Transgressing Fictions: Transgressive Fiction in Trans-National and Trans-Temporal Contexts (https://www.nemla.org/index.html)
Salve Regina University
Organization: NeMLA
Event: https://www.nemla.org/index.html
The term “transgressive fiction” was coined in 1993 by LA Times columnist Michael Silverblatt to describe a loosely related coterie of authors in the ‘80s and ‘90s whose writing has “violation at its core: violation of norms, of humanistic enterprise, of the body.” Silverblatt’s preliminary “sketch” of the genre’s leading voices was primarily American, almost entirely Anglophone, and exclusively white.
Since its coinage both the term and the archive it describes have widened to include both a more diverse set of contemporary Anglo-American authors and a broader set of transnational and transtemporal texts. In both academic and popular contexts “transgressive fiction” has come to loosely describe Anglo-American authors from Samuel R. Delany to J.G. Ballard, non-Anglophone writers like Ry? Murakami and Virginie Despentes, and historical antecedents ranging from Petronius’s Satyricon to the writings of the Marquis de Sade.
The para-academic provenance of “transgressive fiction” as a term and its liberal application, especially by non-scholarly readers, to a wide range of culturally and historically distinct texts make it a problematic, yet perhaps fruitful, term for academic, historicist scholarship. This panel proposes both to interrogate the risks and benefits of “transgressive fiction” as a scholarly rubric, as well as a bid to further widen its archive by considering neglected texts from across space and time that might, however loosely, be identified as transgressive fictions.
Proposals might ask:
- Why (not) use “transgressive fiction” over alternative terms like “blank fiction” (Annesley, Caveney, Young), “aggressive fiction” (Hume) or “queer experimental fiction” (Bradway)?
- What do we, as scholars or readers, wish to find transgressed by such fiction? Is the heterogeny of transgressive fiction’s archive part of its transgressive appeal?
- What neglected texts ought to be considered in the lineage of transgressive fiction? What contemporary texts resonate with its organizing principles?
Submissions accepted until September 20th, 2026. Submit at https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22718.
Ya'el Z. Frankel
yzfrankel@gmail.com
Doctoral Candidate
University of British Columbia (Vancouver)
https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22718
Ya'el Z. Frankel