Depressions-Memoirs : Selbst- und Kulturreflexionen in deutsch- und englischsprachigen autobiographischen Erzählungen des 21. Jahrhunderts

Sammanfattning: My dissertation focuses on the literary genre of Depression Memoirs in the 21st century. Depression Memoirs are autobiographical narratives in which the experience of suffering from a depressive illness is recounted from a hindsight perspective. The genre emerged in the United States since the 1990s and in Europe since the turn of the millennium due to specific characteristics that, consecutively, are responsible for its great popularity of both its production and its reception. These characteristics are presented together with premises from the fields of narratology, life writing, narrative psychology, and cognitive narratology in the theoretical chapters of the thesis. They are rounded off with a categorisation and analysis model that reflects that Depression Memoirs tackle the multi-layered hurdles of narrating depression in different ways and that forms the analytical lens for the analysis of six Depression Memoirs in the core corpus of this study: Sally Brampton’s Shoot the Damn Dog (2008), Jana Seelig’s Minusgefühle (2015), Benjamin Maack’s Wenn das noch geht, kann es nicht so schlimm sein (2020), Matt Haig’s Reasons to Stay Alive (2015), Alastair Campbell’s The Happy Depressive (2012), and Nora-Marie Ellermeyer’s Lebensnebel (2018).With a cultural narratological approach, I analyse which narrative structures preconfigure the Depression Memoirs, with which narrative strategies the depressive experience is re-enacted on the histoire- and discours-level, and which individual as well as discursive and cultural functions are at work. Key findings of the study include that Depression Memoirs are inscribed with a communicative act and that they serve as a medium of both individual and cultural self-reflection. Memoirists seek to 1) better understand the illness themselves and reclaim their life narratives, 2) to share their insights in order to give solace and hope to fellow sufferers, and 3) to stimulate cultural processes of demystification and destigmatisation. Depression Memoirs sharpen the picture of depressive illnesses by anchoring vague symptoms with a nuanced vocabulary in concrete biographies and, thereby, co-constitute the cultural meaning of depression. They offer a space of reflection that critically challenges hegemonic discourses, configurations of knowledge, and sociocultural constructions of mental (ill-) health. Thus, without denying depression its status as a life-threatening illness, it can be stated that through Depression Memoirs we perceive a cultural self-understanding.