International Workshop
"Generic Change and Novelistic Experiment in 21st-Century Narratives"
CLIC is pleased to invite you to the international workshop "Generic Change and Novelistic Experiment in 21st-Century Narratives" on 12 September 2025 from 10:00 until 17:00 at Usquare, Brussels. This event is organised by Janine Hauthal (VUB), Katrijn Van den Bossche (VUB), Ruben Vanden Berghe (VUB) and Lars Bernearts (Ghent University).
This workshop centres on experiments with genre in contemporary literary fiction and aims to trace formal, thematic, and functional developments of novelistic genres. In light of the cultural dynamics of generic change (Rupp 2010; Basseler et al. 2013) and theoretical concepts such as “genre hybridity” (Duff 2000; Seibel 2007; Hartner 2013; Pyrhönen 2013; Mäntynen and Shore 2014), “conceptual blending” (Sinding 2005; Allen 2013; Schneider and Hartner 2012), and genre-reflexivity (Hauthal 2013; Thompson 2020; Niederhoff 2022), this workshop aims to advance and update existing theories of generic change (see, for example, Fowler 1982; Gymnich et al. 2007; Zymner 2010; Rowlett 2017; Allen 2020). For this purpose, the workshop situates questions of genre development and genre formation against the backdrop of the current cultural moment by engaging with theories of post-postmodernism, metamodernism alongside studies on queer(ed) and decolonial experimentation.
In recent years, the saliency of explicit and implicit genre-reflexivity in literary fiction has prompted critics to conceptualize new genres and generic developments, such as the fictional metabiography (Nadj 2007), the metamnemonic novel (Neumann 2007) the neo-slave narrative (Rushdy 1999; Anim-Addo & Lima 2018), the “neuronovel” (Salisbury 2015), “post-millennial metafictional horror” (Thompson 2020), the braided narrative (Bancroft 2018), the multifocal decolonial novel (Moya 2020), the fragmentary essay novel (Nünning 2018), and the neo-Victorian novel (Garrido et al. 2021; Ayres & Maier 2024). According to the so-called genre turn (Martin 2017; Hoberek 2019), the new millennium saw a marked increase in the number of literary novels that engaged with conventions of “genre literature”. These novels distinguish themselves from the primarily ironic references to genre in the 20th-century novel. Instead, genre conventions traditionally associated with the centre and the margins of cultural hegemony now often appear together to invite cultural and political reflection, as well as a playful, diverting effect. This increase in genre-reflexive writing has also prompted genre theorists to systematize and concretize literary strategies that effectuate genre critique, genre memory or a readerly genre awareness more generally. Aside from questions on the development of parodic and ironic functions of genre-reflexivity and the terminological flexibility of the terms “genre”, “mode”, and “form”, this workshop is interested in how contemporary genre-reflexivity invites the reader to ponder issues of canonization, cultural memory, and the ways genres shape our political reality, as well as the other way around.
The workshop explores this dynamic of generic change that has been central to the field of genre studies by creating a dialogue between new-formalist approaches to genre analysis inspired by Caroline Levine (2015) and post-postmodern, metamodern, queer, and decolonial theories of literary self-reflexivity. Additionally, different branches of narratology (cognitive, cultural, feminist) may offer valuable conceptual and methodological tools for reflections on genre and genre-reflexivity. Lastly, publishing studies may provide insight into the motivations, pressures, and possibilities that underlie novelistic developments across linguistic and cultural contexts.
At the workshop, eight experts will address these themes through a range of methodological approaches and analyse novelistic texts from different cultural traditions, before opening a plenary discussion. All participants are invited to a preparatory (hybrid) reading session, where we will collectively engage with three foundational texts on the topic to foster the discussion on the analysis of generic change in the 21st century.
This workshop is co-organized by CLIC and SEL, Centre for Literary and Intermedial Crossings (VUB), Studiecentrum Experimentele Literatuur (VUB – U Gent), as part of, and financed through, the Junior Research Project Fundamental Research “Self-Reflexivity and Generic Change in 21st-Century Black British Women’s Literature”, FWO – Research Foundation Flanders (grant G038921N).
Bibliography:
Allen, Martina. “Against ‘Hybridity’ in Genre Studies: Blending as an Alternative Approach to Generic Experimentation.” Trespassing Journal: An Online Journal of Trespassing Art, Science, and Philosophy, no. 2, 2013, pp. 3–21.
---. GenReVisions: Genre Experimentation and World-Construction in Contemporary Anglophone Literature. Winter, 2020.
Anim-Addo, Joan, and Maria Helena Lima. “The Power of the Neo-Slave Narrative Genre.” Callaloo, vol. 41, no. 1, 2018, pp. 1–8.
Ayres, Brenda, and Sarah E. Maier, editors. The Palgrave Handbook of Neo-Victorianism. Springer, 2024.
Bancroft, Corinne. "The Braided Narrative." Narrative, vol. 26 no. 3, 2018, pp. 262-281.
Basseler, Michael, et al., editors. The Cultural Dynamics of Generic Change in Contemporary Fiction: Theoretical Frameworks, Genres, and Model Interpretations. Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2013.
Duff, David. Modern Genre Theory. Routledge, 2000.
Fowler, Alastair. Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Oxford UP, 1982.
Garrido, Felipe Espinoza, et al., editors. Black Neo-Victoriana. Brill, 2021.
Gymnich, Marion, et al., editors. Gattungstheorie und Gattungsgeschichte. Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2007.
Hartner, Marcus. “Hybrid Genres and Cultural Change: A Cognitive Approach.” The Cultural Dynamics of Generic Change in Contemporary Fiction, edited by Michael Basseler et al. Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2013, pp. 163–182.
Hauthal, Janine. “Metaization and Self-Reflexivity as Catalysts for Genre Development: Genre Memory and Genre Critique in Novelistic Meta-Genres.” The Cultural Dynamics of Generic Change in Contemporary Fiction, edited by Michael Basseler et al. Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2013, pp. 81–114.
Hoberek, Andrew. “Popular Genres and Interiority.” Amerikastudien / American Studies, vol. 64, no. 4, 2019, pp. 567–78.
Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton UP, 2015.
Marshall, Kate. Novels by Aliens: Weird tales and the Twenty-First Century. University of Chicago Press, 2023.
Martin, Theodore. “Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present.” Contemporary Drift, Columbia UP, 2017.
Mäntynen, Anne, and Susanna Shore. “What Is Meant by Hybridity? An Investigation of Hybridity and Related Terms in Genre Studies.” Text & Talk, vol. 34, no. 6, Nov. 2014, pp. 737–58.
Moya, Paula. “Multifocal Decolonial Novels.” Unpublished hand-out. Narrative 2020.
Nadj, Julijana. Die fiktionale Metabiographie: Gattungsgedächtnis und Gattungskritik in einem neuen Genre der englischsprachigen Erzählliteratur; Theorie - Analysemodell - Modellinterpretationen. Wissenschaftlicher Verl. Trier, 2006.
Neumann, Birgit. “What Makes Literature Valuable: Fictions of Meta-Memory and the Ethics of Remembering.” Ethics in Culture : The Dissemination of Values Through Literature and Other Media, edited by Astrid Erll et al. De Gruyter, 2008, pp. 131-152.
Niederhoff, Burkhard. “An Introduction to Metagenre with a Postscript on the Journey from Comedy to Tragedy in E. M. Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread.” Connotations – A Journal for Critical Debate, vol. 31, 2022, pp. 1-32.
Nünning, Ansgar, and Alexander Scherr. “The Rise of the Fragmentary Essay-Novel: Towards a Poetics and Contextualization of an Emerging Hybrid Genre in the Digital Age.” Anglia, vol. 136, no. 3, Sept. 2018, pp. 482–507.
Pyrhönen, Heta. “Generic Stability Despite Hybridization: The Austenian Dominant Construction Principle.” The Cultural Dynamics of Generic Change in Contemporary Fiction, edited by Michael Basseler et al. Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2013, pp. 183–200.
Rowlett, John L., editor. Genre Theory and Historical Change: Theoretical Essays of Ralph Cohen. U of Virginia Press, 2017.
Rupp, Jan. Genre and Cultural Memory in Black British Literature. Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2010.
Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form. Oxford University Press, 1999.
Salisbury, Laura. “Translating Neuroscience: Fictions of the Brain in the 2000s”. The 2000s: Contemporary British Fiction, edited by Nick Bentley et al. Bloomsbury, 2015, pp. 83-114.
Schneider, Ralf, and Marcus Hartner, editors. Blending and the Study of Narrative: Approaches and Applications. De Gruyter, 2012.
Seibel, Klaudia. “Mixing Genres: Levels of Contamination and the Formation of Generic Hybrids.” Gattungstheorie und Gattungsgeschichte, edited by Marion Gymnich et al. Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2007, pp. 137–50.
Sinding, Michael. “‘Genera Mixta’: Conceptual Blending and Mixed Genres in Ulysses.” New Literary History, vol. 36, no. 4, 2005, pp. 589–619.
Thompson, Dominic. “‘…town That Doesn’t Keep Showing up in Books’: Genre Reflexivity in Post-Millennial Metafictional Horror.’ Language, Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies, vol. 3, no. 4, July 2020, pp. 86-107.
Zymner, Rüdiger, editor. Handbuch Gattungstheorie. J.B. Metzler, 2010.
