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Foggy realisms? Fiction, nonfiction, and political affect in Larry Beinhart’s Fog facts and The librarian

This paper reads Larry Beinhart’s novel The Librarian (2004) and its nonfiction companion Fog Facts (2005) as a double attempt at writing that is politically invested in representing reality but that nevertheless is openly aware of the postmodern crisis of representation. In this sense, I read both books as indicative of a broad cultural search for forms of writing that engage their readers’ reality without simply attempting to return to a less complicated moment before postmodernism. The paper situates both books within crucial textual contexts: a broad ‘epistemic panic’ about the facts and reality at the time, a surge of political nonfiction published in response to George W. Bush’s Presidency, and a longer tradition of political fiction. Tracing how the novel struggles with
its nonfiction aspects and how the nonfiction book relies on fiction to make its point, I then look at how the two books evoke political affect to have a realist appeal of sorts despite their insistence on the precarious nature of all realist representation. Reading both books as distinctly popular, mass-market products and thus bringing together the debate around post-postmodernism from literary studies with an interest in reading pleasures informed by popular culture studies, I argue that the two books constitute decidedly popular attempts at a new, meta-aware yet politically engaged textuality.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa.de:bsz:15-qucosa-206587
Date06 July 2016
CreatorsHerrmann, Sebastian M.
ContributorsUniversität Leipzig, Philologische Fakultät, Universität Leipzig, Philologische Fakultät
PublisherUniversitätsbibliothek Leipzig
Source SetsHochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typedoc-type:bookPart
Formatapplication/pdf
SourcePoetics of politics : textuality and social relevance in contemporary American literature and culture / Sebastian M. Herrmann [Hrsg.] ... Heidelberg : Winter, 2015. S. 133-151. ISBN 978-3-8253-6447-2

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