Working Group on Narrative

Join us this month for the first Working Group on Narrative of the year! Luca Messarra will be discussing his chapter “Metapublishing Fictions” with Professor Héctor Hoyos as respondent. Join us at 5pm on November 19th in the Terrace Room of Margaret Jacks Hall. 

RSVP here to receive a pre-circulated copy of the chapter! Luca’s paper abstract is below:

“Metapublishing Fictions” theorizes the literal presence of the Publishing Industry (agents, editors, critics, marketing tours, etc.) in contemporary novels. I consider why the Publishing Industry publishes these texts that are seemingly critical of themselves, and why literary theorists are so interested in them. I argue that the rise of the typeset-quality print-on-demand book poses an economic and symbolic threat to publishers, who throughout the last half of the twentieth century alone held the productive keys and distribution networks that had enabled the production and widespread proliferation of professional textual aesthetics. The liberation of professional aesthetics from Big Publishing has meant that the authors of Big Publishing, and Big Publishing itself, must distinguish themselves from self-published print on demand so as to reassert their relevancy and acquire (future) capital. Combining Pierre Bourdieu with Walter Benjamin and Guy Debord, I historicize and critique the publication of metapublishing fictions as a recuperative strategy of status differentiation, wherein a particular brand of contemporary literary publishing is reified and spectacularly presented as the totality of contemporary authorship. These theories are concretized in the second half of the chapter with a close reading of R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface (2023).