This week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Patrik Engisch and Julia Langkau’s (eds.) recent book: The Philosophy of Fiction: Imagination and Cognition. On Monday, we began with an introduction from Patrik Engisch and Julia Langkau. Commentaries will appear Tuesday through Thursday. Today, Michel-Antoine Xhignesse comments on the papers in Part 1: Fiction and The Definition of Imagination.

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Blood and Phlegm: Deflating Fiction

The Philosophy of Fiction: Imagination and Cognition opens with a deflationary broadside against some well-loved (and well-worn) intuitions about fiction and the imagination.

A post by Michel-Antoine Xhignesse

I really like reading historical fiction. I mean, I really really like it. I don’t mean Honoré de Balzac, Robert Graves, or Georgette Heyer, though. I’m talking about the kind that comes in a series of a dozen or more installments, which features vikings (or Romans!), and is structured around some big, historical set-piece battle—the bloodier, the better! Once you’ve read a few dozen of these, you start to suspect they might be written to a template.

These are paradigmatic examples of what Thomas J. Roberts (1993) called ‘junk fiction’, but which a kinder reader might prefer to call ‘genre’ or ‘pulp’ fiction. These are novels which aspire to be page-turners and which belong to well-established genres, but whose plots are somewhat… formulaic. Think airport novels and drugstore Harlequins; Agatha Christie and Anne Rice; Danielle Steel, Michael Crichton, and Stephen King. Even children read a lot of them—remember Goosebumps, Nancy Drew, and the Hardy Boys?

In film and TV, these are the soaps, romcoms, slashers, and zombie films; Rosemary & Thyme, Stargate, and Star Trek. This isn’t to say that junk fiction is of generally low aesthetic merit; Bernard Cornwell’s Warlord Chronichles, for example, are a remarkable piece of work, as is Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002). It’s just that when we pick these up, we have a pretty good idea of what we’re in for.