What’s in a Cultural Hegemony?: Feel Good Literature, ME and Capitalism

What’s in a Cultural Hegemony: ‘Feel-Good’ Literature, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS), and Capitalism. A talk by Amélie Doche.

Amélie Doche is an AHRC-funded doctoral researcher in English language and literature at Birmingham City University. Her PhD – carried out in collaboration with the literature development organisation Writing West Midlands – explores discourses of value in contemporary literary culture. Amélie’s articles have appeared in Textual Practice, Iperstoria, The Journal of Languages, Texts, and Society, and English Studies. She’s happy to be contacted via email (amelie.doche@mail.bcu.ac.uk) or on X (@LaDoche).

My talk focuses on hegemonic discourses of value as they intersect with feel-good literature, online discourses of ME/CFS recovery, our culture of immediacy, our society’s fetishisation of self-help (to cure one’s mental and physical diseases) and self-improvement (to increase one’s performance and success). During times of personal and cultural crises, a majority of readers turn to feel-good romance and pop poetry for comfort and escapism. I read the production and reception of Donna Ashworth’s Wild Hope and Kim Nash’s Escape to the Country – among others – diffractively through the lenses of mass-entertainment consumer culture, mental capitalism, performative vulnerability and sincerity (assessed in the author – ad hominem), the instrumentalisation of imagination in popular self-help, and individualism. My presentation is structured into three main sections. The first section explores readers’ attraction to feel-good genres within the context of contemporary cultural dynamics. The second section analyses feel good and discourses of ME/CFS recovery focusing on a specific mode of knowledge activation: archetypal, where the myth of personal salvation is both reinforced and co-created. The final section examines the allure of feel-good genres and discourses of ME/CFS recovery in connection to current tendencies toward magical thinking –an intensified form of positive psychology – and infantilism.