Transgressive Popular Fiction
Appealing ‘Shock Value’ of transgression literature
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Chuck Palahniuk (on transgressive fiction)1 “The most successful books now serve us as sedatives, confirming the values and worldviews their readers already hold. They’re the books we read as sleeping pills at bedtime. When was the last book banned? Oh, how I miss the great book bonfires of my Christian youth! That’s when books had some power! When they had to be burned like witches.”
In all its ambiguity, transgressive fiction is a genre of selective taste. This sub genre within the world of contemporary popular fiction was first identified or rather labelled in 1993 by the critic Michael Silverblatt2, in an essay in the Los Angeles Times. He defined it thus: “A literary genre that graphically explores such topics as incest and other aberrant sexual practices, mutilation, the sprouting of sexual organs in various places on the human body, urban violence and violence against women, drug use, and highly dysfunctional family relationships, and that is based on the premise that knowledge is to be found at the edge of experience and that the body is the site for gaining knowledge.” Transgressive literature, thus, presents a protagonist who breaks all the rules of social normalcy. The taboo subject matter of this genre confronts the reader with the loathsome, sometimes violent, diseased and debauched members of their social milieu.
Transgression, of course, operates in many domains and on many levels beyond the definition prescribed by Silverblatt. In literary studies, texts that deploy formal and linguistic disruptions familiar to readers of avant-garde fiction might be said to be transgressive. Robert R. Wilson, for example, exclusively emphasizes structural and linguistic elements such as subversion of plot expectations, exploratory treatment of literary conventions, and generative word play in defining a certain category of literary transgression, venturing that transgression can even become
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Chuck Palahniuk (on transgressive fiction)1 “The most successful books now serve us as sedatives, confirming the values and worldviews their readers already hold. They’re the books we read as sleeping pills at bedtime. When was the last book banned? Oh, how I miss the great book bonfires of my Christian youth! That’s when books had some power! When they had to be burned like witches.”
In all its ambiguity, transgressive fiction is a genre of selective taste. This sub genre within the world of contemporary popular fiction was first identified or rather labelled in 1993 by the critic Michael Silverblatt2, in an essay in the Los Angeles Times. He defined it thus: “A literary genre that graphically explores such topics as incest and other aberrant sexual practices, mutilation, the sprouting of sexual organs in various places on the human body, urban violence and violence against women, drug use, and highly dysfunctional family relationships, and that is based on the premise that knowledge is to be found at the edge of experience and that the body is the site for gaining knowledge.” Transgressive literature, thus, presents a protagonist who breaks all the rules of social normalcy. The taboo subject matter of this genre confronts the reader with the loathsome, sometimes violent, diseased and debauched members of their social milieu.
Transgression, of course, operates in many domains and on many levels beyond the definition prescribed by Silverblatt. In literary studies, texts that deploy formal and linguistic disruptions familiar to readers of avant-garde fiction might be said to be transgressive. Robert R. Wilson, for example, exclusively emphasizes structural and linguistic elements such as subversion of plot expectations, exploratory treatment of literary conventions, and generative word play in defining a certain category of literary transgression, venturing that transgression can even become
Cited: Schuessler, Jennifer. Personal Interview. 26 September 2011. Silverblatt, Micheal. “SHOCK APPEAL / Who Are These Writers, and Why Do They Want to Hurt Us? The New Fiction of Transgression” Los Angeles Times. 1 Aug 1993. Gardner, James. “Transgressive Fiction.” National Review (17 June 1996): 54-6. “This Transgressive World”. Graves, Ben. HubPages. 8 May 2011. Web. 7 Apr 2013.