Poetics of Genre in the Contemporary Novel

Tim Lanzendörfer is assistant professor of American studies at the University of Mainz.

Both contributor and editor, Lanzendörfer has compiled an impressive variety of essays dealing with genre in the postmodern age and beyond. The issue is not a new one, and in fact it reinvents itself in virtually every generation. Nonetheless, few collections address the interactions and functions of so-called artistic fiction and 'lowbrow' entertainment as aggressively and productively as do the contributors to this collection. Investigating the liminal area between popular and 'literary' work has always been hazardous, and this book makes it even more so in that it ventures into narrative forms outside the novel itself, especially film and television. Scholars from the US, Germany, Israel, Canada, Italy, and Tunisia, all with impressive critical credentials, handle the challenge with skill and international heft. Divided into three sections, 'Genre at the End of Postmodernism,' 'Between High and Low, Literary and Popular,' and 'Revisiting Traditional Genre,' the 14 essays evaluate works as diverse as Saving Private Ryan, Cormac McCarthy's apocalyptic The Road, and Steven King's Joyland. The range of critical perspectives is inclusive and far-reaching. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction: The Generic Turn? Toward a Poetics of Genre in the Contemporary Novel.Part One. Genre at the End of Postmodernism1 Aliens in America: Toni Morrison, Steven Spielberg, and the Ends of PostmodernismPhilipp Löffler2 The Digital Intensification of Postmodern PoeticsLai-Tze Fan3 The Black Box of Genre in Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist and Charles Yu’s How to Live Safelyin a Science Fictional UniverseStephen Hock4 Self-Parody and the Aesthetics of Literary Transgression in John Hawkes’s An Irish Eye and Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent ViceSalwa Karoui-Elounelli5 Sincerity, Sharing, and Authorial Discourses on the Fiction/Nonfiction Distinction: The Case of Dave Eggers’s You Shall Know Our VelocityVirginia PignagnoliPart Two. High and Low, Literary and Popular6 Techno-Anxiety and the Middlebrow: Science-Fictionalization in the Fictional Mainstream of the Early Twenty-First CenturyRoger Bellin7 Post-Apocalypse Now—Cormac McCarthy's The Road as Post-Apocalyptic Science FictionYonatan Englender and Elana Gomel8 Ghostly Presences: Nostalgia, the Literary Market, and the Cultural Work of Genre in Stephen King’s JoylandClemens Spahr9 Postmodern Autonomy and the Poetics of Genre in Matt Ruff’s NovelsAnnette Schimmelpfennig and Tim Lanzendörfer10 Purposing the Familiar: Genre, Repetition, and Anxiety in Breat Easton Ellis’s Lunar ParkGavin F. HurleyPart Three. Revisiting Traditional Genre(s)11 The Heirs of Don Quixote: Representations of the World-Shaping Powers of Genre in Contemporary FictionMartina Allen12 Reimagining Genre in the Contemporary Immigrant Novel.Katie Daily-Bruckner13 Looking Beneath the Surface: Self and Genre in Joseph O’Neill’s NetherlandTim De Jong14 Connecting Travel Writing, Bildungsroman, and Therapeutic Culture in Dave Eggers’s LiteratureRobert MousseauBibliographyAbout the ContributorsIndex