{"id":156970,"date":"2024-08-17T22:04:22","date_gmt":"2024-08-18T06:04:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=156970"},"modified":"2024-08-17T09:28:52","modified_gmt":"2024-08-17T17:28:52","slug":"everything-and-less-the-novel-in-the-age-of-amazon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=156970","title":{"rendered":"Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mark McGurl writes in this 2021 book<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n* all fiction is genre fiction in that it caters to a generic desire.<\/p>\n

* With its by – all – accounts absolute requirement of a happy ending for it to even receive recognition as a member of the genre by its devotees, the romance\u2019s unforgivable sin is that it flagrantly satisfies the \u201cimaginative needs of the community”… What other genres do indirectly, or even \u201ccritically,\u201d it does shamelessly in the open and in resourcefully new ways.<\/p>\n

From Pamela to the present, the novel in the English – speaking world has developed alongside and within a capitalist economy increasingly oriented toward consumer enjoyment and, if only implicitly, has been telling the story of that economy the whole time. What we now label the \u201cromance\u201d novel is the reflexive expression of the novel\u2019s original appeal: not only is it written for the satisfaction of the imaginative needs of the reader, but it is about that satisfaction in the figure of the heroine and her mate, who always get what they want, and who in getting what they want reassure their readers of the legitimacy and continuity of the social order.<\/p>\n

* Entering through the eyes as a succession of words, the novel is transformed into a series of affectively charged mental images of people and places.<\/p>\n

* It would be for Norman Holland, whose classic Dynamics of Literary Response (1968) argues that the better part of what we do when we read is to activate emotional resonances between the text and our unacknowledged fantasies of return to pre – oedipal pleasures.<\/p>\n

In his view, the conferral of interpretive meaning on the literary text is a form of defense against the unruliness and unspeakability of those pleasures, which are nonetheless the text\u2019s primary raison d\u2019\u00eatre and source of generic appeal. In this sense, and never more so than when it is utterly obscene \u201cadult entertainment,\u201d all literature is children\u2019s literature at its core.<\/p>\n

* In the mostly unconscious act of introjection, which converts words into psychic events, the reader finds (or feels) analogies between the text\u2019s fantasy material and their own. I have added an additional \u201cbasement\u201d level, representing something like the Lacanian or Lovecraftian Real \u2014 that is, the substratum of utter indifference to human well – being from which literary and all other forms of fantasizing are obsessively repeated attempts to recover. The literary text is in this sense a therapeutic processing of that indifference as a pleasurable sensation of narrative meaning, and each distinct genre a quasi – algorithmic form of doing so. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mark McGurl writes in this 2021 book: * all fiction is genre fiction in that it caters to a generic desire. * With its by – all – accounts absolute requirement of a happy ending for it to even receive … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29759],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-156970","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-amazon"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t