Literary Genre Fiction
ENG 348W: Contemporary Literature
Emory University, Fall 2022
Everyone loves a good genre story. Or, depending on your aesthetic preferences, loves to hate it. From science fiction, westerns, horror, romance, historical fiction, thrillers, to fantasy—not to mention their many subgenres and hybridizations—the genre hunger of mass culture has been long understood in opposition to the aesthetic seriousness of art and high literary endeavors. But this either/or, high/low, all or nothing dynamic has been changing dramatically since at least the 1980s. In American fiction, we have seen a steady rise in what we might call “literary” genre fiction, or literature with clear literary ambitions that nonetheless engages with popular, and commercially successful, generic registers.
Literary genre fiction has major implications for how fiction is produced, circulated, consumed, and critiqued. This course introduces you to some key precursors and exemplars of this literary development. At the same time, it explores a selection of genre criticism to help you intervene in conversations about contemporary aesthetics, literary institutions, and cultural politics. Traversing literary and socio-political atmospheres of the 1980s to the present, we will see how genres resonate across the decades and what new meanings and uses become attached to them. Key texts include novels like Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian (1985), Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), Ling Ma’s Severance (2018), Percival Everett’s The Trees (2021); James Tynion IV’s groundbreaking comic The Department of Truth (2020 –); and stories from William Gibson’s Burning Chrome (1982), and Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties (2017).
To better grasp how popular genres permeate literary culture, this course draws from critical idioms like Marxist literary studies, literary sociology, ethnic studies, and race critique. We will pay attention to how genre fiction has helped emerging artists break into publishing while also speaking to socio-political dilemmas like the lasting effects of slavery, settler colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, white supremacy, and climate change. And as the awkward scare quotes in the phrase “‘literary’ genre” signals, we will investigate how we assign aesthetic value in the first place.
