Writing about the institutional decline of theory at the end of the twentieth century, Nicholas Dames (2012: 163–64) observes that theory, once seen as “the key to all the world’s things,” gradually became “just another thing-in-the-world.” The reverse, I think, could be said of genre in the twenty-first century. Once easily dismissed as flat, repetitive, and prosaic—the enemy of the literary—genre has today emerged as an indispensable concept for both contemporary literary study and the study of contemporary literature. Although journals devoted to work on genre have been around since the late 1960s, scholarly treatments of the topic have exploded in the twenty-first century. A cursory glance at the MLA International Bibliography reveals as much: peer-reviewed publications with “genre” in their title increased significantly from the 1980s (398) to the 1990s (651), but then nearly doubled in the 2000s (1263). The 2010s have kept pace, with more than 1000 such publications having appeared by early 2018. (The high-water mark seems to have arrived in 2008, with 164 publications making it to print that year.)The cause of this development is surely overdetermined. New methodologies and shifting reading techniques—most notably surface and distance reading—have identified genre as a particularly fruitful vein of study. Contemporary authors, even those with highbrow literary aspirations such as Jennifer Egan, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Colson Whitehead, Junot Diaz, and Cormac McCarthy, have increasingly embraced the creative potential conventional genre forms afford. Technology saturates daily life with prefabricated formats—the Facebook feed, the Twitter post, the Squarespace website—which inevitably impose a generic logic on individual lived experience. The homogenizing force of neoliberal capital demographizes its consumers and imposes a bland uniformity on its legions of affective laborers. The vast scope and scale of the contemporary risk society require nonparticularized modes of thought that can imagine the world more generally, more collectively. In short, the generic is not only more present, but we also feel increasingly comfortable with it. We live it every day.Columbia University Press seems to agree with this assessment, as it has recently included two monographs, Jeremy Rosen’s Minor Characters Have Their Day: Genre and the Contemporary Literary Marketplace (2016) and Theodore Martin’s Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present (2017), in its excellent “Literature Now” series, edited by Matthew Hart, David James, and Rebecca Walkowitz. Rosen’s book closely examines the flourishing phenomenon of “minor character elaboration”—that is, when authors use marginal characters from canonical literature as the central protagonists of entirely new texts. Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea is the ur-text of the genre, which, as Rosen convincingly demonstrates, has grown immensely since its inception in 1960s postmodern literary experimentation. Rather than focusing on a single genre as Rosen does, Martin’s monograph examines five different genres: the novel of manners, film noir, the Western, the detective novel, and post-apocalyptic fiction. While producing compelling insights about each of these genres in isolation, Martin also contends more broadly that genre—in particular, the way today’s authors and filmmakers update older genre forms—proves indispensable for historicizing the contemporary.As Martin makes immediately clear via some introductory theses, the contemporary here does not refer to the literary period stretching from 1989, or 2001, to the present (the literary period after postmodernism, for example), but instead names the problem of knowing the present in any substantial, historical way. The problem of the contemporary, in other words, is not specific to our present but to presentness in general. Thus, Martin variously imagines the contemporary as “a critical category” (1), “a conceptual problem” (2), “a literary-historical problem” (3), and “a strategy of mediation—a means of negotiating between experience and retrospection, immersion and explanation, closeness and distance” (5). In short, the contemporary forces us to ask, Who and how are we? What are we about? And how can we know for sure since we’re knee-deep in the thick of it?As Martin rightly observes, this paradox of time and knowledge, this perilous relation between phenomenology and epistemology, also marks the limits of historicist methodology. When our objects of inquiry and analysis become congruent with the present, historicism breaks down. How do you historicize events transpiring in the present tense? It’s complicated, but, as Martin demonstrates throughout Contemporary Drift, we don’t have to jettison historicism at the cusp of the contemporary. Instead, genre analysis provides a “historicism by other means” (197). Genres speak to, are defined by, and in many ways resolve the contemporary’s tendency to drift “between experience and retrospection, immersion and explanation, closeness and distance.” Or, as Martin explains, “the drag of genre—the accretion or sedimentation of formal change over time—makes the process of becoming contemporary uniquely visible” (7). He continues: “Genre describes the incipient but shared conventions that make historical emergence visible and thinkable in the present. The idiom of genre thus allows us to put a finer point on precisely what the contemporary is: a set of shared conventions for categorizing our otherwise disorienting experiences of the present.” This, I think, is ingenious. If we really want to understand the contemporary, we shouldn’t search for its unique features and characteristics, its breaks with and turns from the past. Instead, we should emphasize its historical continuity, its slow build, the way things today are pretty much the same but also a little different. In the cultural sphere, that means paying attention to genres and the way they change over time. That last part, the change over time, is particularly key for Martin since it allows his “historicism by other means” to historicize not just the contemporary but also the past. “Genres lead distinctly double lives,” Martin explains, “with one foot in the past and the other in the present.” Consequently, “they contain the entire abridged history of an aesthetic form while also staking a claim to the form’s contemporary relevance” (6). Just when we thought there was no history to be had, genre suggests otherwise. It not only historicizes the present but, as an added bonus, teaches us a lot about the past as well. Unfortunately, this feature of the book is uneven, as some of Contemporary Drift’s chapters reveal much more about the history of their specific genre form than others. I learned a lot more about the history of film noir and the Western, for example, than I did about the novel of manners, detective novels, and post-apocalyptic fiction.In each of the book’s five chapters, Martin examines the contemporary treatment of a common genre form to reveal a particular feature of our contemporary moment. In the first chapter, on the updated novel of manners—his examples are Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) and Glamorama (1998) and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000)—Martin takes up the problem of periodizing the present, or what he describes as the contemporary’s sense of itself as “not not historical” (27). When you know that you’re living through history but you’re not entirely sure what’s significant, the decade emerges as a form of provisional historicizing, “an imprecise yet strangely effective way to structure the expectation of historical change, . . . to account for contemporary drift” (55). The decade: a historical period that isn’t one. Its conceptual fuzziness and arbitrariness make it the ideal temporal form for twenty-first-century contemporaries who want to think historically but lack the distanced perspective to do so.The second chapter focuses on the phenomenon of voice-over narration in film noir, particularly noir’s consistent reinsertion of that narration into the film’s diegesis, as when we see Neff, the voice-over narrator in Double Indemnity, speaking his narrative confession into a Dictaphone in his office. According to Martin, this “deictic function” (61) of noir voice-over indicates the genre’s profound interest in situatedness, or the way an individual understands oneself as part of a broader context. However, in more recent updates of film noir, such as Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City (2005) and Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German (2006), the voice-over narrators are conspicuously dead. For Martin, these contemporary examples of film noir aren’t simply reviving an old genre. They also indicate that revival itself, in the form of undead corpses that narrate, best describes the uncanny nature of being situated in our present moment.Next, Martin turns his attention to twenty-first-century detective fiction—Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games (2007), and China Miéville’s The City and the City (2009)—arguing that it replaces the uncertainty championed in postmodern anti-detective fiction—Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1965), Paul Auster’s City of Glass (1985), Roberto Bolaño’s Savage Detectives (1998)—with the temporality of waiting. Given the massive uncertainty of contemporary life, Martin argues, “uncertainty becomes a more dubious ideal” (97). Contemporary uncertainty is ominous, nothing to trifle with. Consequently, in detective fiction from Chabon, Chandra, and Miéville, waiting emerges as “both a symptom of and a hedge against a cultural logic of uncertainty” (98). Waiting, which Martin understands as a “dialectic of knowing and unknowing” (121), draws one’s attention toward the present and represents the contemporary’s tendency “to accept and to question uncertainty at the same time” (101). It provides a form of qualified hope for those no longer willing to wallow in postmodern indeterminacy.Treating our lived experience of climate change as a defining component of the contemporary, the book’s fourth chapter examines the role weather plays in Westerns. Martin acknowledges that weather and climate are nonequivalent, but he does suggest a dialectical relationship between the two that allows him to imagine weather as “both a symptom and a symbol of the contemporary era of climate change, an imperfect yet irreplaceable method for grasping the otherwise invisible alteration of the climate” (130). In older, conventional Westerns—The Searchers (1956), Day of the Outlaw (1959), The Great Silence (1968), and McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971)—filmmakers highlight anomalous, inclement weather such as blizzards. However, twenty-first-century Westerns—Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), Takashi Miike’s Sukiyaki Western Django (2007), Joel and Ethan Cohen’s True Grit (2010), Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012) and The Hateful Eight (2015), and Alejandro Iñárritu’s The Revenant (2015)—emphasize “unseasonable weather” (143). Snow falls throughout the Cohen brother’s True Grit remake, for example, even though it rarely snows in the Arkansas county where it’s set. Consequently, in much the same way that contemporary detective fiction registers a transition from uncertainty to waiting, “the ecological unconscious of the Western” shifts from inclemency to unseasonableness, an index of the contemporary’s growing recognition of climate change and global warming.Finally, Martin turns his attention to contemporary post-apocalyptic fiction, specifically, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), Ben Marcus’s The Flame Alphabet (2012), and Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (2011). Whereas early instances of the genre, curious about the end of life as we know it, dwelled on the radical differences between pre- and post-apocalypse, these contemporary works emphasize how much life stays the same despite the apocalypse. The novels that Martin examines represent that continuity between pre- and post-apocalyptic life through the endurance of work and labor: “The self-motivated, highly adaptable, always-working protagonist of the post-apocalyptic survival story sounds a lot like the hero of the neoliberal workplace” (168). For Martin, the “survival of work” in contemporary post-apocalyptic fiction speaks directly to the “work of survival” that defines the precarious labor of postindustrial capitalism. Or, such fiction figures contemporary labor as a post-apocalyptic condition.In a brief coda, Martin claims that Contemporary Drift has “produc[ed] positive knowledge about our contemporary moment” (196). He’s right. Martin’s brilliant readings and innovative approach to genre identify the historical schema of the decade, the ontological condition of revival, the temporality of waiting, the lived experience of weather, and the laborious project of survival as constitutive of twenty-first-century life. These insights convincingly answer “the question of whether we really can historicize our own contemporary” with “a lengthy but unambiguous yes” (197). Even as Martin’s method, his “historicism by other means,” describes the particularities of the present, it also opens up new ways to understand the past. It’s portable. If we want to know how preindustrial England, the antebellum United States, or any other historical moment conceived its own contemporariness, we should examine how its cultural artifacts were updating earlier genre forms. In this way, Martin has developed a method of using genre to understand contemporariness that is itself generic. It’s the same conceptual problem over and over again—every contemporary must “negotiat[e] between experience and retrospection”—but with different answers each time. The decade, revival, waiting, the weather, and survival: these constitute our particular responses to the problem of the contemporary under currently existing material conditions (superficial commodity culture, climate change, and neoliberal capitalism, for example). But any given historical moment, defined by distinct material conditions, will mediate the “conceptual problem” of the contemporary differently. Although genre analysis isn’t the only way to learn about the past, and probably isn’t even the only way to historicize the present, Martin’s methods make a welcome and illuminating addition to the contemporary scholar’s analytical toolbox.Jeremy Rosen’s Minor Characters Have Their Day also makes larger claims on behalf of genre and, much like Martin’s, it’s easy to see how Rosen’s approach could be as useful for learning about the past as the present. The similarities end there, however, as Martin examines an array of genres to answer a narrow question about culture’s response to the conceptual problem of contemporariness while Rosen analyzes a single genre to answer a broad set of questions about literary form, politics, and institutions. For Martin, genre is the method. It provides the conceptual structures that facilitate a productive investigation of the contemporary. For Rosen, genre is a useful object of study because it requires a scale of analysis—oscillating between close and distant, historical and abstract— that in turn demands a productively diverse set of methodological tools. Genre recommends itself “to the scholar who wants to reach for the breadth of social significance without abandoning the nuance of close reading” (181). Or, as Rosen explains, Minor Characters seeks “to demonstrate what can be gleaned from the sustained and in-depth study of a genre, especially when a history of the evolution of literary forms is combined with cultural history and a literary sociology of the material conditions under which such forms circulate” (6). Rosen occasionally refers to genre itself as his method, but as this quotation indicates, it’s more accurate to say that his genre analysis requires an array of other methods (formalism, cultural history, and literary sociology). Martin’s work, with its close attention to the subtle shifts in genre forms over time, provides a much better example of what it would mean to make a method of genre itself.These three “methodological axes” (form, cultural history, and literary sociology) organize Minor Characters, with each of its first three chapters devoted to a single axis. The chapter on form explains the emergence in the 1960s of minor character elaboration as a distinct literary “technology” (82). With extensive readings of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967), George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman (1969), and John Gardner’s Grendel (1971), Rosen explains the genre’s midcentury genesis in three different ways: the rise of “modes of active reading” (both political and poststructural); a corresponding “revisionist and politically oppositional stance toward the traditional canon” born from those active reading tactics; and a pervasive “spirit of literary appropriation and experimentation” (82) that Rosen associates with postmodernism. With this focus on the genre’s emergence, however, the chapter never delivers a properly formal analysis beyond Rosen’s characterization of it as “a malleable form adaptable to diverse purposes” (47). While it’s easy to imagine other genres submitting to precise formal analysis (film noir and detective fiction, for example, thrive on subtle shifts in formal technique), it seems that the genre of minor character elaboration lacks much formal coherence, which in turn raises the question of whether minor character elaboration should even be read as genre.When it comes to the politics of minor character elaboration, Rosen makes a much stronger claim. While it’s tempting to align the genre’s desire to give voice to marginal characters with the turn in the 1960s “toward a multicultural politics of recognition” (23), Rosen argues that most minor character elaborations reinforce bourgeois liberalism. Here Rosen discusses Christa Wolf’s Cassandra (1983), Christine Brückner’s Desdemona—If You Had Only Spoken! (1983), Julian Barnes’s “Stowaway” (1989), Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent (1997), Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2005), and Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia (2008), concluding that such texts evince “a broad contemporary commitment to a subjectivist perspectivism compatible with the reigning tenets of liberal pluralism” (89). The minor character discovering her voice reiterates rather than challenges the individual rights and liberties underpinning the status quo. J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986), which Rosen reads as the rare example of minor character elaboration that recognizes the impossibility of recovering and giving voice to minor characters, is the exception that proves the rule.Linking this political analysis with an institutional one, the third chapter of Minor Characters observes that the genre’s generally “anodyne” politics make it perfectly compatible with the economic motivations of large publishing companies. Here Rosen chronicles the twenty-first-century explosion of minor character elaboration, noting that the industry has embraced the genre because of the way it “trades on the prestige of the traditional literary canon while accommodating ‘voices’ from the margins” (121). Why take a risk on an unknown author writing a novel ex nihilo when a work that elaborates a minor character from canonical literature comes stamped with the imprimatur of the literary? As Rosen ably shows, minor character elaboration imbues publishers, authors, and readers with significant cultural capital even if very little culture makes its way into the text.With these three methodological axes—formal, political, and institutional—Rosen provides a multi-layered look at the genre of minor character elaboration. Along the way, he also makes a historical argument—kind of. The title of the first chapter on form (“Active Readers and Flexible Forms”) is accompanied with some dates (1966– 1971), as is the second chapter: “The Real and Imaginary Politics of Minor-Character Elaboration, 1983–2014.” Although one wonders about the decade between 1972 and 1982, this makes it seem like the three methodological axes also follow a historical chronology. Parts of Minor Characters suggest as much. In the introduction, for example, Rosen writes of “the trajectory of the genre—from its emergence amid the insurgent political movements and postmodernist experimentation of the 1960s; through the mid-1980s, when it is increasingly deployed and its principal conventions become visible; to the 1990s and 2000s, when the culture industry embraces and aggressively markets minor character elaboration as a form of genre fiction” (4). However, when we arrive at the third chapter, “‘An Insatiable Market’ for Minor Characters,” the historicizing dates of the previous two chapters have disappeared. Here we see Rosen’s impulse not to tell a chronological story about the genre’s development, which he elsewhere insists does “not occur teleologically,” even though he also contends, just sentences earlier, that “ironic narrators and fragmented forms will largely give way to formerly minor characters that contemporary authors transform into sentimental narrator-protagonists,” which will in turn “facilitate a swell of production of highly conventional popular fiction for a multinational publishing industry” (82). Over the course of the book, in other words, minor character elaboration both does and does not evince a clear historical trajectory.I bring up this tension in the argument only because it bears directly on Rosen’s broader championing of genre as an object of inquiry that makes possible a “triple-stranded approach” to literary scholarship (181). It’s true that one can examine the form, politics, and institutional function of a given genre, but each of those veins of inquiry also has its own history. The genre’s formal aspects aren’t just germane between 1966 and 1971. They’re relevant in 1966, 2016, and all the years in between. The same goes for its politics and institutional function. Trying to peg each methodological axis to a specific historical window doesn’t make a lot of sense. Historicizing the trajectory of the genre works against Rosen’s attempt to characterize it formally, politically, and institutionally, to “telescop[e] between levels of analysis.” It arbitrarily isolates the levels of analysis, although I think on some level Rosen recognizes the irresistible overlap of these axes, since he’s constantly referring backward and forward in his own text to chapters already read or yet to come. Which is, of course, how it should be. Form, politics, and institutions do overlap. But that’s why the book’s organization, along with its equivocal historicization of the genre, leaves the reader’s understanding of minor character elaboration simultaneously comprehensive and fractured.Even more fracturing, Minor Characters contains a fourth chapter, “The Logic of Characters’ Virtual Lives,” that doesn’t clearly connect to the previous three. Here, Rosen develops a compelling theory out of the unique way authors of minor character elaborations conceive character. In particular, the genre helps us understand “characters as constituted both by textual information and by an unregulated, variable process of readerly inference and supplementation” (158). In short, Rosen explains, “Characters are both what their texts say about them and what readers make of them.” This way of thinking about character, opened up by texts that practice minor character elaboration, pushes back against the strictly structural notion of character implied whenever a stodgy professor admonishes a student for talking about characters as if they are real people (“Don’t you know characters are just words on a page!?!”). For Rosen, that way of thinking about character belongs to a very specific, distinctly poststructural moment in literary history. Minor character elaboration, however, demands “a more pliable sense of character” (177) that challenges and expands our understanding of what it means to read. We must appreciate that a more referential notion of character, which imagines a character’s life beyond the page, isn’t naive. Instead, it’s one crucial side of a reader’s complicated negotiation between structure and reference in the production of textual meaning.Despite my concerns about its organization, Minor Characters is filled with such compelling insights and arguments. I particularly enjoyed Rosen’s observation about the common literary effects produced in the 1960s by poststructuralism and the cultural interventions of radical political movements; his insistence that a multicultural politics of liberated voices is susceptible to the conservative ideologies of liberal individualism; and his systematic analysis of the role that the highbrow literary canon plays in the marketing of lowbrow literary schlock. Taken together, Martin’s Contemporary Drift and Rosen’s Minor Characters make a strong case that the structures and logic of genre are increasingly indispensable, not just for the study of contemporary literature, but for literary study going forward.