Paraliterature
The postmodernisms have, in fact, been fascinated precisely by this whole “degraded” landscape of schlock and kitsch, of TV series and Reader's Digest, of advertising and motels, of the late show and the grade-B Hollywood film, of so-called paraliterature, with its airport paperback categories of the gothic and the romance, the popular biography, the murder mystery, and the science fiction or fantasy novel: materials they no longer simply “quote” as a Joyce or a Mahler might have done, but incorporate into their very substance. --Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1984) - Fredric Jameson * Source: New Left Review 146, 1984, pp. 53—92
Parents: postmodernism - literature
Related: comics - dime novels - escapist fiction - fiction - genre fiction - genre - low culture - literature - men's magazines - paracinema - popular fiction - pulp fiction
By country stationsroman (NL) - dime novels (USA) - Groschenroman (DE) - penny dreadful (UK) - romans de gare (FR)
The genres of paraliterature action-adventure - crime - detective - erotica - fantasy - horror - mystery - romance - science fiction - thriller - western
Connotations: bad taste
Compare with: classic novels - high culture - Western canon
Definition
Paraliterature is a term for genre literature, such as science fiction, pulp fiction and comic books, that is not considered literary fiction by mainstream literary standards. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraliterature [Aug 2005]
Paraliterary and paraliterature
Krauss coined the term paraliterary and Jameson the term paraliterature. However, they used it to denote different concepts. With paraliterary, Krauss denotes philosophy that can be read as literature (of which Deleuze is my favourite). With paraliterature, Jameson denotes that literature which became popular after postmodernism dissolved the borders between high and low literature.
Quoting from Krauss:
If one of the tenets of modernist literature had been the creation of a work that would force reflection on the conditions of its own construction, that would insist on reading as a much more consciously critical act, then it is not surprising that the medium of a postmodernist literature should be the critical text wrought into a paraliterary form. And what is clear is that Barthes and Derrida are the writers, not the critics, that students now read. --Rosalind Krauss (1980, 40) quoted in Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (1980) - Linda Hutcheon
Quoting from Jameson:
The postmodernisms have, in fact, been fascinated precisely by this whole “degraded” landscape of schlock and kitsch, of TV series and Reader's Digest, of advertising and motels, of the late show and the grade-B Hollywood film, of so-called paraliterature. (Jameson: 1984)
See also: Rosalind Krauss - Fredric Jameson - paraliterature
Paradoxa literary journal
Very nice set of mini-essays which came with the 1997 launch of literary journal Paradoxa concerned with paraliterature (a term coined by Fredric Jameson in 1984) can be found here.
Contributors include Brian Attebery, Samuel Delany, John Huntington, David Ketterer, Ursula K. LeGuin, Jean Marigny, Patrick McCarthy, Michael Moorcock, David Pringle, Franz Rottensteiner, David Samuelson, Vivian Sobchack, C.W. Sullivan III, Takayuki Tatsumi, Keyan Tomaselli, Donald M. Hassler, Charles Nicol, Pamela Sargent, James Winchell and Gary K. Wolfe.
"Sf film, then, in terms of films studies, is no longer paraliterature - that is, outside the bounds of what counts as an appropriate academic object. We could say it has been "disciplined". However, one could make the same case for the progression of film in general. Intellectuals first marginalized the movies as a low-class amusement, then argued it as a legitimate art form and excluded base and popular productions, and now inclusively embrace everything cinematic from pornography to surveillance film to the Home Shopping Network as cultural objects worthy of study. Having a penchant for writing about things on the margin, I have no quarrel with the dissolution of the canonical by its very expansion - other than that I am no longer able to indulge my romantic pride in being an "outsider". This contemporary situation is not unique to film studies and it provokes me to ask how we can speak of paraliterature if we think of it as that which is uncanonized? The very existence of Para*doxa speaks to the cultural "colonization" and academic "canonization" it would challenge." --Vivian Sobchack via http://paradoxa.com/excerpts/1-1intro.htm [Aug 2006]
See also: paraliterature - SF film
Poststructuralism and the Paraliterary (1980) - Rosalind Krauss
Poststructuralism and the Paraliterary (1980) - Rosalind Krauss is published in the book below
The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (1985) - Rosalind E. Krauss [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
It would thus appear that Rosalind Krauss coined the terms paraliterary and by extension paraliterature in 1980.
See also: Rosalind Krauss
Introduction à la paralittérature (1992) - Daniel Couégnas
Introduction à la paralittérature (1992) - Daniel Couégnas [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
SDM
Tentative de cerner une notion ambiguë qui, depuis peu, sert aux universitaires de prétexte sociologique pour jeter un regard condescendant sur cette forme de culture de masse. L'auteur, du moins, connaît très bien ce dont il parle, quoique s'attachant surtout au roman-feuilleton du 19e siècle. Cependant, collection oblige, ses considérations nous sont servies dans le jargon sémiotique: ce qui fait que la narration allongée du récit devient la dilution diégétique dans l'excipient. --via Amazon.fr
link to Todorov
I would like to reserve part of this short review to respond to a response Couégnas is kind enough to offer me in the Conclusion of his volume. In an article dealing with the notion of "paraliterature" ("La paralittérature et la question des genres") where I discussed several critical approaches, I compared (maybe rather abruptly) Couégnas' position as presented in his book Introduction à la paralittérature to that of Todorov. This latter author clearly divided "literature" from "paraliterature" and sent some works to heaven and other ones to hell with enviable nonchalance. Couégnas indicates in his Conclusion that his aim has always been "to insist upon the constituent variety" of the novels and to focus on novels "of the third kind", i.e. those who "officially" belong to "paraliterature" but nonetheless show sufficient qualities to warrant critical attention.
paraliterature and paralittérature coined by Jean Tortel
I also do not subscribe to that brand of myopic egalitarianism that tends to consider all aesthetic judgment upon which to justify one's preferences to be, at best, purely optional. And I also am not one of those aficionados Couégnas talks about, who refuse "to admit that there are, in this field, novels that are less good than others." (219) To the contrary, I fully agree such differences exist (it would seem fairly obvious) but I am not convinced that the best way to identify them is to adopt the terminology "literature versus paraliterature", coming as it does from critics who are hostile - by definition - to any type of popular literature whatsoever. The debate, here, is not so much around content as around terminology. I remain of the opinion that the term "paraliterature", created by Tortel, is inappropriate, since it arbitrarily defines two contiguous but nonetheless sharply separated fields, whose nature is irreconcilable by definition. This, after all, was Tortel's explicit intention and derives from a precise ideological position. In a field divided between "literature" and "paraliterature" there is no room for novels of the "third kind" (sorry for Couégnas...).--Vittorio Frigerio via http://etc.dal.ca/belphegor/vol1_no2/articles/01_02_Friger_Couegn_en_cont.html [Jan 2006]
Paraliterature Google books results
Google Books "paraliterature" search
Comics & Culture: Analytical and Theoretical Approaches to Comics by Anne (EDT) Magnussen, Hans-Christian (EDT) Christiansen - 2000 Page 38 - They are also constantly being assimilated with what is known as paraliterature, a badly defined set of popular genres that includes adventure stories, ... [ More results from this book ] Experimental Nations: Or, the Invention of the Maghreb by Reda Bensmaia - Literary Criticism - 2003 - 232 pages Page 132 - Because paraliterature is not supported by a secret and a force of writing. ... Paraliterature is the entropic circulation of words in an economy of ... [ More results from this book ] Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction by Damien Broderick - 1995 - 197 pages Page xii - Suvin — followed in this by Samuel R. Delany and others — refers to sf as a INTRODUCTION paraliterature — the popular, ‘low', or plebeian literary ... [ More results from this book ] French Cultural Studies: Criticism at the Crossroads edited by Marie-Pierre Le Hir, Dana Strand - Social Science - 2000 - 325 pages Page 303 - Paraliterature is this entropic circulation of words in an economy of interchangeable objects. An economy in which writing no longer has its proper place. ... [ More results from this book ] Just Postmodernism by Steven Earnshaw - 1997 Page 200 - Consequently, ‘paraliterature occupies the space outside the literary enclosure, as a forbidden, taboo, and perhaps degraded product — held at bay, ... [ More results from this book ] Learning from Other Worlds edited by Patrick Parrinder - Literary Criticism - 2001 - 312 pages Page 52 - ... for example, in the studies of film and popular music, and in paraliterature, especially science fiction and utopias. In this richly layered space-time, ... [ More results from this book ] Postmodern Culture edited by Hal Foster - 1985 - 176 pages Page 101 - ... opportunity to demonstrate the usefulness of post-criticism not only as a compositional method but also as a method for reading paraliterature itself. ... [ More results from this book ] Calvino and the Age of Neorealism: Fables of Estrangement by Lucia Re - 1990 - 419 pages Page 31 - For Sartre, committed literature—unlike propaganda or other forms of political paraliterature— ... [ More results from this book ] Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Fredric Jameson - Literary Criticism - 1992 - 472 pages Page 2 - ... of the late show and the grade-B Hollywood film, of so-called paraliterature, with its airport paperback categories of the gothic and the romance, ... [ More results from this book ] Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film by Vivian Sobchack - Performing Arts - 1997 - 345 pages Page 246 - ... of TV series and Readers' Digest culture, of advertising and motels, of the late show and the grade-B Hollywood film, of so-called paraliterature with ... [ More results from this book ] Film Production Theory by Jean-Pierre Geuens - Performing Arts - 2000 - 304 pages Page 31 - ... of the Las Vegas strip. of the late show and Grade-B Hollywood film, of so-called paraliterature with its airport paperback categories. ... [ More results from this book ] The Wake of Imagination by Richard Kearney, Alan Sanders - Philosophy - 1998 Page 375 - ... of so-called paraliterature with its airport paperback categories of Gothic and Romance, the popular biography, the murder mystery and science-fiction ... [ More results from this book ] Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism edited by Patricia Merivale, Susan E Sweeney - Literary Criticism - 1999 - 304 pages Page 134 - of so-called paraliterature with its airport paperback categories of the gothic and the romance, the popular biography, the murder mystery and ... [ More results from this book ] Transactions, Transgressions, Tranformations: American Culture in Western Europe and Japan edited by Heidi Fehrenbach, Uta A Poiger - History - 1999 - 304 pages Page 233 - 23 If one redefines the term "trash" as applying to invisible culture and paraliterature per se, it becomes applicable not only to popular fiction in the ... [ More results from this book ] A Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory by Jeremy Hawthorn - Literary Criticism - 2001 - 416 pages Page 36 - The term paraliterature has been coined to describe such work which ... [ More results from this book ] Passionate Journeys: Why Successful Women Joined a Cult by Marion S Goldman - Social Science - 2001 - 312 pages Page 18 - Chain bookstores sell paraliterature that combines spirituality and personal growth, and shopping malls offer products ranging from crystal angel jewelry to ... [ More results from this book ] Rereading the New: A Backward Glance at Modernism by Kevin J Dettmar - Literary Criticism - 1993 - 400 pages Page 29 - ... Krauss suggests the term paraliterature to describe the kind of writing that can now go on within the postmodern, a writing that laminates the genres of ... [ More results from this book ] Art for Art's Sake & Literary Life: How Politics and Markets Helped Shape the Ideology and... by Gene H Bell-Villada - Literary Criticism - 1998 - 352 pages Page 198 - ... criticism (or of “paraliterature” or “ ... [ More results from this book ] History of Structuralism: The Rising Sign 1945-1966 by Francois Dosse - Philosophy - 1997 - 512 pages Page 73 - ... "can only confirm a police universe," intellectual writing is condemned to being a "paraliterature";5 the novel, with its pretensions to universality, ... [ More results from this book ] Cometh a Grey Host by Richard D Farley - Fiction - 1999 - 292 pages Page 9 - Throughout the paraliterature of the other races (much of which, admittedly, the author has yet either to channel or to translate), misconceptions about the ... [ More results from this book ] Homosexuality in French History and Culture by Jeffrey Merrick, Michael Sibalis - Social Science - 2002 Page 135 - paraliterature that flourished around the prison made its own case for the need to address the “realities” of carceral life. The journalist and author ... [ More results from this book ] The Cambridge Companion to the Spanish Novel: From 1600 to the Present edited by Harriet S Turner, Adelaida Lopez de Martinez - Literary Criticism - 2003 - 344 pages Page 66 - ... as “paraliterature” and “ ... [ More results from this book ] Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: Approaches, Scholars, Terms by Ireana R Makaryk - Literary Criticism - 1993 Page 152 - ... such as oral literature, literature of the masses and paraliterature, and their diachronic and synchronie interactions with the 'mainstream/ In terms of ... [ More results from this book ] Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of Biomedicine by Susan Merrill Squier - Medical - 2004 - 344 pages Page 285 - 14 By the term “paraliterature,” I refer to those genres of fiction and nonfiction that are not authorized as part of the literary canon but nonetheless ... [ More results from this book ] A History of French Literature: From Chanson de Geste to Cinema by David Coward - Literary Criticism - 2003 - 606 pages Page xxvii - But if what was until recently described as ‘paraliterature' is to be admitted, then it would seem logical to give its earlier manifestations — the ... [ More results from this book ] Unspeakable Images: Ethnicity and the American Cinema edited by Lester D Friedman - Performing Arts - 1991 - 443 pages Page 335 - ... of advertising and motels, of the late show and the grade-B Hollywood film, of so-called paraliterature with its airport paperback categories. ... [ More results from this book ] Music and Its Social Meanings by Christopher Ballantine - Music - 1984 - 202 pages Page 11 - ... can only confirm a police-universe, just as all intellectual writing can only produce a paraliterature which does not dare any longer to tell its name. ... [ More results from this book ] Conversations With Stanley Kauffmann edited by Bert Cardullo - Literary Criticism - 2003 - 212 pages Page 54 - Not paraliterature, not a substitute for literature, but a kind of art concurrent with art. To me it's not a substitute vocation. ... [ More results from this book ] Narrative As Communication by Didier Coste - Language Arts & Disciplines - 1989 - 370 pages Page 31 - ... “paraliterature,” “popular literature,” and other “junk”, together with the debunking of former classics, is extremely varied in its processes ... [ More results from this book ] Latin American Literature and the Mass Media edited by Debra A Castillo, Edmundo Paz Soldan - Literary Criticism - 2000 - 304 pages Page 286 - ... among scholars and critics in the Peninsula and elsewhere that such writing is paraliterature—popular, low, plebeian—and should not be taken seriously, ... [ More results from this book ] Virtual Geographies: Cyberpunk at the Intersection of the Postmodern and Science Fiction by Sabine Heuser - 2003 - 303 pages Page xii - ... literary mainstream and popular fiction or paraliterature.7 These are by no means absolute oppositions or categories but fields of tensions which define ... [ More results from this book ] Latin American Postmodernisms by Ph. D. Richard A Young - 1997 Page 205 - ... between genres thanks to the new investiture it gives to texts from different contexts: popular and mass literature, paraliterature, technical writings, ... [ More results from this book ] Technoscience and Cyberculture edited by Stanley Aronowitz, Michael Menser, Barbara R Martinsons - Social Science - 1995 Page 260 - ... the conceptual creation of a vast reservoir of texts outside literature that has come to be called, in recent years, “paraliterature,” ie, centering on ... [ More results from this book ] The Cambridge Companion to the Italian Novel edited by Peter E Bondanella, Andrea Ciccarelli - Literary Criticism - 2003 - 243 pages Page 87 - At any rate, the “literary” novelists tended to scorn this production of “paraliterature,” as it has come to be called in recent literary criticism. ... [ More results from this book ] Young Adult Science Fiction edited by C W Sullivan - Literary Criticism - 1999 - 264 pages Page 193 - “Literature and Paraliterature: Writings for Children and Young People.” International Social Science Journal 28 (1976): 161—83. ... [ More results from this book ] Russian Postmodernist Fiction: Dialogue with Chaos by Mark Lipovetsky, M N Lipovetskii - Literary Criticism - 1999 - 352 pages Page 185 - ... The “realistic” situation in his work constantly imitates the texts of newspapers and paraliterature. The writer's parodic style merely exaggerates the ... [ More results from this book ] Mail-Orders: The Fiction of Letters in Postmodern Culture by Sunka Simon - Literary Criticism - 2002 - 333 pages Page 251 - ... , informing paraliterature as a hybrid of literature and criticism, art and science, is that knowledge of an object of study may be obtained without ... [ More results from this book ] From Dreams to Despair: An Integrated Reading of the Novels of Boris Vian by J K L Scott - 1998 Page 180 - market, in an attempt to cash in on the contemporary taste for American paraliterature, in this case science fiction. However, such a coldly mercenary ... [ More results from this book ] Countercurrents: On the Primacy of Texts in Literary Criticism 1992 - 302 pages Page 225 - period, and perhaps already extinct. For we are now witnessing a type of paraliterature (mass literature, what the ... [ More results from this book ] The Shattered Mirror: Representations of Women in Mexican Literature by Maria Elena De Valdes - Literary Criticism - 1998 - 294 pages Page 257 - ftm. 4 (1977): 22—23. Valdés, Mania Elena de. “Paraliterature as a Sociocultural Index of Mexico. ... [ More results from this book ] The Thousand and One Nights by Muhsin Mahdi - Social Science - 1995 - 277 pages Page 37 - ... and paraliterature. That a work can be at the same time widely known and read, yet despised and ignored by literary critics, is proven by the fate of ... [ More results from this book ] A History of Korean Literature by Peter F Williams - Literary Criticism - 2003 - 654 pages Page 441 - The distance between high and low literature seems to dissolve here, engendering a kind of paraliterature.43 POETRY OF ENGAGEMENT Some of the poets who came ... [ More results from this book ] Science Fiction and Organization edited by Warren Smith, Martin Parker, Geoff Lightfoot - Business & Economics - 2001 - 256 pages Page 21 - In any' case debates over the content of the genre are of reduced import to SF when considered as a paraliterature, since it apes everything found in other ... [ More results from this book ] The Road to War in Serbia: Trauma and Catharsis edited by Nebojsa Popov - 2000 - 720 pages Page 320 - ... but also to the no less complex problem of paraliterature, the literary value of which, as traditionally defined, is seriously called into question. ... [ More results from this book ] American Studies edited by Jack Salzman - Literary Criticism - 1991 Page 1255 - ... “paraliterature,” he uses science fiction prior to HG Wells to illustrate his thesis that 20th—century fiction often reflects the ideology of a mass ... [ More results from this book ] Genres As Repositories of Cultural Memory edited by Hendrik Van Gorp - Literary Criticism - 2000 Page 79 - ... and considered paraliterature at best, unsuited for serious contemplation. In addition to intellectual prejudices, moral objections included distaste ... [ More results from this book ] The Writing Experiment: Strategies for Innovative Creative Writing by Hazel Smith - Language Arts & Disciplines - 2005 - 288 pages Page 204 - ... or paraliterature has also arisen because of an increase of writers who wanted to transmit their own poetics as well as presenting their creative work. ... [ More results from this book ] Australian Popular Culture edited by Ian Craven - Social Science - 1994 Page 197 - ... paraliterature' (Jameson, 1991: 17. 2). For Lash, postmodernist ‘de-differentiation' is present in the transgression ‘between literature and theory, ... [ More results from this book ] Un/Popular Culture: Lesbian Writing After the Sex Wars by Kathleen Martindale - Literary Criticism - 1997 - 224 pages Page 103 - Wanting to promote her ascendancy from small press writer of paraliterature to serious artist, they deck her with high cultural honorifics, ... [ More results from this book ] Unfinished Revolutions: Legacies of Upheaval in Modern French Culture edited by Robert T Denomme, Roland H Simon - History - 1998 - 192 pages Page 23 - ... period.8 It is high time we abandon the timid approach and the linguistic pre cautions taken by the first historians of popular writing: paraliterature, ... [ More results from this book ] The Cross, the Plow and the Skyline: Contemporary Science Fiction and the Ecological Imagination by Ernest J. Yanarella - Fiction - 2001 - 319 pages Page 2 - That the literary genre of science fiction, so long considered paraliterature and relegated to the margins of mainstream literature, should fulfill these ... [ More results from this book ] History of Universities by Mordechai Feingold - History - 2001 - 336 pages Page 21 - Indeed, this imbalance persists into the present, in that the printed terrae fl/ins speeches and paraliterature of the eighteenth century remain reasonably ... [ More results from this book ] The Biography of "the Idea of Literature" from Antiquity to the Baroque: From Antiquity to... by Adrian Marino - 1996 - 336 pages Page 118 - Actually, printing encourages the apparition and development of this new species of “paraliterature.” The species will gradually work out its own definition ... [ More results from this book ] Handbook of Latin American Studies: Humanities by Delores M Martin - Reference - 1999 - 951 pages Page 491 - New chapters are: “Latino Writing in the United States,” “Paraliterature,” and “Film.” Each is a comprehensive essay concerning the national literature of a ... [ More results from this book ] The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature: Volume 3, Brazilian Literature; Bibliographies edited by Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, Enrique Pupo-Walker - Language Arts & Disciplines - 1996 - 884 pages Page 388 - This edition has articles on the principal Hispanic groups in the US, films, and in paraliterature. Klein, Leonard S. (ed.) Latin American Literature in the ... [ More results from this book ] Thematics Reconsidered: Essays in Honor of Horst S. Daemmrich edited by Frank Trommler - 1995 Page 89 - over many centuries, and while simultaneously paying attention to its embodiment 89 in the complementary paraliterature - and only by pursuing this ... [ More results from this book ] New Women's Writing in African Literature edited by Ernest N. (Department of Africana Studies, University of Michigan-Flint, USA) Emenyonu - 2004 - 192 pages Page 33 - Children of the age of globalization, their tastes have been moulded largely by imported pulp and Western paraliterature, whereas Symbols is short in ... [ More results from this book ] Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture edited by Mark Dery - Social Science - 1994 - 355 pages Page 340 - 2 Paraliterature, 323. See also Comic books Parliament-Funkadelic (musical group), 182 ... [ More results from this book ]
your Amazon recommendations