studies. It explores how autobiography functions as mediation and mitigation as Wurtzel attempts to communicate her experience of depression in Prozac Nation, with rich yet problematic results, and argues that Wurtzel’s refusal or difficulties with some key features of (American) autobiography mark her major contribution to the genre. The article also argues that the general understanding of Wurtzel as a ‘rule-breaker’ has merit but is only partly true, particularly as it extends to the frequent understanding of her as providing an empowering or feminist autobiographical example for women writers. Her complex influence is explored through a brief discussion of a contemporary autobiography of illness, Porochista Khakpour’s Sick.
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Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14775700.2021.2013452
Rachael Mclennan, M. Torres-Quevedo
This Special Issue was prompted by Elizabeth Wurtzel’s death in January 2019, from complications of breast cancer. Its articles constitute a form of commemoration of her literary work throughout her life, and are conceived as testimony to its value and continued influence. Despite the sense of loss expressed in the wake of Wurtzel’s death, that value and influence has not been widely agreed upon, or even much evidenced, in scholarship over the decades following the period of Wurtzel’s greatest visibility (or notoriety), from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s. Her death has galvanised our efforts to not only appraise Wurtzel’s literary achievements but to do our part to make sure they are not unjustifiably rendered obscure. People tend to know Wurtzel via her autobiography, Prozac Nation (1994) and its sequel More, Now, Again (2002); the former is widely credited as an important and early, even inaugurating, example of the ‘misery memoir’ and the ‘memoir boom’ of the late 1990s and early twenty-first century. Wurtzel has been celebrated for the candid way she wrote about depression, which was particularly admired by her Generation X peers and young women readers. Yet, as many of the contributors here note, Wurtzel and her writing were regarded by reviewers and readers alike as self-involved, frustrating and difficult. Reception of Wurtzel’s work suffered from such characterisations in ways that works by her male peers did not. This dynamic persists today; it is difficult to think of a contemporary woman autobiographer whose work is considered with the reverence Karl Ove Knausgaard’s works received, for example. While the sexist reviews she received partly accounts for the fact that Wurtzel’s work has been undeservedly ignored or forgotten, this does not tell the full story. It is also partly because a focus on her rebellious behaviour, or understanding of her as a celebrity, may have obscured focus on the detail of her work. We argue that the provocations and complexities of her work deserve greater scrutiny (and praise). Wurtzel does indeed deserve credit for ‘writing out’ about depression and mental health when these were stigmatised (of course, they still often are today) but such understandings do not fully address her thoughtful participation in and influence on various discourses about gender, writing, illness, music and American culture at the end of the twentieth century. In many ways her work anticipates or can be understood in relation to some features of the twenty-first century too, such as the role of social media and its relationship to autobiography and performance, and debates over the impact and legacy of the 1990s.
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Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14775700.2021.1977560
B. Nicol
ABSTRACT This essay explores the relationship between Elizabeth Wurtzel and David Foster Wallace, two writers who are in different ways representative of the ‘in-between’ status of the 1990s, and who both pioneered different modes of writing which remain influential today: Wurtzel’s ‘obscene’ (in Baudrillard’s terms) confessional style, and Wallace’s post-postmodern aesthetics of sincerity. In particular it considers Wallace’s short story ‘The Depressed Person’ (from his collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men), which is widely understood to be ‘about’ Wurtzel. While somewhat cruel and misogynistic on the surface, the hauntological dimension of this text – ie the effect created by the posthumous context of reading it now, when both writer and alleged subject are no longer with us – opens up a different reading, one which enables us to explore the association with depression which is central to understanding both authors. The essay compares ‘The Depressed Person’ to Wurtzel’s own rather circumspect memorial of Wallace, ‘Beyond the Trouble, More Trouble’, published in 2008 shortly after his death. Read posthumously, both texts come to seem unlikely companion pieces. For all their substantial differences, both effectively advance a similar, bleak yet carefully considered, conclusion about what it means to suffer with depression which casts new light on Wallace’s notion of sincerity and Wurtzel’s ‘obscene’ approach to autobiography.
本文探讨了伊丽莎白·沃泽尔和大卫·福斯特·华莱士之间的关系，这两位作家以不同的方式代表了20世纪90年代的“中间”状态，他们都开创了不同的写作模式，这些模式在今天仍然具有影响力:沃泽尔的“淫秽”(用鲍德里亚的话来说)忏悔风格，而华莱士的后后现代真诚美学。它特别考虑了华莱士的短篇小说《抑郁的人》(摘自他的合集《与丑陋男人的简短访谈》)，这部小说被广泛认为是“关于”伍泽尔的。虽然表面上有些残酷和厌恶女性，但这篇文章的鬼魂维度——即现在阅读它时，作者和所谓的主题都已不在我们身边，在死后的语境中产生的影响——开启了一种不同的阅读方式，使我们能够探索与抑郁的联系，这是理解两位作者的核心。这篇文章将《抑郁的人》与伍泽尔在华莱士去世后不久于2008年出版的《超越麻烦，更多麻烦》(Beyond The Trouble, More Trouble)相比较，后者相当谨慎。在他死后阅读，这两篇文章似乎不太可能成为伴侣。尽管他们之间存在着巨大的差异，但他们都有效地提出了一个相似的、凄凉但经过深思熟虑的结论，即抑郁症意味着什么，这一结论为华莱士的真诚概念和伍泽尔的“淫秽”自传方式提供了新的视角。
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Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/14775700.2020.1868247
W. Palmer
ABSTRACT T.S. Eliot opens ‘The Dry Salvages,’ the third of his Four Quartets with a speaker stating the belief that ‘the river/Is a strong brown god, sullen, untamed, intractable’ (1–2). This article begins with follow-up questions: where and who is the brown god and how do Eliot and his speakers situate themselves in the new geography of a breaking world? Through geographical consideration, biographical knowledge, historical context, and formal analysis, this essay posits the Mississippi River as Eliot’s stated brown god and considers the historical and philosophical implications of what it means for the paragon Anglo-American expatriate to return to the river of his youth in the final grand poetic effort of his literary career. Four Quartets goes back in time and space shifts across impossible geographies. In the poem, Eliot attempts and fails to understand African American life in white modernity at the same time he uses the Mississippi to exist within the Atlantic Ocean. He and his speakers spend their poetic time trying to become a universal poetic voice in a new modern existence and falling short.
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