A small but growing body of scholarship across disciplines has begun to reflect recent years, which brought renewed attention to death and the value of health; however, significant gaps remain in how these matters are explored through a literary lens. This MLA session contributes to and extends that emerging discourse by exploring how our field engages with core public concerns—particularly the lack of quality healthcare and its fatal consequences—and confronts the persistent devaluation of the humanities. It underscores how literary texts broaden our understanding of health, wellness, mortality, and grief as they expose and critique systems and ideologies that shape perceptions of illness, dying, and loss. The session builds on studies such as Sabine Kollmann’s Narrative Fiction and Death: Dying Imagined (2024), Katarzyna A. Małecka’s Grief Memoirs: Cultural, Supportive, and Therapeutic Significance (2024), and Ronald Schleifer’s Literary Studies and Well-Being: Structures of Experience in the Worldly Work of Literature and Healthcare (2022), which show how literature offers distinct insights into death and wellness by attending to structures of language, narrative form, and cultural meaning.

Bringing together four presentations, this session interrogates depictions in contemporary fiction and nonfiction through frameworks informed by health humanities, disability studies, political theory, and intersectionality. The panelists include scholars in tenure-track and non-tenure-track positions from disciplines including literary, gender, and Africana studies, and from various institutions (private, public, regional) across the U.S. They identify as women, men, queer, and racial minority. Focusing on men and women writers, the presentations are in dialogue and explore how literary texts serve as vital spaces for rethinking the meanings and representations of mortality and care.

Douglas Dowland opens the session with “‘The Ruse of Repair’: Cancer and its Aftermaths in Anne Boyer’s The Undying,” which examines how Boyer’s Pulitzer Prize–winning memoir challenges dominant narratives surrounding breast cancer. Situating the memoir within critiques of neoliberalism and wellness culture, the presentation analyzes how Boyer resists the notion of cancer as a linear journey with a tidy resolution. Instead, she offers a portrait of “undying”—a suspended state between life and death—exposing the limits of both medical discourse and activist language. The paper highlights how Boyer’s work interrogates the “emptiness” of cancer advocacy and insists on alternative ways of writing illness and grief.

Dowland’s analysis of systemic failure and the grief accompanying pain segues into Seth McKelvey’s “‘Death as We Know It’: Politicized Death and Articulated Knowledge in Don DeLillo’s White Noise,” which considers how DeLillo uses fiction to challenge bureaucratic and state understandings of death. Drawing on theories of tacit knowledge and “politicized death,” he argues that White Noise critiques how death is rendered knowable only through documentation—death certificates, wills, legal paperwork—while silencing embodied, tacit experiences of dying. This expands existing DeLillo scholarship by moving beyond postmodernist critiques of media and instead emphasizing the novel’s broader meditation on the politics of life and death.

Elaine Cannell similarly offers a reinterpretation in “‘Wait a Minute!’ Revising Prognosis Time in Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women,” where she turns to disability studies and queer theory to examine Berlin’s depiction of terminal illness. Focusing on a recurring character named Sally, who has cancer, the presentation explores how Berlin’s narrative structure enacts what scholars have termed “crip time” or “prognosis time”—temporalities that resist normative, linear timeframes imposed by medicine and dominant culture. Berlin’s asynchronous storytelling becomes a mechanism for reimagining life with terminal illness, offering a model of resistance to ableist constructions of time and mortality.

Extending this challenge to representations of time and narrative, Robin Brooks’s “Death Up Close: Hospital Scenes and Funeral Sites” brings the panel’s themes into sharp focus by centering Black life and death through the lens of memoir. Analyzing Dawn Turner’s Three Girls from Bronzeville and Saeed Jones’s How We Fight for Our Lives, this presentation examines hospital and funeral scenes shaped by chronic illness and sudden loss. These narratives highlight how systemic inequities, including healthcare access, inform the conditions under which Black death is experienced and remembered. Like Boyer, these texts critique failings of health systems; like DeLillo, they probe the tension between personal grief and public record; and like Berlin, they resist linear, sanitized arcs of death by emphasizing the emotional, spiritual, and social complexity of loss.

Together, these four presentations offer a discussion on how illness, death, and grief are lived and represented—and how literature can document and reshape these cultural narratives. Presentations are limited to twelve minutes to ensure robust audience discussion that encourages new areas of exploration.