Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Turning point
Robert Eaglestone
Contemporary fiction in the academy: towards a manifesto
Textual Practice
When reading contemporary fiction, what differentiates a geek or a journalist or member of a reading group from an academic? They all read,
think, and respond to contemporary novels in ways analogous to academics. Geeks, who have reclaimed this once unkind word, display what
we might call a very good subject knowledge and are involved in reproducing their field through informal modes of teaching, recommendations,
and so on; they have specialist publications (fanzines and webzines) and
their own forms of writing (fanfiction, reviews, and blogs) with their
own specialised vocabulary; they have prizes (for example, science fiction
fans in the UK have the Clarke awards). Journalists are also (often)
highly knowledgeable about the business side of literary production;
again, they have their own genre of writing and publication; and they
are sometimes quite powerful people in the world of cultural capital and
impact. Reading groups have their own publications (magazines and webpages aimed specifically at them), their own habits, literary festivals, and so
on, and display their own knowledge of literature. And, of course, all these
people, like we academics, can read carefully and closely.
This question about expertise, about the difference between knowledge inside and outside the academy, is rightly asked across the discipline
of literary studies: however, in the study of contemporary fiction, the question is put at its most acute. As Ben Knights argued, in his now seminal
article, in our discipline, Literary studies or English, there is a
particular problem to be faced, since the subject matter and discourse
are actually continuous with everyday cultural activity: if you are to
lay claim to specialism, you have to find ways of marking off your
activity from what readers do anyway (talk about books, plays or
films), or day-to-day metalinguistic activity (talk about meanings).
If people are discussing Emmerdale or Harry Potter on the train,
the status of specialist discussion is obviously fraught.1
Knights points out that this is not a new problem. It was faced in the creation of English as a discipline in the first half of the last century and discussed
widely: Knights cites the Newbolt report, for example. The answer given then
lay in the idea of a professionalisation of the discipline which would create an
impermeable barrier between different forms of discourses about literature:
to create a new domain of educational knowledge necessitates drawing a
boundary around the . . . subject, and this in turn has obvious implications
for the identity of the learner.2 (Knights implication is that the core of the
Leavis/Scrutiny moment and the moment of theory in the second half of
the century, for all their differences, were alike in their desire to create an
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For myself, I neither want to be a glorified journalist or modern antiquarian, nor simply a generic critic reproducing basic critical gestures. In order
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to avoid these risks, then, we need to work out what the problems in the
field are and face them, to develop at least a disesnsus. So, what are the problems? Everyday problems give us clues as to what the larger real problems are. Here I just touch on nine very, very briefly.
Period
I alluded to this earlier. In one way, we are different from some periods of
study which do not have fixed end dates (the long eighteenth century)
because we end in the now, this minute. But where do we begin? Traditionally, literary history is dated by watershed historical moments. In
the case of just the UK, might this be 1945, 1979, or 1997? Or some
other date (1963/Beatles/Lady Chatterley ban/sexual intercourse)? But
even in Western Europe, there are differences: in Spain, the contemporary
might begin with the death of Franco in 1975 and in Germany, with the end
of the cold war in 1989. Outside of Europe things are very different again:
contemporary might mean the end of the USSR in 1991 in Russia or Independence from Britain in 1947 in India. Different communities have difference senses of when they are living and when the current moment began.
Even the years given here are CE: there are other calendars (and why should,
say the year 2000 mark anything literary?). Periodisation itself is a suspect
gesture. In any case, it might seem odd to mark a literary period with an
extra-literary event, however momentous. It takes time for historical
events to move through into the literature, like the corpse in the glacier
in Sebalds The Emigrants, and for the literature to make historical events
intelligible. Instead, perhaps the contemporary might mark the end of a
previous literary age: the contemporary comes after modernism, perhaps,
or postmodernism. Then again, did everywhere have modernism? And
what did that consist of? It might be better to take a literary event as the
beginning the contemporary. Perhaps contemporary fiction begins with
Salman Rushdies Midnights Children (1981). This novel was not only a
huge international success the first global novel but also represented
the flourishing of postmodernism and was central in introducing new ideas
about memory, national identity, suffering, joy, about history, and about
writing itself which much contemporary fiction is still exploring.
This everyday problem about dates opens up to a deeper and more
complex problem. A period is not just about dates, the very idea of a
period, the process of periodisation implies a spirit of the age, a
theme, perhaps even a telos. What the spirit of the age is, or even if
such a thing could exist, is a topic on which no one will easily agree,
and yet this question however, vaguely formulated and complex is a
central part of being a critic of contemporary fiction. This problem also
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raises in an acute way a general critical problem about location in space and
in time. Put very crudely: what seems of the past for a graduate student of
25 seems oddly contemporary for an academic of 50 (a question of duration, perhaps, or of the difference between academic and living
history). Again, this is different to other areas of the field: Wordsworth
is, in one commonplace sense, contemporary to nobody alive: David
Eggers is. I am not sure there is any easy answer to this problem, but it
is real and does bear on critical work. Other disciplines that study the contemporary have similar problems.5 (My rough answer to this problem of
dates stems from but is not only a pedagogic concern: it seems odd
to be teaching a novel as contemporary to 20-year-old students whose
parents had not even met when it was published. My rule of thumb is
that the contemporary is the last ten years. But even this rough idea
shows how senses of age are shaped by pressing present concerns).
Archive
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Authors
Contemporary authorship is a complex matter. For reasons to do with marketing authors are more and more prominent and are taken as a font of
authority or as a celebrity. The temptation to stop trying to work out
what a book thinks and instead turn to what an author says is very
strong, inside and outside the academy, especially when the author is in
front of you. At the same time, the standard author is dead argument
about intention looks more and more hokey. Again, this everyday issue
suggests that our ideas about authorship need reworking around ideas of
intentionality and the author-function: the seminal essays by Barthes
and Foucault need updating (Kaye Mitchells work on intentionality has
begun to do this).6 I think we can learn a great deal about what authors
can and cannot do from the fantastic and reassuringly lovely boom in creative writing. Creative writing has both introduced the discipline to new
questions and asked older questions in new and challenging ways.
Globalisation
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there are still traditions that exist and flourish Scottish experimental
writing, for example but these are better understood as tracing a line
of flight or a path of descent (as novelists choose their own predecessors)
rather than embodying a national tradition. This is not a question simply
of provincialising Europe as Dipesh Chakrabarty might put it, but of
reconceiving the world and the world of the novel. Moreover, the fact
that more novels are translated into and from English than any other
language is no longer simply a colonial hangover but like so much in the
contemporary world, calls for a fuller theoretical investigation.
Genre
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limits are why David Shields writes that genre is a minimum security
prison.7 This question can be looked at through a sort of thought experiment: in 2005, Kazio Ishigorus novel Never Let me go was shortlisted for
both the UKs serious fiction Prize, the Booker, and the UKs science fiction
prize, the Clarke Awards, because it featured a staple of science fiction, the
idea of clones.8 However, we cannot imagine the opposite: that is, we
cannot imagine a non-Science fiction novel with absolutely no clones
or robots or spaceships or hair that photosynthesises or anything typical of
science fiction novels being shortlisted for a Science Fiction prize precisely
because it has none of those things. Of course, genre is not made up by
awards, but this illustrates a key idea about the limits of genre fiction.
But what limits does serious fiction have? If it can say anything, do
anything in writing, then it has no limits. To imply that serious fiction is a
genre of writing is, wrongly, to limit its possibilities in both its creation and
its understanding. If fiction can say anything, then genre fiction is limited.
This is not to say it is bad or good, or better or less well written or less valuable or that it cannot deal with serious social or personal issues, nor to say
that all literary fiction is good (some is dull, uninspiring, and clicheridden), but it is to say that genre fiction is restricted. Ironically, it is
restricted by precisely those things that people like about it (killer robots
or grim detectives with nothing but whisky in their fridges etc.). Moreover,
of course, because of its popularity, genre fiction has a wider social reach
than unrestricted fiction. The distinction between serious and genre
fiction might be remade through a distinction between open, unrestricted
fiction, and closed, restricted fiction. Open fiction is what used to be
called literary fiction, able to cover anything, in any form. Closed
fiction is what used to be called as genre fiction, shaped by its own selfchosen restrictions.
Two linked problems. Issues of literary judgement and value are now integral to the discipline of literary studies as problems, rather than sensibilities
to be refined. However, to express explicitly a value judgement in a formal
setting a journal article or a conference paper is almost taboo. In other
sub-fields in the discipline, this taboo can be avoided because topics are, in
the main, established: there is such a scholarly weight behind Milton that
Miltonists do not need to claim he is a genius. However, in contemporary
fiction, because we judge all the time which novels to read, research and
teach, to avoid confronting issues of value is an intellectual contortion.
Indeed, worse, it is an affectation. While formally in papers and articles
expressing judgements is taboo, informally, in corridors and over coffee
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Finally, there is the issue of form. Form and formal innovation is that which
makes contemporary fiction contemporary (Nathalie Sarrautes baton of
innovation passing from one generation to another). Is there here a sign of
some possible consensus? There seem to be three broad linked areas of
formal innovation in the contemporary novel. The first is a retreat from
the extreme playfulness of postmodernism and the emphasis on textuality
and a turn to a concern with narrative. This, however, is not a return to a
pre-postmodernism because these writers bring a knowledge of postmodernism and its rhetorics with them but decline to use them as freely. David
Mitchells Cloud Atlas is an example here, as are Jonathan Franzens novels,
which are more strictly realist. If it was not too silly a word (it is) we
could call this post-postmodern. Second, there is a return to a sort of
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Conclusion
The study of contemporary fiction is, oddly, rather a new sub-discipline or,
perhaps, it is one that is constantly renewing itself and is currently in the
early stages of a new incarnation. There have been a range of recent conferences taking it as their theme. Brand new journals have appeared (I am
thinking of the excellent Alluvium, edited by Caroline Edwards and Martin
Paul Eve, and of C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings edited by
Katy Shaw and Deborah Philips, and, at a close tangent, of The White
Review). I suggested that disciplines are shaped by questions, and that
they reach maturity when they question their own questions. However,
the study of contemporary fiction does not even know what its questions
are despite the unique complications it faces in relation to periodisation,
the archive, authorship, the business of fiction, globalisation, genre,
value judgements, and form. The risks of not facing up to these issues in
the study of contemporary fiction are that we become modern antiquarians, picking oddities that pique our interest to display to the public, or
generic critics, showing off our honed senses with no focus on the
nature of the contemporary. To avoid these alternatives, critics of contemporary fiction face a double but interlinked task: to engage with contemporary fiction and simultaneously to develop new ways of understanding
it. These new ways need to create not communal answers but rough
fields of consensus and dissensus around, at least, the problems I have
suggested. Then we will be able to live up to the critical task we seem to
have been set: in Frank Kermodes subtle words, it is not expected of
critics as it is of novelists and poets that they should help us to make
sense of our lives; they are bound only to the attempt the lesser feat of
making sense of the ways in which we try to make sense of our lives.9
University of London
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Notes
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