Genre-Bending Literary Fiction and the Pleasure of Immersion in Fictional Worlds
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Jeremy Rosen
Jeremy Rosen is Associate Professor of English at the University of Utah. He teaches and writes about contemporary fiction, genre, literary institutions, and the blurry line between literary and popular culture. His work has appeared inASAP/J, Contemporary Literature, New Literary History , andPost45. His first book,Minor Characters Have Their Day: Genre in the Contemporary Literary Marketplace , was published in 2016, with Columbia University Press. His second book,Genre Bending: The Plasticity of Form in Contemporary Literary Fiction , will be published by Stanford University Press in 2025.
Abstract
Many commentators have remarked on the prominent “genre turn” in contemporary Anglophone literary fiction: the boom in prestigious writers adopting the putatively “low brow” genres that flourished in popular fiction fields and the marketplace in the twentieth century. This essay argues that one major driving force behind “the genre turn” is literary writers’ renewed attunement to the pleasure of immersion in fictional worlds. The essay demonstrates that literary writers have paid tribute to this pleasure in interviews and their nonfiction writing, and by representing scenes that depict such pleasures in their fiction. At the same time, as literary writers retain perennial, modernist-inherited commitments to formal innovation and making visible the process of signification, I argue that their fictions often laud immersion without fully giving themselves over to immersiveness, extending a tension between the aesthetics of high cultural literary production and that of mass-market reception.
Abstract
Many commentators have remarked on the prominent “genre turn” in contemporary Anglophone literary fiction: the boom in prestigious writers adopting the putatively “low brow” genres that flourished in popular fiction fields and the marketplace in the twentieth century. This essay argues that one major driving force behind “the genre turn” is literary writers’ renewed attunement to the pleasure of immersion in fictional worlds. The essay demonstrates that literary writers have paid tribute to this pleasure in interviews and their nonfiction writing, and by representing scenes that depict such pleasures in their fiction. At the same time, as literary writers retain perennial, modernist-inherited commitments to formal innovation and making visible the process of signification, I argue that their fictions often laud immersion without fully giving themselves over to immersiveness, extending a tension between the aesthetics of high cultural literary production and that of mass-market reception.
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Acknowledgments
- Table of Contents VII
- Introduction: Forms of Narrative Continuation 1
- Continuation and the Novel: Open Context and the Problem of Closure 15
- Clotels: Bad Beginnings, Instructive Continuations 31
- “He Keeps Happening”: Character and Situation in W. D. Howells’s A Modern Instance 61
- Serial Singularity: Reading for the Project Form in the Business Romance 83
- Genre-Bending Literary Fiction and the Pleasure of Immersion in Fictional Worlds 113
- The Eternal Draft: Authorial Revision and Philip Roth’s Construction of the Oeuvre 141
- Nicole Krauss’s To Be a Man: Implications of Continuity in the Jewish American Short Story Collection 165
- Ali Smith and the Unfinished Book: Novels, Middles, and Serialization in an Electronic Age 197
- Of Masks and Men: Percival Everett’s James 221
- Eclogue: The End of History in Verse (Continued) 247
- Shakespeare, Ibsen, and the Staged Future of Robots 267
- The Remake as Fetish Art: On Gus Van Sant’s Psycho and Other Psychos 293
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Acknowledgments
- Table of Contents VII
- Introduction: Forms of Narrative Continuation 1
- Continuation and the Novel: Open Context and the Problem of Closure 15
- Clotels: Bad Beginnings, Instructive Continuations 31
- “He Keeps Happening”: Character and Situation in W. D. Howells’s A Modern Instance 61
- Serial Singularity: Reading for the Project Form in the Business Romance 83
- Genre-Bending Literary Fiction and the Pleasure of Immersion in Fictional Worlds 113
- The Eternal Draft: Authorial Revision and Philip Roth’s Construction of the Oeuvre 141
- Nicole Krauss’s To Be a Man: Implications of Continuity in the Jewish American Short Story Collection 165
- Ali Smith and the Unfinished Book: Novels, Middles, and Serialization in an Electronic Age 197
- Of Masks and Men: Percival Everett’s James 221
- Eclogue: The End of History in Verse (Continued) 247
- Shakespeare, Ibsen, and the Staged Future of Robots 267
- The Remake as Fetish Art: On Gus Van Sant’s Psycho and Other Psychos 293
