The (Post)confessional Mode: Parodic Psychiatry in Feminist Literature and Performance

Abstract

The (Post)confessional Mode: Parodic Psychiatry in Feminist Literature and Performance gathers a body of post-1945 feminist works that portray and aestheticize mental illness towards experimental forms of self-telling, a process that revises the first-person I as a fragmented, revisionary, and ultimately collective referent, often in response to exclusionary hierarchies in language and its attendant social and clinical effects. Reading across a lineage of postwar feminist literature and performance, I identify this strategy as part of a psycho-aesthetic phenomenon that reclaims portrayals of mental illness to achieve an ironic, parodic form of self-disclosure, which I call the “postconfessional” mode. Playful, irreverent, and evasive, the multimodal works by Sylvia Plath, Clarice Lispector, Kathy Acker, Claudia Rankine, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Karen Finley, Taylor Tomlinson, and Cristela Alonzo demonstrate an increasing awareness of an external reader or viewer who participates in their self-fashioning, especially as artists increasingly move from texts to other media. Postconfessions decenter confessional literature as a dominant postwar genre, especially as a feminized practice that attempts to achieve authentic self-revelation. While revising long-established forms of psychiatric treatment and talk therapies, the formal strategies behind postconfessions increasingly implicate extra-clinical actors in newly therapeutic processes, leading to revisions of care that create catharsis through mutual recognition.