(Un)Making a Genre: The Case of the Sad Girl Novel
This project studies the Sad Girl novel, which is a dominant, if reductive, label for contemporary literary fiction written by women about women. Combining insights on contemporary (digital) reading cultures with affective and aesthetic conceptualisations of genre, the research aims to be a comprehensive study of the Sad Girl novel.
The project contends that the ambiguous label, originating in the digital literary sphere, and co-opted by the publishing industry, offers crucial insights into the socio-industrial underpinnings of contemporary reading cultures. In studying the Sad Girl novel, the project will seek to traverse the distance between ‘label’ and ‘genre,’ between reader-created and industry-created categories, in ways that sheds light upon the networked nature of contemporary reading and publishing practices, as well as the contemporary understanding of genre as a socially and culturally oriented means of communication between texts and contexts.
The novels, on the other hand, offer resistance to the postfeminist demands of infinite optimism through narratives that disrupt the link between intense self-optimisation and attainment of the good life. The research will focus upon specific Sad Girl texts to probe the Sad Girl persona as a response to the conditions of neoliberal precarity. In doing so, it will argue for the centrality of negative affects (subsumed under the inadequate and pejorative ‘sad’) as crucial sites of protest and consciousness raising by virtue of being expressions of experience instead of resources to be controlled, managed, and optimized. The project will therefore consider how the Sad Girl novel is a new aesthetic mode and affective genre of the contemporary moment (of ‘impasse’) wherein traditional genres no longer provide sustainable affective attachments.
The overarching aim is to demonstrate how Sad Girl novels are timely responses to the present moment and significantly revealing texts in ongoing scholarship on reading cultures, the digital literary sphere, genre, (post)feminism, and affect.
Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Corinna Norrick-Rühl & Prof. Dr. Silvia Schultermandl