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SoSe 16: Addicted to Plot: Genre Fiction After the Literary/Genre Divide

James Dorson

Comments

The literary critic Edmund Wilson once described detective fiction as “a habit-forming drug for which its addicts will fight like tigers.” Such has long been the view of genre fiction as distinct from literary fiction. Being plot driven instead of character or theme driven, genre fiction has often been dismissed as the fast food of literature—cheap and tasty, but bad for you—and has long ranked at the very bottom of literary hierarchies. However, with the recent intrusion of high-status literary writers into the popular pleasures of genre fiction, the distinction between the two has become tenuous. In this class, we will take the new light shed on genre fiction from this most recent shaking up of the highbrow/lowbrow divide as an opportunity to reread classics in two major genres: mystery and science fiction. In reading prominent examples from both genres, we will examine their mid-nineteenth-century rise as distinctive popular forms, and trace the development of their conventions over almost two centuries. We will analyze what makes their plots ‘addictive,’ and explore how genre organizes discourse and social knowledge. And we will ask how the market and literary taste shape the expectations and classification of genre. In the last part of the class, we will read two recent examples of texts that break down the distinction between literary and genre fiction, and ask how and to what effect they do so. The reading material for the class includes stories and novels by Edgar Allan Poe, Anna Katherine Green, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Dashiell Hammett, Chester Himes, Philip K. Dick, Octavia Butler, Ursula LeGuin, Cormac McCarthy, and Michael Chabon or Emily St. John Mandel (to be decided in class). close

12 Class schedule

Regular appointments

Thu, 12:00 - 14:00 12 Class schedule

Thu, 2016-04-21 12:00 - 14:00

Lecturers:
Prof. Dr. James Dorson