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The Rise of the Fragmentary Essay-Novel: Towards a Poetics and Contextualization of an Emerging Hybrid Genre in the Digital Age

  • Ansgar Nünning EMAIL logo und Alexander Scherr
Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 13. September 2018
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Anglia
Aus der Zeitschrift Anglia Band 136 Heft 3

Abstract

This contribution introduces the ‘fragmentary essay-novel’ in terms of an emerging hybrid genre within the experimental branch of contemporary Anglophone literature. Reading David Shields’s manifesto Reality Hunger (2010) as a poetics which literally ‘essays’ a “path for the novel” (Smith 2008: n. pag.) in the early 21st-century, it also discusses Tom McCarthy’s recent work Satin Island (2015) as a prime representative of the fragmentary essay-novel. Both Shields’s and McCarthy’s texts are contextualized and framed as aesthetic responses to the digital age, especially to the implications that processes of digitization have for our shifting understanding of ‘reality’, ‘authenticity’, ‘literature’, ‘reading’, and ‘authorship’. Special attention will be given to the question of how the organization of knowledge in digital networks affects the epistemological situation of the novelist and the human individual. In addition to putting the essay-novel on the map of contemporary fiction, we aim to raise awareness of the tradition and general significance of this unduly neglected genre.

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Published Online: 2018-09-13
Published in Print: 2018-09-06

© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Artikel in diesem Heft

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Frontmatter
  3. Articles
  4. Trans*textuality in William Shakespeare’s Othello: Italian, West African, and English Encounters
  5. Ways of Witnessing: Journalism vs. Fiction in The Quiet American and El pintor de batallas
  6. Art, Nature and the Negotiation of Memory in J. L. Carr’s A Month in the Country
  7. Sonic Borderscapes: Popular Music, Pirate Radio, and Belonging in Black British Writing in the 1990s
  8. The Rise of the Fragmentary Essay-Novel: Towards a Poetics and Contextualization of an Emerging Hybrid Genre in the Digital Age
  9. Transmodern Motion or the Rhizomatic Updated in In a Strange Room, “Take me to Church” and Babel
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