Marginal Genre Research Articles

“INNUMERABLE DEPTH OF BOOKS”. DUSHECHKINA E.V. “THE AUSTERE JOY OF CONTEMPLATION”: ARTICLES ON RUSSIAN CULTURE, COMPILED AND EDITED BY E.A. BELOUSOVA. MOSCOW, NOVOE LITERATURNOE OBOZRENIE, 2022. 808 P.

The collection analyzes medieval Russian literature in its most diverse manifestations (The Tale of Bygone Years, the translated Legend of the Indian Kingdom, the message of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich to the Metropolitan, the future Patriarch Nikon, etc.), poetry of the 18th century (above all odes by Lomonosov and the poem by N.A. Lvov Russian 1791), Russian literature of the 19th century (Tyutchev, Leskov, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Chekhov), works for children, children’s literature, the history of the New Year holiday in Russia, Russian anthroponymy, including literary. Research by E.V. Dushechkina is diverse, reflects the breadth of the author’s scientific interests, the desire to consider literary phenomena in a cultural context. Another distinctive feature of E.V. Dushechkina — invariable attention to ‘particulars’: to little-known works of the classics (for example, these are the stories by Leskov Waste Dancers and Offended before Christmas), to such marginal genres in comparison with ‘big’ literature as the Christmas story and the ‘dacha’ text. Among the grateful readers of this book, there will undoubtedly be philologists, and cultural historians, and school teachers, and students, and university professors.

“Edible Aesthetics”: Blurring Boundaries between Pastry and Art

The inquiry into whether food can be classified as “art” has long been a subject of debate. From its roots tracing back to Plato, this question has attracted the attention of both artistic movements and philosophers, especially throughout the twentieth century. In this paper, I aim to revisit this contentious issue by exploring the realm of pastry making as a form of art. Within the broader discourse on this topic, pastry emerges as a distinctive medium. Since sweets have historically transcended their mere nutritive functions, pastry may establish an immediate connection between art and food. Simultaneously, it reiterates the persistent challenges of encompassing the edible domain within conventional aesthetic theories. Throughout various contexts and periods, confectionery has evolved through the reproduction or imitation of visual arts, often reflecting the prevailing artistic climate of its flourishing periods. Moreover, due to its intimate association with rituals and celebratory occasions, pastry carries a profound cognitive and metaphorical framework that enhances its expressive potential, capturing the attention of many artists. By exploring the intersection of pastry and various artistic genres, drawing on illustrative examples ranging from modern European pièce montées to American cake design and Japanese wagashi, I critically examine the possibility and potential aesthetic qualities of this marginal genre, thereby opening up broader inquiries into the loose categorizations and fluctuations within the intricate domain of art.

Le Défi des diaristes maghrébins: situations, contraintes et horizons de l’écriture journalière au Maghreb

In Maghrebi literature, the diary remains a marginal genre and writers have an ambivalent relationship with diaristic writing. This article begins by identifying and studying four major situations of Maghrebi diaristic writing based on its relationship with fiction, history, politics and autobiography. A more focused study of the diaries of Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine, Abdelkébir Khatibi and Abdellatif Laâbi then sheds light on the constraints of diaristic practice. The diary, whether interrupted or diverted towards other forms of writing, is construed by the three Moroccan writers as hybrid and unstable, favouring the duplication of the ‘I’ and forming connections with the diarist’s œuvre. Driven by a complex and dynamic writing, the diary seems to tend toward the fragment that embodies both the uncertainty of the diarist and his quest for a literary work of which the diary could be the core, the margin or the horizon.

Dietary Calendars in the Slavic Middle Ages: A Case Study

Thе article attempts to delineate the boundaries of dissemination of dietary calendars in the Balkan Slavic cultural area through the evidence that can be obtained from the names, places, and very rarely patrons, found in the manuscripts that contain them. Special attention is paid to the most eminent men of letters who included dieteticons in their miscellanies – the Moldavian copyist Gavriil Urik, the Serbian monks Gavriil of Mount Athos and Gavrilo Trojičanin, and the Bulgarian priest Avram Dimitrievič. The analysis of the dissemination of dietary calendars in mediaeval South Slavic and Slavic-Moldavian literatures shows that the trajectory of this marginal genre started from royal codices, ran through manuscripts commissioned by rich patrons and produced in scriptoria, and ended in the miscellanies of ordinary priests and laypersons. Whatever their hierarchical dynamics may be in Slavic literatures, they, as a whole, remain outside the context of properly medical knowledge, gravitating around miscellanies of divinatory and astrological works, erotapokriseis and apocrypha.

Literature Counts: The Feelings of Overwhelmed

Literature Counts: The Feelings of <i>Overwhelmed</i>

The Female Fantastic vs. The Feminist Fantastic: Gender and the Transgression of the Real

Since Ann Richter coined the term “fantastique féminin” in 1977, many works in different languages have postulated a “female” way of writing fantastic texts, depending on the selection of themes, language, characters, supernatural elements, and the portrayal of the uncanny and the monstrous. This claim on the existence of a "female fantastic" reflects central issues in Feminist Literary Theory: on the one hand, the will to identify an aesthetic mode opposed to the dominant patriarchal discourse (female writing, the use of specific themes, etc.); on the other hand, the argument that there are marginal genres, forms and styles voluntarily removed from the central canon (this would also apply to the fantastic written by men). This article offers a review of the theoretical viability of the main works on this subject to show how most of them define the fantastic in terms of recurring themes that, paradoxically, tend to also appear in the works of male authors. Much more productive and more viable from a theoretical point of view is to study the "feminist fantastic" (this is the central thesis of this article), given the tendency of a significant number of women writers to use the fantastic as an element of destabilization of cultural, ideological and political characteristics and values of patriarchy.

A Keyword Analysis of Stance and Engagement in Three-Minute Thesis (3MT) Presentations

Due to the increasing influence of promotional culture on academic discourse, new marginal genre texts with informative and promotional purposes are emerging. In this study, we investigated a novel promotional but under-researched academic spoken genre, 3MT (three-minute thesis) presentations, which only allow the speakers 3 minutes to promote their research findings. We generated keywords of this genre using size effect metrics to identify the features of 3MT presentations delivered by PhD candidates and trained undergraduate ESP learners. The addressors were compared in their use of personal pronouns to present their stance and to interact with the audience. The results revealed that the PhD candidates tended to highlight the values and rationale of their research, whereas the ESP learners placed greater emphasis on their methodology. The PhD candidates were better at using rhetorical devices, i.e. reader pronouns and inclusive we , to invite the audience into their discourse community. Some similarities between the two groups were also identified. For example, ‘ you’ was less deployed by both groups compared with its use in other academic spoken genre texts. Our study shows that genres are not only evolving and changing but are also heavily affected by technology advancements. Findings can also help ESP practitioners better prepare learners to make persuasive presentations in minimal time by employing personal pronouns.

Утопія С. Подолинського та її відгомін в українській літературі

The article deals with the connections between S. Podolynsky and Ukrainian literature, namely his artistic, educational and non-fiction works, scientific studies that testify to the philosophical principles of that era, create an additional explanatory context for the literary process, and the influence of the scientist's ideas on art literature. The object of study was mainly the texts of the thinker, such as “Steam machine” and “Human work and its relation to the distribution of energy.” The relevance of the study is seen in the need for a comprehensive understanding of the so-called populism, which in its individual samples went beyond provinciality and intellectual limitations, attesting to the art of the next era. The defining feature is the cultural and historical method established in Ukrainian literary studies. The novelty of intelligence is to shift the focus to little-known figures and marginal genres of Ukrainian literature. Interest in the figure of S. Podolynsky, what grew over time in a separate direction of research, dates back to the periods of national revival in the 20th century. Historians and economists wrote the most about him. However, physicians, physicists, biogeochemists, ecologists from Ukraine and abroad have gradually joined. The grows of the number of researchers and, in particular, the diversification of the subject of research with the involvement of all new areas of science is evidenced by the underestimated true scale of the personality of the Ukrainian thinker over the decades. We consider it necessary to focus, firstly, the genre specificity of the work “Steam machine” in the context of that day attracts attention, secondly, on the search for the echo of the ideas of this scientist in Ukrainian literature of the 19th and the first third of the 20th century. It is argued that the ideas of S. Podolynsky, in particular the autotrophy of mankind, as well as compositional and genre innovations could have influenced on the formation of scientific and social science fiction in Ukrainian literature. From our point of view, the proposed problem has the prospect of further elaboration, in particular the hypothesis about the connection between the futurological forecasts of S. Podolynsky and the ideological and artistic content of the short story by Panas Myrny “Dream” and V. Vynnychenko’s novel “Sun Machine”.

English Influences, Russian Experiments

Abstract This article analyzes the Neo-Russian style in children’s book illustrations in Russia and compares it to analogous artistic developments in England, revealing a similar evolutionary path to that of other national variants of Art Nouveau. The initial aesthetic impulse for this evolution came from the promotion of crafts and medieval handicrafts by “enlightened amateurs.” The history of children’s books, with its patently playful nature, aestheticization of primitives, and free play with quotations from the history of art, is an important episode in the history of Russian and English Art Nouveau. Starting with a consideration of the new attitude towards the “theme of childhood” as such, and a new focus on the child’s perception of the world, this article reveals why the children’s book, long treated as a marginal genre, became a fertile and universal field for artistic experimentation at the turn of the twentieth century. It then focuses on Elena Polenova’s concept of children’s book illustrations, which reflected both her enthusiasm for the British Arts and Crafts movement, and, in particular, the work of Walter Crane, and her profound knowledge of Russian crafts and folklore. The last part of the article deals with the artistic experiments of Ivan Bilibin and the similarities of his book designs to those of Walter Crane.

Popular Music and Genre in Mainstream Nollywood

This article examines how genres of Nollywood soundtrack, which draw mainly from Nigerian popular music, effectively give Nollywood film genres their unique identification. This music genre–film genre association not only sets Nollywood apart from other cinema traditions, but also confers a marginal genre identity on its film music. The approach of this study is primarily ethnographic: pooling and teasing out inferences from the local discourse on film music practice, which the experiential evidence from forty classic Nollywood film samples support. The outcome shows that popular music is and can be a critical tool for distinguishing among film genres.

Radio drama and its avatars in the work of Caryl Phillips

Between 1984 and 2016 Caryl Phillips wrote nine radio plays which were all broadcast on the BBC. Meant for a different circuit of communication than his novels, essays and published stage plays, Phillips’s radio plays might be dismissed as minor writing, yet they constitute a fascinating, under-investigated body of texts which are worth exploring alongside the rest of his work. Thematically, Phillips’s radio drama covers similar ground to his fiction and essays. Starting from this sense of familiarity, this article examines the formal and communicative specificities at play in Phillips’s contributions to the radio drama genre. Focusing on two radio plays entitled Crossing the River (1985) and A Kind of Home: James Baldwin in Paris (2004), this piece discusses which features of this marginal genre inform Phillips’s radio-dramatic characterization of protagonists with complex identities, but also, more generally, how these aspects infuse his formally experimental fiction.

What titles tell us: The prose poem in the little magazines of early modernism

This essay takes up the question of the prose poem as a marginal genre in British and American modernism and examines its presence in the little magazines during the second decade of the twentieth century through 1920. Employing Gérard Genette’s notion of the ‘paratext’, I look at the function of titles in establishing or suggesting genre. While direct references to the ‘prose poem’ or ‘poem in prose’ are rare, titling practices perform a number of functions that shape possibilities for the genre. Translations of poetry in prose form appear, and their titles, in identifying the source, draw on past literary traditions, thus legitimising poetry in prose. Titles that employ analogies with other art forms assert a status for the texts as art, and suggest ways of reading them. Finally many titles evoke an ontology of the partial, the fleeting, and the fragmented, while the prose poems play out these modernist themes and demonstrate the form’s experimental edge.

"Original Practices," Lost Plays, and Historical Imagination: Staging "The Tragedy of Merry"

"Original Practices," Lost Plays, and Historical Imagination:Staging "The Tragedy of Merry" Emma Whipday and Freyja Cox Jensen In 1594, Thomas Merry murdered his neighbor, Master Beech, by hitting him repeatedly over the head with a hammer. Merry was condemned and hanged, along with his sister, Rachel, who was found to be complicit in the crime. The murder was reported in a news pamphlet—"a booke entytuled A True Discourse of a Most Cruell and Barbarous Murther Comitted by one Thomas Merrey" (August 29, 1594)—and in five broadside ballads published in August and September that year (Knutson and McInnis, "Thomas Merry (Beech's Tragedy)"). In 1600, William Haughton and John Day's "The Tragedy of Merry" (also called "Beech's Tragedy") was performed at the Rose, as documented in Philip Henslowe's Diary (Greg 1: 114). The fictionalized version of the crime played in the same South-wark neighborhood where the murder originally took place. Despite the evident hold of the murder upon the popular imagination, demonstrated both by the proliferation of ballads and pamphlets capitalizing on "news" of the murder and by the staging of Beech's death six years after the murder itself took place, the contemporary narratives of the murder are lost. None of the texts is extant: we find only their traces in records in the Stationers' Register, and in a series of entries in Henslowe's Diary. Yet one portrayal of the crime survives. In 1601, the play Two Lamentable Tragedies was published in quarto, attributed to Robert Yarrington (who appears to have been a scribe) (Hanabusa xv–xvi; Greg 2: 208–209). [End Page 289] The title page describes these two tragedies: The one, of the murther of Maister Beech a Chaundler in Thames-streete, and his boye, done by Thomas Merry. The other of a young childe murthered in a Wood by two Ruffins, with the consent of his Uncle (Yarrington). Two Lamentable Tragedies is unusual in representing two interlocking narratives: one set in Padua in the non-specific past, concerning the murder of a ward by his uncle, and the other, a "true crime," set in contemporary London—the tragedy of Thomas Merry. The two narratives are framed and interlinked by narrator-figures: Homicide, Avarice, and Truth. The relationship between the play performed at the Rose and the surviving playtext has been much debated (Hanabusa xxv–xxviii; Wiggins 305), but whether Yarrington's "Merry" narrative is some form of memorial reconstruction of Henslowe's play, or a separate play altogether, it would seem that both are based on Merry's crime. Indeed, it may be useful to borrow Barbara Hodgdon's term for the relationship between Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew and the anonymous The Taming of a Shrew, as "representing different stages of an ongoing theatrical 'commodity,'" of which the exact relationship, chronology, and authorship is impossible to determine (Hodgdon 36). As a later stage of the ongoing theatrical "commodity" of Merry's crime, Two Lamentable Tragedies seems to contain extensive traces of an earlier lost play, yet has itself neither a stage history, nor a recorded relationship with a known author, company, or space. Indeed, it has been suggested that it was never staged, or is even unstageable (Hanabusa xii–xiii). Two Lamentable Tragedies therefore presents unique opportunities for scholars interested in marginal genres, the possibilities for engaging with "lost" plays, and the role of performance practice as—and as a complement to—research, in the study of early modern drama, culture, and society. This article charts our explorations of these possibilities, a process that shared many of the concerns of Oliver Jones's work in Stratford discussed elsewhere in this special issue, but from a different perspective: Jones seeks to explore and reimagine a space, we, a text. We excerpted "The Tragedy of Merry" from the surviving text of Two Lamentable Tragedies, and, working with a company of professional actors and academics, staged our historical imagining of the play at University College London in March 2014.1 A second production, using a new cast of amateur actors with almost no prior experience of early modern drama, was staged at The Walronds in Cullompton, Devon, in...

"Faces of Evil in Modern Fantasy"

Fantasy literature has enjoyed a vast increase in cultural prominence in the last quarter-century. What was once considered a marginal genre of scant literary merit is now enormously popular, enjoying huge sales and steadily increasing critical respectability. This change is partly due to the fashion in the early years of this century for cinematic adaptations of fantasy novels. Film “franchises” such as The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter sold tens of millions of tickets apiece and prompted sympathetic reappraisals of their source material among both popular and academic audiences. Though this trend seemed to have run its course by about 2010, the television show Game of Thrones (2011-present) appears to have taken it to a new level. After six seasons the show continues to break ratings records and seems likely to be remembered as part of the zeitgeist of this decade. This success has naturally prompted renewed interest in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, the series of novels on which the show is based. Recent editions of Martin’s books have become runaway bestsellers and the forthcoming installments will no doubt do the same. Martin has also become a success with the critics, who praise the complexity of his characters and the moral depth of his work. Long-time readers and scholars of fantasy obviously welcome this.

MAPS, ART, POWER

This history of maps is a history of shifting power relations, essentially between the growing, consolidating state and its citizens, allies and enemies; but ultimately between governments and those affected by them at every level and in all aspects of life. In the process, the idea of making and using maps gradually became ways of mediating all kinds of relations among people in every walk of life. Today maps spread the power of the state into every dimension of our existence, but also show us the route to the theater, the location of animal species, and where people are having sex. At the same time, but in a comparatively minor key, maps became tools for imagining alternative worlds, mostly at the hands of novelists, but in the twentieth century maps emerged in the practices of artists. During the last century and explosively at its end and in this century, map art has become, first an eccentric gesture in this or that artist’s practice, then a marginal genre, and now a taken-for-granted form seen everywhere. Map art springs from many sources, but fundamentally it opposes itself to the contemporary form of the state whenever that might have been, to the exercise of state power, and to the status quo more generally. This follows from the fact that the map has become an indispensible part of state authority – and vice versa – so that an assault on the facticity of the map amounts to an assault on the authority of the state. In a sense this makes map art a kind of counter-mapping, though most counter-mapping is opposed merely to this or that aspect of state maps, trying to replace them. In general map art is more broadly opposed to the entire map project.

A Uniform of a Writer: Literature, Ideology and Sexual Violence in the Writing of Rivka Alper

This essay explores the politics of women’s writing in the Zionist yishuv by examining the literary career of Rivka Alper, whose work features a difficult clash between a “feminine” narrative of sexual trauma and Zionist ideology. I discuss Alper’s literary trajectory from her first novel, Pirpurey mahapekha, a coming-of-age story of a young woman, which foregrounds themes of sexual trauma and gendered violence, to her second project, Ha-mitnaḥalim ba-har, a biography of a Zionist role model, one of the women founders of the colony of Motza. Alper’s transition from “personal” fiction to ideological literature is part of a process of an arduous self-fashioning toward carving a place for herself, albeit marginal, in the Zionist republic of letters. Her process demonstrates the predicament of writing as a woman in a Zionist cultural space that marks writing as an emasculating practice, but exclusively assigns male writers the role of national subjects. In such a space, I argue, transitioning to marginal genres in order to write for the collective emerges as a privileged alternative for an aspiring woman writer. And yet, as contents from Alper’s fictional writing infiltrate her biographic writing, the literariness of her “less literary” text exposes the exclusions that lie at the heart of the Zionist ideological project, and, in turn, reinscribes “the feminine” as a composite marker of these exclusions back into the Zionist text.

Spoken Poetry: the Rules of Social Discontent

This paper is an attempt to analyze the relative success of spoken poetry in the last decades. Poetry slams have become venues that attract more and more young talented people, larger audiences and the interest of the media. This should make us reconsider the role of poetry in the present cultural and social environment. I will insist on the importance of form and conventions in generating social networks that helped transform a marginal genre into a phenomenon most appealing to the young people as well as a financial success story.

The Sound of the English Picturesque in the Age of the Landscape Garden

ABSTRACTIn eighteenth-century England, painting, poetry and gardening were often labelled the ‘sister arts’. An increasing interest in English landscape scenes and an emerging taste for ‘nature tourism’ gave rise to the ‘picturesque’ movement. Contemporary writers seldom considered English music as part of this ‘sisterhood’, however, or treated music as a medium for conveying national scenic beauty. When the picturesque was discussed in connection with music, eighteenth-century critics tended to use the concept to explain the tactics of novelty and surprise encountered in German instrumental music. Plays with regularity and expectation were analogous to the surprises and irregularities of picturesque ‘beauty spots’ – natural features studied and imitated by contemporary landscape gardeners. Accordingly, recent musicological studies of the picturesque have also preferred to emphasize its kinship with the unconventional or subversive formal schemas in instrumental music by German composers.This article addresses the silent aporia in this discourse: the apparent absence of any participation in the picturesque movement by composers from England, the country most closely associated with this aesthetic. Focusing on the pictorialism and pastoralism of eighteenth-century English song texts and their musical treatment, this article reveals previously ignored connections between the veneration of national landscape and English vocal music. In consequence, the glee – a decidedly marginal genre in traditional eighteenth-century music historiography – emerges at the centre of contemporary aesthetic concerns, as the foremost musical vehicle for the expression of a distinctively English, painterly engagement with national landscapes.

The Sword or the Needle: The Female Knight-Errant ( xia ) in Traditional Chinese Narrative (review)

Reviewed by: The Sword or the Needle: The Female Knight-Errant (xia) in Traditional Chinese Narrative Paul S. Ropp (bio) Roland Altenburger. The Sword or the Needle: The Female Knight-Errant (xia) in Traditional Chinese Narrative Bern: Peter Lang, 2009. 425 pp. Hardcover $65.95, ISBN 978-3-0343-0036-0. Roland Altenburger’s study of the female knight-errant (nüxia) in Chinese literature from the Tang tale to the modern Republican-era novel is a thorough and insightful exploration of the topic, with equal attention to the literary and gender implications of this long tradition. In his introduction, Altenburger briefly traces the evolution of xiaoshuo (fiction) in China, from Tang classical tales and miscellaneous anecdotes to Song vernacular stories to Ming novellas and, by the late sixteenth century, to full-length novels. He suggests that all types of xiaoshuo were distinctly marginal genres until Pu Songling’s Liaozhai zhiyi in the seventeenth century and Cao Xueqin’s Honglou meng in the eighteenth century achieved widespread popularity and greatly raised the prestige of fiction as a serious art form. Precisely because fiction was marginal to the dominant orthodox culture, it provided a vehicle for the expression of subversive themes, including tales of the supernatural, the heterodox, and the strange. In this context, tales of female knights-errant were doubly subversive because the knight-errant stood outside the law and the control of the state, and female knights (nüxia), in addition, broke all the orthodox gender rules of women’s seclusion in the home and women’s subservience to fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons. Making a sharp distinction between the woman warrior (nüjiang) and the female knight (nüxia), Altenburger argues that the latter is entirely unrelated to warfare or to the defense of the state, but is rather motivated primarily by the personal quest for justice, frequently to avenge the unjust death of her father. The earliest avenger stories tended to feature women rather than men, perhaps because such tales were regarded as the more worthy of literary attention by virtue of their novelty. Altenburger notes that in every narrative of a female knight, her gender role reversal is a major component of the story. But whether this reversal is intended merely as an attention-grabbing oddity, a commentary on the weakness of men, a celebration of the strength of women, or some combination of these or other elements is often left highly ambiguous. The prototypical and most important nüxia tale from the Tang is the story of Nie Yinniang, attributed to Pei Xing (825–880) in its earliest extant version in the Taiping guangji. Abducted and taught martial arts and magical sword skills by a Buddhist nun, Nie Yinniang chooses her own spouse, a lowly mirror grinder, and [End Page 28] works for a warlord who she then deserts for a more virtuous one. She assassinates evildoers; protects her lord, the second warlord, from two assassination attempts; and eventually leaves her husband to retreat into the mountains. This tale was subversive for a number of reasons: it is full of magic and supernatural elements; Nie, fully as autonomous as any male, chooses her own husband from a social class far below her father’s, thereby assuring her own dominance in the marriage; and after working for the military general her father had served, she eventually abandons him and chooses instead to serve one of his rivals. Thus, at every turn, she refuses to be bound by the patriarchal rules and expectations of Confucian society. The story of Nie Yinniang was retold in many different versions and genres in subsequent eras, and she became “the archetype of the female xia figure” (p. 74). In some later versions, most strikingly in You Tong’s 1664 zaju drama, Hei bai wei (Black and white mule), the subversive elements were greatly altered and domesticated, as Nie herself is seen as less autonomous and her father and husband more assertive than in the original tale. In other later stories, Nie Yinniang reappears as an immortal with magical powers who passes her skills on to later generations. This, in effect, transfers her to the realm of myth and fantasy, where she...

&lt;i&gt;The possibility of an island&lt;/i&gt;; or, The double bind of Houellebecq’s apocalypse: when the end is not the end

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that “The possibility of an island” (2005), the latest novel by the controversial French author Michel Houellebecq, utilises a variety of so-called marginal genres such as millennial, apocalyptic, Utopian writing and science fiction to question and to continue the millennial project he elaborated in “Atomised” (2001). The latter novel, first published in French in 1998, explores the idea of a new order that would gradually come into existence during the new millennium, namely that of a neo-humanity produced through cloning. In “The possibility of an island” this Utopian construction turns unequivocally into a dystopia. This novel thus adds a double bind to the Apocalypse foreseen in “Atomised”: the end was not the end, but just the beginning of an intermediary phase.This analysis of Houellebecq’s novelistic techniques is based on theoretical descriptions of the genres on which the two novels draw, as well as narratological concepts formulated by Roland Barthes and Gérard Genette. The conclusion of the article points out that Houellebecq’s utilisation of marginal genres enables him to question contemporary civilisation and to investigate the consequences of scientific research on future generations.