Transgressive fiction as popular fiction

• Autores: Murat Goc
• Localización: Visiones multidisciplinares sobre la cultura popular: actas del 5.º Congreso Internacional de SELICUP / coord. por Eduardo de Gregorio Godeo, María del Mar Ramón Torrijos, 2014, ISBN 978-84-617-0400-2, págs. 254-263
• Idioma: español
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • This paper will mainly discuss the historical and ideological significance of transgressive fiction as an emerging popular culture culture. While bitterly criticizing and demeaning the society of spectacle and consumerist obsessions with body, glamour and corporate burnout, transgressive fiction has been placed at the center of popular fiction as well as Hollywood and �indie� movies. The open controversy of transgressive fiction, its ambiguous cultural and political disposition, reasserts that the literary field is not a fixed and predetermined area of cultural production but instead the form and content may greatly vary according to the social and ideological conditions in different places at different times. Transgressive fiction, then, has certainly existed under different names, always resisting, challenging and transforming the mainstream culture. Moreover, it expressed the resentments of subcultural groups� social hierarchization based on economic and cultural capital. On the other hand, transgressive has equally been prone to misconceptualization and desublimation. Given such a theoretical background, this paper will basically discuss the function and position of transgressive fiction in popular culture, particularly referring to transgressive fiction as a postmodern genre and to what extent it still transgresses the boundaries of social order and normality.

    phenomenon and the qualities and challenges of literary production as a cultural production in the late capitalist society. Also known as �blank fiction�, transgressive fiction is defined by Elizabeth Young as �a flat affectless prose which dealt with all aspects of contemporary urban life:

    crime, sex drugs, sexual excess, media overload, consumer madness, inner-city decay and fashion-crazed nightlife�. Extending the range and the context of such counter culture fiction to the writings of Charles Bukowski, Ken Kesey, William Burroughs or even classic writers such as D.H. Lawrence and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the works of transgressive fiction provide an insight into the young people�s anger and hatred against consumer society, deprivation of individual freedom, feminization of culture, gender confusion and false promises of power and patriarchy. Transgressive fiction will also be evaluated as a new genre embodying a new lingual and formal content, and as the inheritor of an artistic lineage, ranging from avant-garde to Beat generation, focusing on the American Adam�s search for identity and alienation yet diverging with a substantial emphasis on postmodern irony and nihilism.

    It is now undoubted that literary production and aesthetic perceptions are fundamentally and inevitably historical, and like all other cultural artifacts, they take place within social fields dominated by hegemonic power struggles. As Frederic Jameson argues, literary texts, and literary forms in particular, are the bases for historical knowledge let alone empirical facts. Therefore, understanding postmodern zeitgeist essentially necessitates deciphering postmodern texts from a historical perspective unfolding them in terms of both thematic and formal heredity and their social and cultural functions at jetzzeit. Thus, the examples of transgressive fiction chosen for this paper will illustrate the existential struggles of the individual who is trying to survive in a culture of complete meaninglessness and irony, a culture of floating signs and mass consumption of commodities as well as manufactured identities.

    However, main characteristics of transgressive fiction turn that struggle into a consumable, self-denying and implosive parody, all of which also mark the postmodern angst. Ironically enough, transgressive fiction seems to be easily assimilated and transposed into the domain of popular