The novella has enjoyed a surge in popularity in recent decades. Some argue that this is simply due to shorter attention spans, or competition for reading time from other media. Such accounts leave out the important, if minor role that this minor form has played in the evolution of genre in the twenty-first century. Understanding this role requires first a view of the long history of the novella, thought by Lukács to be the precursor and then eventual postscript to the novel as a primary social form. In these terms, the novella is both the “not-yet” of the novel, and its “no-longer”. For Benjamin, the stereoscopic or mythic qualities of the novel are concentrated and made visible in the novella when it is embedded within the longer form.
Within the more recent history of the novella are flashpoints of generic change, especially around the turn of the twentieth century when authors turned to short form to incorporate genre experimentation into novelistic practice, from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) to James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898) to Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915). In this presentation I will ask how scale might impact accounts of contemporary genre experimentation by focusing on the contemporary novella, especially where its reflexive turns inflect both genre and scale simultaneously. To do so I will examine a range of twenty-first century novellas. My examples will move between realism, science fiction, detective fiction, and myth, considering not only the important history of science fiction in recognizing the novella form in the middle of the twentieth century, but how speculative genre modes have been important to the circulation of contemporary novellas. They will include: Christina Rivera Garza’s The Taiga Syndrome (2012, tr. 2018), described as “a fairy tale run amok,” and a partial retelling of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness via detective fiction; Olga Ravn’s ekphrastic science fiction novella The Employees (2018, tr. 2020); and the Edinburgh-based publisher Canongate’s “The Myths” book series, launched in 2005, with 18 books published by 2013, most of which are under 200 pages. Looking at texts from the series by Margaret Atwood and Jeanette Winterson, for example, I will address the role of myth in short novels and novellas, and in particular the affordances of short form for genre experimentation. By doing so, I will ask whether narrative structures tied to generic form, including internal and total length constraints, register in the novella in ways that are instructive for a broader account of how genre functions in twenty-first century fiction.
The narrator of Rivera Garza’s The Taiga Syndrome is a former private detective, weighed down by failure, who has “instead begun to lead the discreet life of a writer of noir novellas,” but is tempted back to a case by a wolflike figure. “Sometimes failures push us to open the door of a run-down old house,” she says, “to clean the dust off the unused furniture and find a drawer where an old typewriter hides.” The novella that follows generates itself out of her encounter with the detritus of narrative in the twenty-first century. It is not clear at the end whether she or the novella will survive this act of creation, but the liminal window in which they appear suggests a possible horizon for both. Rivera Garza’s novella, along with other texts that toggle genre at radically distinct scalar levels, presents generic change as a necessary accomplice to the contemporary ascendance of the short novel.
It is common to assume that the genre of the novel changes through its interaction with other literary as well as extraliterary genres, for example by integrating or merging them. This certainly holds true for the twentyfirst-century novel as well. As a genre that has always been genre-conscious and self-reflexive, the novel displays an enormous flexibility in incorporating other genres and in stretching its own boundaries. Since it is so fundamentally flexible – think of Bakhtin’s view of the novel –, the novel is always already hybrid (and for that reason, ‘hybridity’ may be a misleading term for new developments in the novel).
The main question in this presentation is what happens to genre when the novel is embedded in a larger textual structure such as a series or a cycle. Does it limit, advance, or modify the novel’s generic flexibility? Based on their particular ‘affordances’, cycles and series are breeding grounds for generic change in the novel, the presentation hypothesizes. It will show how the features of the cycle, such as their part-whole relations, recurring characters, and cyclicity, shape the novelistic genres in which the cycle inscribes itself and vice versa.
Against the background of cognitive and discursive genre theory, the presentation analyses examples from recent novels in Dutch, in which genres such as crime fiction and the family novel are modified by the macrotext of the cycle. In the Ewout Meyster cycle (1986-2024) by Wessel te Gussinklo a Bildungroman is phased in several novels; in the trilogy Ayoub (2010-2016) by Fikry El Azzouzi the picaresque is gradually blended with a Bildungsroman, and J.Z. Herrenberg’s cycle (2018-) of experimental novels embodies the hybridity that is so vital to the genre of the novel.
In my presentation I will consider how generic conventions affect reading. The so-called metaphysical detective story is an experimental genre which plays with and subverts the conventions of the traditional detective genre. By highlighting generic conventions, it provides an in-depth representation of such questions as identity, knowledge, and reality. According to researchers such as Umberto Eco and Stefano Tani, the metaphysical detective story cannot simply be read, it can only be reread. This means that reading this genre always involves a self-reflexive awareness of generic conventions and their role in how we produce meaning. If a reader read a metaphysical detective story in the same fashion as a traditional one, he or she would be what Eco calls a naïve reader.
I have chosen Muriel Spark’s metaphysical shocker, The Driver’s Seat (1970), as a case study to examine whether this type of narrative may be read in a fashion that rejects the self-reflexive in-depth model that the metaphysical genre is claimed to necessitate. Consequently, my presentation takes part in the contemporary debate on how literary scholars read—and how they should read. What would a so-called surface reading of Spark’s novel look like? What happens if we stay on the textual surface and even favor literal reading? Will the book resist such a reading and signal that it must be read self-reflexively?
‘I have always felt a deep prejudice against both autobiography and biographical criticism’, experimental novelist Christine Brooke-Rose states in her collection of essays Invisible Author, in which she reflects on writing her autobiography Remake (1996). Presented by her publisher as ‘an autobiographical novel’, Remake was only able to be written, Brooke-Rose recounts, after she found the ‘constraint […] needed’, namely: ‘to scrap all personal pronouns and all possessive adjectives.’ In doing so, Brooke-Rose extended a mode of writing which has since been referred to as ‘autofiction in the third person’ and, in her last published work Life, End Of (2006), Brooke-Rose continued to make use of autofictional constraints;1 referring to its author as ‘the old lady’, the narrative reflects on experiments undertaken in writing whilst giving the reader a glimpse into a daily life constrained by a failing physicality. In the opening pages, Brooke-Rose draws attention to the process of unlearning that is necessary now in order to be able to get from bedroom to bathroom:
Standing, on its own, without support somewhere, causes a tidal wave of nothingness in the head and a limping rush to the nearest armchair or bed. That means that nothing, nothing at all, no action or gesture, can now be done with two hands, if standing. That’s a lot of gestures to unlearn.
Standing, on its own, without support somewhere, causes a tidal wave of nothingness in the head and a limping rush to the nearest armchair or bed. That means that nothing, nothing at all, no action or gesture, can now be done with two hands, if standing. That’s a lot of gestures to unlearn. (7)
This presentation suggests that the concept of unlearning might be a useful way in to interrogate Brooke-Rose’s contributions to both autofictional and autotheoretical genres. Throughout her oeuvre, from her most radically experimental novel Thru (1975) which exposes much of (post-)structuralist thought as phallogocentric, to her - in many ways autotheoretical - collection of essays Stories, Theories, Things (1991) in which she takes the reader on a crash course of post-war French literary theory, to her late autobiographical fictions in which she reflects on narratological theories of narrating the self, Brooke-Rose employs, engages with and questions literary theory as a discipline and as a method. For Brooke-Rose, the realm of literary theory is not confined to the study of text; recognising that theory, just like fiction, partakes in the creation of the world around us, her work illustrates that the stakes of engaging with literary theory are high.
Responding to Brooke-Rose’s plea that ‘what is needed is the present tense, but without the first person’, this creative-critical contribution will adopt Brooke-Rose’s constraint used in her autofictional works of writing in the third person without personal pronouns or possessive adjectives. Doing so, it will explore in what ways Brooke-Rose unlearned conventional ways of telling and theorising stories in order to narrate her own life history and ask what is at stake in doing so. At the same time, interested in unlearning academic conventions to acknowledge and explore the subjective nature of the act of research (in stark contrast perhaps to Brooke-Rose’s desire to ‘drop subjectivity’ but retain ‘immediacy and distance’ through the adoption of this literary constraint), I will explore my own involvement in Brooke-Rose’s life, experimenting with Brooke-Rose’s writing method to attempt to acknowledge the body in the archive, the subjective thoughts, emotions and projections of the researcher.
[1] See Lorna Martens, ‘Autofiction in the Third Person, with a Reading of Christine Brooke-Rose’s Remake’ in Autofiction in English, edited by Hywel Dix (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 49-64.
Using Yann Martel’s Beatrice and Virgil as a case study, this paper investigates a range of under-theorised forms of genre usage in contemporary literature, highlighting their critical role in challenging hegemonic discourses.
Most genre theoretical works focus exclusively on genre attribution—the question of how a literary text should be classified. This focus, I argue, overlooks the fact that literary texts often evoke both literary and non-literary genres in ways that have little to do with classification—for example, through the insertion of text composites or the partial projection of generic structures onto select parts of the fictional world. However, these generic evocations often play a vital discursive role within the narrative. Indeed, as I seek to show, texts such as Beatrice and Virgil engage in meta-generic critique by foregrounding the interaction between generic structures, social institutions, and specific worldviews.
In Beatrice and Virgil, Martel’s protagonist (and fictional twin), the writer Henry, devises a new way to address the trauma of the Holocaust. He combines an essay and a novel in a flipbook format, juxtaposing two very different genres to provoke both philosophical reflection and emotional response. His failure to get the project published attests to the enduring institutional separation between fact and fiction—or, in literary industry terms, fiction and nonfiction, which persists despite the increasing challenges to the binary described by Linda Hutcheon (The Poetics of Postmodernism). Indeed, the Holocaust serves as a kind of litmus test for this genre boundary within Martel’s story. Henry’s encounter with a taxidermist-turned-writer, who uses allegory and existentialist drama to approach the Holocaust, profoundly alters his perspective. Following the taxidermist’s self-immolation, Henry appropriates the former’s writing, inserting parts of the remembered play into his “factual memoir”, a more intricate and viable combination of fictional and nonfictional genres than his flipbook idea. On the narrative level, the strange world of the taxidermist’s play profoundly alters the protagonist’s perspective on his mentee and his animals. On the meta-narrative level, the novel’s composite structure compels the reader to consider how genre shapes our thinking about complex issues like genocide, dehumanisation, and the power and limits of language (cf. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition).
By analysing the various forms and functions of genre usage in Beatrice and Virgil, this paper seeks to highlight how contemporary literature explores what I call “the world-shaping power of genre” (Allen GenReVisions), through showing that the kinds of stories we tell ourselves and each other profoundly affect our conceptions of reality.
This paper proposes a methodological framework for analysing how self-reflexive narrative strategies (e.g. metanarration, intertextual references, framing devices, reader address) interact with genre conventions in 21st-century Black British women’s literature. In our paper, we explore how such strategies may make legible the ways that authorship, reader expectation, and the literary market shape and are shaped by generic categories. Our main argument is that, by modelling a self-conscious, genre-reflexive reading strategy for the reader, genre reflexivity in these novels teaches readers “how to read” (Gass qtd. in Jablon 177). Moreover, based on a cognitive and reader-centred understanding of genre (see Sinding, Allen), we contend that self-reflexivity in contemporary novels facilitates generic change, i.e. the development of existing genres and the formation of new ones.
The paper deploys the term self-reflexivity when a work refers to (an aspect of) itself or the semiotic system it belongs to in such a way that it creates additional “discursive meaning” (Wolf 19; e.g. intertextual references to Snow White contribute to the characterization of a stepmother in a contemporary novel). A self-reflexive reference then becomes metareferential when it establishes a logical difference between an object-level and a meta-level (as, for instance, frame narratives or metalepses do) and elicits in recipients a “meta-awareness” of a narrative’s fictional (“in the sense of artificial and ‘invented’”) status (Wolf 31). Even though scholars have already noted that genre frequently is an object of metareferential reflection in novels, few have proposed a comprehensive theory of how the category of genre interacts with self-reflexivity and metareference.
This paper examines how self-reflexivity and metafiction come to function as a “catalyst” for generic change by focusing on the cultural and political affordances of the self-reflexive treatment of genre in contemporary novels. Building on previous explorations of the role of metafiction to facilitate “genre memory” and/or “genre critique” (Hauthal 2013; see also Nadj 2006, Nünning et al. 2006, Niederhoff 2022), we are especially interested in the processes of genre development and the formation of new genres. In a first step, our inquiry sets out by distinguishing between “genre-reflexive” and “meta-generic” references: while the former designate references to altergeneric categories (e.g. a discussion of Greek tragedy in a contemporary travel novel set in Greece), we suggest to use the latter to describe references which actualise the genre they refer to in the text (e.g. a narrator announcing that readers are reading their diary). In a second step, we will illustrate the productivity of this distinction by comparing different case studies.
Drawing on examples from a broader corpus of 21st-century metafiction by Black British female writers, these case studies demonstrate the increasing popularity of metafictional novels beyond the historiographic kind and the contemporary tendency to combine metafiction with a pointed political message concerning readers’ expectations, the literary
canon or the cultural and economic forces that shape both individual authorship and the literary market at large. Reading these novels and their intertexts through the lens of Mecca Jamilah Sullivan’s understanding of how a Black queer feminist “poetics of difference” (see also bell hooks “Postmodern Blackness”) translates into formal narrative experiment, we observe that many do not only function as agents of generic change, but also make the metalevel process of genre development or genre formation part of the narrative by self-consciously performing their generic similarity and difference on the page. By foregrounding usually latent processes of recognizing and blending of genre conventions, we argue, they uncover the performative actualization of genre during the reading process (Allen 48) and urge readers to actively question the cultural and political affordances of generic legacies while interacting with the novel in front of them as a constructed, mediated and marketed textual artefact. Thus, through their self-reflexive treatment of genre, the novels under scrutiny instill in readers a post-postmodern sense of “new responsibility” (Shaw & Upstone 2021) for the way they read as well as for the generic legacies through which we “narrativize” our experience of the world.
Works cited:
Allen, Martina. GenReVisions Genre Experimentation and World-Construction in Contemporary Anglophone Literature. Universitaetsverlag Winter, 2020.
hooks, bell. “Postmodern Blackness”. Postmodernism and the Contemporary Novel: A Reader, Edinburgh University Press, 2002, pp. 421-428. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781474471312-034.
Hauthal, Janine. ‘Metaization and Self-Reflexivity as Catalysts for Genre Development: Genre Memory and Genre Critique in Novelistic Meta-Genres’. The Cultural Dynamics of Generic Change in Contemporary Fiction, edited by Michael Basseler et al., Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2013, pp. 81–114.
Jablon, Madelyn. Black Metafiction: Self-Consciousness in African American Literature. University of Iowa Press, 1999.
Nadj, Julijana. Die fiktionale Metabiographie: Gattungsgedächtnis und Gattungskritik in einem neuen Genre der englischsprachigen Erzählliteratur: Theorie, Analysemodell, Modellinterpretationen. WVT, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2006.
Niederhoff, Burkhard. ‘An Introduction to Metagenre with a Postscript on the Journey from Comedy to Tragedy in E. M. Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread’. Connotations - A Journal for Critical Debate, 1.0, application/pdf, vol. E-ISSN 2626-8183, 2022, pp. 1–32. DOI.org (Datacite), https://doi.org/10.25623/CONN031-NIEDERHOFF-1.
Nünning, Ansgar, Marion Gymnich, and Roy Sommer, eds. Literature and memory: theoretical paradigms, genres, functions. Francke, 2006.
Sinding, Michael. ‘“Genera Mixta”: Conceptual Blending and Mixed Genres in “Ulysses”’.
New Literary History, vol. 36, no. 4, 2005, pp. 589–619.
Sullivan, Mecca Jamilah. The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora. University of Illinois Press, 2021.
Wolf, Werner, editor. Metareference across Media: Theory and Case Studies. Rodopi, 2009.
Ten years after the publication of the influential study Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015), Caroline Levine will be interviewed about the workshop’s central topic: the role of form(s) in the process of novelistic generic change. According to Levine’s Forms, genres and forms have a different degree of historical specificity and “a different relation to context” and interpretation (Forms 13). Pursuing this line of thought, the interview will further explore questions about the nature and practical use of analytical categories like ‘genre’, ‘form’, ‘mode’ and ‘discourse’.
After a 20-minute interview which will ponder some of the general theoretical challenges and possible merits of a new-formalist approach to genre analysis, the floor will be opened for further questions and debate. The hybrid session offers participants the chance to return to the pertinent questions about genre development raised throughout the day and will conclude the workshop.