J.D. Porter (Penn)

Genres of Existence; or, What exactly is nonfiction?

While analyzing literary genre as it appears in a large dataset scraped from the book review website Goodreads.com, my colleagues and I have consistently found evidence supporting literary critic Catherine Gallagher’s observation that “the primary categorical division in our textual universe is between ‘fiction’ and ‘nonfiction’”. This is especially clear in our network graphs of the co-occurrence of the tags users assign to books, since community detection algorithms find a fiction/nonfiction divide even at very low granularity. Yet the network does not just show a divide; it also shows that the two categories are deeply connected—a tag like “France” or “family” might show up in a history or a mystery, a cookbook or a romance novel. Genres in this graph are not discrete islands, but densely interconnected regions in a single continuous space. If the distinction between fiction and nonfiction can be understood as a genre difference—as philosopher Stacie Friend has argued—then we ought to treat them as part of a continuous single space as well. This might have interesting metaphysical implications, since the big difference between fiction and nonfiction seems to be their ontological stances (one refers to things that are “made up”, the other to things that are “real”), and continuity between the two categories suggests a similar lack of hard-and-fast divisions between real and made-up things. In this talk, I explore the implications of this idea, drawing on ongoing digital humanities investigations of genre, philosophical deployments of network metaphors, and scholarship on the metaphysics of fictions, literary and otherwise.