Generic hybridity in late twentieth-century theory and narrative

Abstract

Twentieth-century narrative has become particularly adept at merging several genres within a single text, making it harder to construct a conventional poetics for the contemporary novel, whose only universally acknowledged, if somewhat vague, characteristic is that it seems to be essentially 'postmodem'. What this heavily loaded term refers to is often problematic because of the vast number of often diverging notions encompassed within its ever-expanding boundaries. It is precisely this idea of boundaries which not only expand, but become blurred, which is central to an understanding of generic hybridity. This is explored further in the thesis, where the concerns of profundity and artistic value are brought together with readability (aspects which had previously been thought to be mutually exclusive) in texts of "theoretical fiction." Furthermore, questions regarding the possibility of theory becoming self-reflexive, following the wake of self-reflexivity in fiction, provide tantalising grounds for research-where are we going to next, if we go beyond a-genericity? The first chapter considers the differences between classical, traditional and essentialist genre theories and the poststructuralist approach to genre, analysing the value of genre as a category and expounding the main concepts of generic hybridity. It then discusses the arguable status of a contemporary pragmatic approach to genre which does not support the notion of a hybrid, and proposes the counterargument in favour of the hybrid. The new strengths of fictional writing described by Christine Brooke-Rose in her paper Eximplosions will be used to justify the use of hybrid texts; while the desire for narrative freedom in the fragmentary writing of Roland Barthes will exemplify how hybrid texts work, suggesting the next logical step is through the further development of theoretical fiction. The second chapter assesses the notions and reasons behind a conceptualisation of the hybrid text. The blurred features of generic hybrids are discussed in terms of theoretical fiction, and finally notions ofhybridity in Jacques Derrida's The Law of Genre are discussed. The third chapter examines how hybrids are generated through text-genre interrelations and consider whether they are amenable to classification. In the second half of the chapter, the hybrid nature of Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes and How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton are discussed. The fourth chapter assesses the writing of Maurice Blanchot. It suggests that rather than striving to achieve a conflictual setting which allows his view of the discourse of literature to come into being, his writings start from the premise of a theoretical-fictive hybrid and by means of his notions on death and the desubjectivity of the text, the image we get of the subject is displaced into the neuter position of elsewhere - the possibilities of the hybrid suddenly become "impossible" in a text which transcends genre altogether to become ageneric. The fifth chapter outlines the hybrid nature of Maurice Blanchot's text The Madness of the Day in the light of Jacques Derrida's concepts of generic activity in The Law of Genre, and gives evidence of the complexity of Blanchot's work and the move towards a-genericity. Finally, the conclusion will attempt to pre-empt the reader's possible objections to certain aspects concerning genre, hybridity and the direction which a-genericity is taking.