Textual Practice

ISSN: 0950-236X (Print) 1470-1308 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtpr20

Contemporary fiction in the academy: towards a

manifesto
Robert Eaglestone
To cite this article: Robert Eaglestone (2013) Contemporary fiction in the academy: towards a
manifesto, Textual Practice, 27:7, 1089-1101, DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2013.840113
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2013.840113

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Date: 22 September 2016, At: 08:35

Textual Practice, 2013

Vol. 27, No. 7, 1089 1101, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2013.840113

Turning point

Robert Eaglestone
Contemporary fiction in the academy: towards a manifesto

Researching contemporary fiction in the academy raises uncomfortable

and worrying questions about what we academics do. It also reveals
that we have yet to come to a view not even a dissensus range of
views about what it means to research contemporary fiction. In
order to begin to develop such a dissensus, this manifesto outlines
nine questions or problems for the study of contemporary fiction.
Key words
Contemporary fiction; literary studies; genre; period; archive; value judgement; authorial intention; Martin Heidegger

# 2013 Taylor & Francis

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What makes a geek different from an academic?

When reading contemporary fiction, what differentiates a geek or a journalist or member of a reading group from an academic? They all read,
think, and respond to contemporary novels in ways analogous to academics. Geeks, who have reclaimed this once unkind word, display what
we might call a very good subject knowledge and are involved in reproducing their field through informal modes of teaching, recommendations,
and so on; they have specialist publications (fanzines and webzines) and
their own forms of writing (fanfiction, reviews, and blogs) with their
own specialised vocabulary; they have prizes (for example, science fiction
fans in the UK have the Clarke awards). Journalists are also (often)
highly knowledgeable about the business side of literary production;
again, they have their own genre of writing and publication; and they
are sometimes quite powerful people in the world of cultural capital and
impact. Reading groups have their own publications (magazines and webpages aimed specifically at them), their own habits, literary festivals, and so
on, and display their own knowledge of literature. And, of course, all these
people, like we academics, can read carefully and closely.
This question about expertise, about the difference between knowledge inside and outside the academy, is rightly asked across the discipline
of literary studies: however, in the study of contemporary fiction, the question is put at its most acute. As Ben Knights argued, in his now seminal
article, in our discipline, Literary studies or English, there is a
particular problem to be faced, since the subject matter and discourse
are actually continuous with everyday cultural activity: if you are to
lay claim to specialism, you have to find ways of marking off your
activity from what readers do anyway (talk about books, plays or
films), or day-to-day metalinguistic activity (talk about meanings).
If people are discussing Emmerdale or Harry Potter on the train,
the status of specialist discussion is obviously fraught.1
Knights points out that this is not a new problem. It was faced in the creation of English as a discipline in the first half of the last century and discussed
widely: Knights cites the Newbolt report, for example. The answer given then
lay in the idea of a professionalisation of the discipline which would create an
impermeable barrier between different forms of discourses about literature:
to create a new domain of educational knowledge necessitates drawing a
boundary around the . . . subject, and this in turn has obvious implications
for the identity of the learner.2 (Knights implication is that the core of the
Leavis/Scrutiny moment and the moment of theory in the second half of
the century, for all their differences, were alike in their desire to create an

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impermeable barrier to demarcate the discipline). However, as I have

suggested, in the study of contemporary fiction, this barrier looks all too permeable. In other sub-fields, there is at least a patina of mastery. One can read,
for example, material that non-academics do not: not just Dickenss novels,
but many of his now very obscure contemporaries, for example, as well as the
journals and newspapers of his day. (Although the Internet means that, these,
too, are now available to the very enthusiastic Dickens geek.) However, even
this thin patina is not available to us in the sub-field of contemporary fiction.
This means that, in the reading and understanding of contemporary
fiction, the difference between geeks, journalists, general readers, and academics cannot lie in a mastery of sources and knowledge of the subject possessed by the academics and lacking in the others. Non-academics may
know as much (or more) or have read as much (or more) than academics
have. They might also be involved in establishing their own canons and categories and their own forms of knowledge production (I am thinking of
journalists and geeks again). But there are further problems in relation
to the study of contemporary fiction. First, the field is so huge there is
always more to read and, worse, there is even more unread. We have in
our sub-field not only an open archive but also an archive that is continually proliferating and expanding. (The issue here is not simply the size of
the archive: most disciplines, and most sub-fields within disciplines, have
archives too enormous to be processed in a life time. The issue here is
that the archive of contemporary fiction is, by definition, continually
growing at a phenomenal rate: I will come back to this.) Second, the Internet means that knowledge of a traditional sort (dates, titles, and more
importantly the relationships between events, objects, and people) is very
open: we all use Wikipedia (although perhaps with different levels of scepticism). And in the study of contemporary fiction, it is not even clear what
knowledge means. It means more than knowing Will Selfs date of birth,
surely? (Its on Wikipedia.) Is it knowledge to feel something? To read? To
understand? What, after all, makes my understanding better than yours
when we cannot establish a traditional academic mastery?
Moreover, and in contrast to what many academics say, the difference
between geeks and academics does not lie in special cult or guild words,
jargon or professional concerns that academics have and other people do
not: it does not lie in a crude version of theory, in the fact that we say analepsis when geeks, journalists, and reading groups say flashback. But in
this very commonly held idea among academics something more
complex and demanding is revealed. Special words and concepts are the
sign of a trade or a discipline. Wittgenstein uses the metaphor of a city: our
language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and
squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from

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various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs

with straight regular streets and uniform houses.3
Special words and professional languages show you that you are now in
a particular quarter of the city. Some people think that these guild words exist
only to make outsiders feel lost in our quarter, which means they are simply
shibboleths. Well, of course sometimes they are are. But these words and the
concepts that go with them arise for a reason. They mark a discipline.

What is a discipline, anyway?

A discipline is a branch of education and research, or formation, which is

structured by questions which in turn create a field and an archive. The
basic questions are usually of the sort that look simple but turn out not
to be (what is literature? and is that novel any good?) and eventually
become more and more refined (how influenced was he by the differences
between the ten book and twelve book versions of Paradise Lost?). You have
come close to understanding a discipline when you know what questions its
practitioners ask and how they are answered. Special words jargon arise
precisely as the sedimented forms of those questions and attempts to answer
them. Learning a field means learning what these sedimented forms mean
and what they really are, it means learning the questions to which they
are the answers and seeing why those are the questions to be asked. (Of
course, inherent in a discipline there are problems of power, hierarchy,
and so on. These exist in all versions of all institutions: geeks and journalists
have them too, and perhaps they are worse when they are inexplicit.)
But if a discipline arises in the setting of its questions, and so the creation of its archive, it reaches something like maturity when its questions
turn from the archive to its own founding ideas and processes. Heidegger
argues that the real movement of the sciences takes place when their
basic concepts undergo a more or less radical revision which is transparent
to itself. He goes on to say that the
level which a science has reached is determined by how far it is
capable of a crisis in its basic concepts. In such immanent crises
the very relationship between positively investigative inquiry and
those themselves that are under interrogation comes to a point
where it begins to totter.4
That is, what we might call the maturity of a field lies in the very possibility of a crisis, lies in the problems it causes for itself. Everyone in the
wider discipline of English knows this and knows, for example, that the

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ascription of literary value to a poem is not straightforward or that canons

of literature do not simply happen.
However, in the study of contemporary fiction in the academy today,
we do not even have a clear idea of what the problems are. It is not that
there is a consensus: there is not even a disesnsus. We do not even know
what the basic concepts are that need to undergo a radical revision.
One glaring example of this is the issue of periodisation. Other subfields argue about, for example, the long or short nineteenth century:
there are at least terms of debate. In the study of contemporary fiction,
we do not even know to what extent we agree or disagree as to what contemporary means even in the mundane sense of when it is.
How far, if at all, is the study of contemporary fiction even capable of
a crisis in its basic concepts?
If it is not capable, if it is not even a discipline, there are serious risks
(serious in our little academic world at least). The first risk is that academics who work in this field basically become literary journalists reporting
on what is going on now, trend spotting, and doing a task somewhere
between a glorified cataloguer and a higher gossip columnist. Publishers
and journalists encourage us in this by producing books which report on
current fiction, student guides, textbooks, and so on. In doing this, we
become archivists or, seeing as the archive is limitless, modern antiquarians,
choosing the quaint and colourful for our cabinets. Not critics of contemporary fiction.
The second risk is that we fail to respond to the contemporary nature
of our field, the now-ness of it, which presumably is part of its excitement
and part of the reason we have chosen this speciality. We can trick ourselves
into treating it like older literature. For example, critics do not treat
Dickens and Conrad, on one hand, and Chaucer and Langland, on the
other, in the same way. Critics respond differently to the different singular
exigencies of each text, each period, and each series of special demands.
This means not least that we must avoid simply applying the same old critical and theoretical saws to contemporary fiction and simply marking up the
established categories of (say) sex/class/race/empire. Not that these things
are not important they are vital but they need to be developed and
nuanced at the same time by the contemporary. The risk here is that we
become no longer critics of contemporary fiction and become, rather, unfocused generic critics, performing routine acts of critical reading.

Nine not yet problems

For myself, I neither want to be a glorified journalist or modern antiquarian, nor simply a generic critic reproducing basic critical gestures. In order

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to avoid these risks, then, we need to work out what the problems in the
field are and face them, to develop at least a disesnsus. So, what are the problems? Everyday problems give us clues as to what the larger real problems are. Here I just touch on nine very, very briefly.

Period

I alluded to this earlier. In one way, we are different from some periods of
study which do not have fixed end dates (the long eighteenth century)
because we end in the now, this minute. But where do we begin? Traditionally, literary history is dated by watershed historical moments. In
the case of just the UK, might this be 1945, 1979, or 1997? Or some
other date (1963/Beatles/Lady Chatterley ban/sexual intercourse)? But
even in Western Europe, there are differences: in Spain, the contemporary
might begin with the death of Franco in 1975 and in Germany, with the end
of the cold war in 1989. Outside of Europe things are very different again:
contemporary might mean the end of the USSR in 1991 in Russia or Independence from Britain in 1947 in India. Different communities have difference senses of when they are living and when the current moment began.
Even the years given here are CE: there are other calendars (and why should,
say the year 2000 mark anything literary?). Periodisation itself is a suspect
gesture. In any case, it might seem odd to mark a literary period with an
extra-literary event, however momentous. It takes time for historical
events to move through into the literature, like the corpse in the glacier
in Sebalds The Emigrants, and for the literature to make historical events
intelligible. Instead, perhaps the contemporary might mark the end of a
previous literary age: the contemporary comes after modernism, perhaps,
or postmodernism. Then again, did everywhere have modernism? And
what did that consist of? It might be better to take a literary event as the
beginning the contemporary. Perhaps contemporary fiction begins with
Salman Rushdies Midnights Children (1981). This novel was not only a
huge international success the first global novel but also represented
the flourishing of postmodernism and was central in introducing new ideas
about memory, national identity, suffering, joy, about history, and about
writing itself which much contemporary fiction is still exploring.
This everyday problem about dates opens up to a deeper and more
complex problem. A period is not just about dates, the very idea of a
period, the process of periodisation implies a spirit of the age, a
theme, perhaps even a telos. What the spirit of the age is, or even if
such a thing could exist, is a topic on which no one will easily agree,
and yet this question however, vaguely formulated and complex is a
central part of being a critic of contemporary fiction. This problem also

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raises in an acute way a general critical problem about location in space and
in time. Put very crudely: what seems of the past for a graduate student of
25 seems oddly contemporary for an academic of 50 (a question of duration, perhaps, or of the difference between academic and living
history). Again, this is different to other areas of the field: Wordsworth
is, in one commonplace sense, contemporary to nobody alive: David
Eggers is. I am not sure there is any easy answer to this problem, but it
is real and does bear on critical work. Other disciplines that study the contemporary have similar problems.5 (My rough answer to this problem of
dates stems from but is not only a pedagogic concern: it seems odd
to be teaching a novel as contemporary to 20-year-old students whose
parents had not even met when it was published. My rule of thumb is
that the contemporary is the last ten years. But even this rough idea
shows how senses of age are shaped by pressing present concerns).

Archive

Again, to return to this issue. The field of study in contemporary fiction is

open for three reasons. First, because it is huge: like many disciplines, it is
beyond what any one person could ever read. This is not an unusual academic problem. What is more unusual is the second problem: our archive
is being created (not just uncovered) daily. This is not just a problem in its
own right but also points at a further problem: that the archive is also under
continual re-evaluation, for the reasons made clear in Tradition and the
Individual Talent (and in many other places). Every new work of art
changes the relations of all the past ones. This is not simply because one
writer from the past becomes hot (say B.S. Johnson recently), but these
sorts of changes are integral to the nature of art.
This everyday problem makes a profound difference to what we do.
For example, more traditional criticism reads (say) Walter Scott and,
building on the critical consensus, finds themes or strands of ideas in
Scott, and then writes about them. But we do quite the opposite:
because of the openness of our archive we choose the themes terror,
perhaps, or trauma and then find books that explore these themes.
This (brutally brief) description of the critical process reveals a difference
in approach between those contemporary texts around which a critical
debate has grown up and those which exist in a critical silence. Because
of this, the study of the contemporary novel suddenly looks as if it is
research into the now, into the themes of now and not fiction itself,
and that makes us, too, researchers into the now. This might be right
(and exciting, with a sort of faux-nobility) but it is surely problematic
and needs to be explored further.

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Authors

Contemporary authorship is a complex matter. For reasons to do with marketing authors are more and more prominent and are taken as a font of
authority or as a celebrity. The temptation to stop trying to work out
what a book thinks and instead turn to what an author says is very
strong, inside and outside the academy, especially when the author is in
front of you. At the same time, the standard author is dead argument
about intention looks more and more hokey. Again, this everyday issue
suggests that our ideas about authorship need reworking around ideas of
intentionality and the author-function: the seminal essays by Barthes
and Foucault need updating (Kaye Mitchells work on intentionality has
begun to do this).6 I think we can learn a great deal about what authors
can and cannot do from the fantastic and reassuringly lovely boom in creative writing. Creative writing has both introduced the discipline to new
questions and asked older questions in new and challenging ways.

Agents and publishers

I think that every academic working in contemporary fiction has at least

one bad story about trade publishers and agents. While some can be
very helpful, in the main agents, and trade publishers are very unhelpful
and resistant to academics. They do not see the point of us, which is
odd as we sell many, many thousands of copies of their books to our students (nearly a captive audience, in fact) and more importantly we create
the intellectual and cultural infrastructure within in which their business
grows. (I studied her in college so I downloaded the new one straight
away.) Yet this, too, reveals that one issue in contemporary fiction is
what we might call the contemporary history of the book: the ways in
which the business of publishing helps to shape and control contemporary
fiction. There seems to be a dearth of research into this aspect of the field.

Globalisation

Even more than by periodisation, the history of criticism is shaped by the

processes of national identity. This is visible even in the common name for
the discipline in the UK, English. Yet the contemporary novel, as the
2013 Booker Prize shortlist shows, is clearly postnational. In the globalised world, the very idea of a national tradition is out of date and
looks non-sensical, as a trip to any good bookshop will demonstrate.
These national distinctions now obscure more than illumine. Of course,

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there are still traditions that exist and flourish Scottish experimental
writing, for example but these are better understood as tracing a line
of flight or a path of descent (as novelists choose their own predecessors)
rather than embodying a national tradition. This is not a question simply
of provincialising Europe as Dipesh Chakrabarty might put it, but of
reconceiving the world and the world of the novel. Moreover, the fact
that more novels are translated into and from English than any other
language is no longer simply a colonial hangover but like so much in the
contemporary world, calls for a fuller theoretical investigation.

Genre

Genre is an idea in complete disarray in contemporary fiction. On the one

hand, the boundaries of genre are rigidly enforced by agents, publishers,
academics, booksellers, and journalists and on the other hand, the effects
of hybridity and the postmodern have left many novels creatively challenging traditional genre distinctions. A further symptom of this disarray lies
in the unending proliferation of names of genres and sub-genres for novels,
as if a need to classify writing has created an army of literary carpenters,
franticly manufacturing pigeonholes in which to fit new novels. This everyday problem reveals a larger issue with the idea of genre.
In the study of contemporary fiction, very little consideration is given
to issues of genre, traditionally understood, in relation to questions of
value. Indeed, it is taken as axiomatic that serious or literary fiction is
a genre of its own (Booker fiction) and that thrillers, science fiction,
and romances are as good as serious fiction. Of course, all writing is suitable for academic study, and, for example, one can learn a lot about a
society from novels that explore the relation between criminals and the
police. The history of the relationship between genre and literary value is
long and complicated. While the Leavises decried all forms of genre
fiction, more or less, the reaction in the 1970s and 1980s was simply to
reverse this. However, for all its origins in a (rightly) democratic and
anti-snobbish feeling, I think that this situation has a very worrying consequence for fiction.
Derrida offers a pointer towards a definition of the literature: it is a
strange institution that allows one to say everything. Literature or,
more specifically, fiction, in which one can say anything has no genre
rules unlike, say, a work of history which refers to external documents, has
a narrative about a past event, is usually in the third person and so on.
This freedom makes people uneasy. But a work of genre fiction has limits
and rules. Thrillers have adventures; detective stories have detectives
(usually) and certainly detection; and science fiction has its novum. These

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limits are why David Shields writes that genre is a minimum security
prison.7 This question can be looked at through a sort of thought experiment: in 2005, Kazio Ishigorus novel Never Let me go was shortlisted for
both the UKs serious fiction Prize, the Booker, and the UKs science fiction
prize, the Clarke Awards, because it featured a staple of science fiction, the
idea of clones.8 However, we cannot imagine the opposite: that is, we
cannot imagine a non-Science fiction novel with absolutely no clones
or robots or spaceships or hair that photosynthesises or anything typical of
science fiction novels being shortlisted for a Science Fiction prize precisely
because it has none of those things. Of course, genre is not made up by
awards, but this illustrates a key idea about the limits of genre fiction.
But what limits does serious fiction have? If it can say anything, do
anything in writing, then it has no limits. To imply that serious fiction is a
genre of writing is, wrongly, to limit its possibilities in both its creation and
its understanding. If fiction can say anything, then genre fiction is limited.
This is not to say it is bad or good, or better or less well written or less valuable or that it cannot deal with serious social or personal issues, nor to say
that all literary fiction is good (some is dull, uninspiring, and clicheridden), but it is to say that genre fiction is restricted. Ironically, it is
restricted by precisely those things that people like about it (killer robots
or grim detectives with nothing but whisky in their fridges etc.). Moreover,
of course, because of its popularity, genre fiction has a wider social reach
than unrestricted fiction. The distinction between serious and genre
fiction might be remade through a distinction between open, unrestricted
fiction, and closed, restricted fiction. Open fiction is what used to be
called literary fiction, able to cover anything, in any form. Closed
fiction is what used to be called as genre fiction, shaped by its own selfchosen restrictions.

Value and judgement

Two linked problems. Issues of literary judgement and value are now integral to the discipline of literary studies as problems, rather than sensibilities
to be refined. However, to express explicitly a value judgement in a formal
setting a journal article or a conference paper is almost taboo. In other
sub-fields in the discipline, this taboo can be avoided because topics are, in
the main, established: there is such a scholarly weight behind Milton that
Miltonists do not need to claim he is a genius. However, in contemporary
fiction, because we judge all the time which novels to read, research and
teach, to avoid confronting issues of value is an intellectual contortion.
Indeed, worse, it is an affectation. While formally in papers and articles
expressing judgements is taboo, informally, in corridors and over coffee

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at conferences, we do it all the time and with gusto. Something is amiss

when formal and informal behaviours are so very different.
In fact, of course, we are all the time making implicit literary judgements. Sometimes these are only lightly hidden (a discussions of a novels
politics is in part, but only in part, a value judgement). But even to discuss
a novel, to teach it or to give a paper on it is to make a value judgement on
it: that it is interesting, well or badly written, and so on. In the study of
contemporary fiction, we ought to be explicit about our judgements. Of
course, the discipline is no longer (if it ever was) just about value judgements, nor are the values of today those that empowered the great canon
makers of the mid-twentieth century, but these issues are still present
and powerful. And we should try to avoid affectation.
One consequence of this taboo is that it is hard to articulate responses
to wider literary patterns. For example, in the fiction of the last ten years or
so there has been a strange and new interest in the child: as protagonists in
Ali Smiths fiction and victims in Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan. There
is also a sort of childishness, playful and full of pathos in Eggers first novel
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and a very problematic child
narrator in Foers Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close who threatens to
turn 9/11 into mawkish sentimentality and political simplicity. And of
course there is the huge, post-Potter rise in childrens fiction (indeed, we
are lucky to be living in a golden age of childrens fiction, for mainly commercial reasons: see agents and publishers above). It is hard to discuss the
new childishness, even before turning to Lee Edelmans political and
theoretical argument in No future, without explicitly evoking values and
concerns. Lots of childrens fiction, especially books aimed at boys, is
astonishingly badly written.
Form

Finally, there is the issue of form. Form and formal innovation is that which
makes contemporary fiction contemporary (Nathalie Sarrautes baton of
innovation passing from one generation to another). Is there here a sign of
some possible consensus? There seem to be three broad linked areas of
formal innovation in the contemporary novel. The first is a retreat from
the extreme playfulness of postmodernism and the emphasis on textuality
and a turn to a concern with narrative. This, however, is not a return to a
pre-postmodernism because these writers bring a knowledge of postmodernism and its rhetorics with them but decline to use them as freely. David
Mitchells Cloud Atlas is an example here, as are Jonathan Franzens novels,
which are more strictly realist. If it was not too silly a word (it is) we
could call this post-postmodern. Second, there is a return to a sort of

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modernism and a rediscovery of the experimental fiction of writers like B.S.

Johnson and Ann Quin. Ali Smiths wonderful novels The Accidental and
There But For The are of this sort as is Hari Kunzrus Gods without Men.
Finally, there is a challenge to the very fictiveness of fiction by the sort of
desire in writing that David Shields, in the book of that name, describes as
reality hunger. Writers inspired by Sebald, such as Robert MacFarlane,
are part of this, but it is the work of David Eggers that best exemplifies this
trend. Yet even given these three very broad illustrative strands, the issue of
form is very much unexplored in work on contemporary fiction: indeed,
Angela Leightons wonderful book on poetry On Form suggests that although
it is at the core of the discipline, no one really knows what form means.

Conclusion

The study of contemporary fiction is, oddly, rather a new sub-discipline or,
perhaps, it is one that is constantly renewing itself and is currently in the
early stages of a new incarnation. There have been a range of recent conferences taking it as their theme. Brand new journals have appeared (I am
thinking of the excellent Alluvium, edited by Caroline Edwards and Martin
Paul Eve, and of C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings edited by
Katy Shaw and Deborah Philips, and, at a close tangent, of The White
Review). I suggested that disciplines are shaped by questions, and that
they reach maturity when they question their own questions. However,
the study of contemporary fiction does not even know what its questions
are despite the unique complications it faces in relation to periodisation,
the archive, authorship, the business of fiction, globalisation, genre,
value judgements, and form. The risks of not facing up to these issues in
the study of contemporary fiction are that we become modern antiquarians, picking oddities that pique our interest to display to the public, or
generic critics, showing off our honed senses with no focus on the
nature of the contemporary. To avoid these alternatives, critics of contemporary fiction face a double but interlinked task: to engage with contemporary fiction and simultaneously to develop new ways of understanding
it. These new ways need to create not communal answers but rough
fields of consensus and dissensus around, at least, the problems I have
suggested. Then we will be able to live up to the critical task we seem to
have been set: in Frank Kermodes subtle words, it is not expected of
critics as it is of novelists and poets that they should help us to make
sense of our lives; they are bound only to the attempt the lesser feat of
making sense of the ways in which we try to make sense of our lives.9
University of London

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Notes

1 Ben Knights, Intelligence and Interrogation: The Identity of the English

Student, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 4.1 (2005), pp. 33 52 (35).
2 Ibid., p. 36.
3 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1963), p. 8
4 Heidegger Martin, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), H.9.
5 See, for example, Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, and Anton Vidoke, eds,
What Is Contemporary Art? (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010).
6 See, inter alia, Kaye Mitchell, Intention and Text (London: Continuum, 2008).
7 David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2010),
p. 70.
8 It status as science fiction is examined in much more detail by Gabrielle Griffin,
Science and the Culture Imaginary: The Case of Never Let Me Go, Textual
Practice, 23.4 (2009), pp. 645 663.
9 Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1967), p. 3. I would like to thank Joseph Brooker, Doug Cowie, Bianca
Leggett, Ben Markovitz, Adam Roberts (who posed the question with which
I start, and to whom this article is dedicated with admiration and affection),
and Tony Venezia for informative conversations on these topics.

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