A Rhetorical-Narratological and Multi-Actor Materialist Analysis of Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias (2019)

In this presentation, I will examine the twenty-first-century schizophrenia memoir in its cultural and diagnostic contexts. Since the rise of the Mad Pride and neurodiversity movements early in the century, perceptions of mental illnesses have shifted, which calls for a reconsideration of the patient-clinician-caregiver relationship and for the reconceptualization of mental illness. This presentation will expand these crucial discussions in the interdisciplinary field of the health humanities by drawing on one case study: Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias (2019). Adopting a methodologically interdisciplinary approach with a rhetorical-narratological, multi-actor materialist, and comparative perspective, it aims to investigate the forms, functions, and relations of the historically important genre of the schizophrenia memoir in its multiple twenty-first-century contexts. By dissecting the narrative features, affects, rhetorical aims, and institutional dimension of the proposed case study, this presentation will make a case for a multi-actor materialist understanding of schizophrenia that considers the many actors and agencies (not only healthcare professionals) that shape illness experience and our knowledge of illness. In this way, this presentation hopes to complicate and/or enrich our medico-cultural understanding of schizophrenia by exploring beyond normative, biomedical, and/or curative models.