The Rise of the Fragmentary Essay-Novel: Towards a Poetics and Contextualization of an Emerging Hybrid Genre in the Digital Age

Abstract

Abstract This contribution introduces the ‘fragmentary essay-novel’ in terms of an emerging hybrid genre within the experimental branch of contemporary Anglophone literature. Reading David Shields’s manifesto Reality Hunger (2010) as a poetics which literally ‘essays’ a “path for the novel” (Smith 2008: n. pag.) in the early 21st-century, it also discusses Tom McCarthy’s recent work Satin Island (2015) as a prime representative of the fragmentary essay-novel. Both Shields’s and McCarthy’s texts are contextualized and framed as aesthetic responses to the digital age, especially to the implications that processes of digitization have for our shifting understanding of ‘reality’, ‘authenticity’, ‘literature’, ‘reading’, and ‘authorship’. Special attention will be given to the question of how the organization of knowledge in digital networks affects the epistemological situation of the novelist and the human individual. In addition to putting the essay-novel on the map of contemporary fiction, we aim to raise awareness of the tradition and general significance of this unduly neglected genre.