Genres and Concepts

all novels and texts

Genre : Postmodern literature

Fiction characterized by fragmentation, paranoia, self-reflexivity, and skepticism toward truth and meaning.

Lot 49 & White noise

Concept: Simulacrum

A copy without an original; representations replace reality, making it impossible to know what is “real.”

Lot 49, White noise & TARF

Concept: Metanarratives

Grand, universal stories that claim to explain history or truth

Lot 49, White noise, Beloved, TARF, UFJ

Omelas & borderlands

Concept Defamiliarization

Making the familiar strange to expose how constructed reality and systems really are.

Lot 49

Bloodchild & Omelas

Concept Media Saturation

Media images and simulations shape reality more strongly than lived experience.

White noise & TARF

Concept Risk Society

Modern society is defined by manufactured risks (toxicity, technology) that are hard to perceive or control.

White noise & UFJ

Genre Magical Realism

The supernatural appears as ordinary and real, reflecting historical trauma rather than fantasy.

Beloved & TARF

Genre: Bildungsroman

A narrative focused on a character’s growth from innocence to experience

UFJ

Concept: Rememory

Memory as something material and communal that exists outside the individual mind.

Beloved

Concept: History + Fiction

Fiction is used to tell historical truths that official histories silence.

Beloved, TARF & UFJ

Concept : Multiple Focalization

Shifting perspectives show how trauma and history are experienced differently

Beloved, Lot 49, White noise

Concept: Reproductive Violence

Enslavement’s control over Black women’s bodies and family structures.

Reproduction becomes a site of domination and dependence

Beloved & Bloodchild

Concept: The Body as Archive

Trauma and history are carried physically and emotionally in the body.

The body records pain, labor, and survival more truthfully than institutions.

Beloved & UFJ

Concept: Globalization

Economic and cultural systems that connect the world unevenly and violently.

TARF & UFJ

Concept: Deterritorialization

The loss of stable ties between culture, identity, and place.

TARF & UFJ - Borderlands

Concept: Environmental Injustice

Environmental harm affects marginalized communities.

TARF; UFJ ; Beloved & Omelas

Concept Borderlands

Family provides protection and continuity under conditions of precarity.

Borderlands, UFJ, Beloved

Genre Science Fiction

Uses speculative worlds to explore power, gender, reproduction, and ethics through defamiliarization.

Bloodchild & Omelas

Concept: Defamiliarization

Making familiar experiences strange to expose hidden power structures.

Bloodchild & Omelas

Concept Exploitation

the use of people, bodies, land, or resources for profit or power, where one group benefits while another is harmed, silenced, or denied agency.

UFJ, TARF, Bloodchild, Beloved

Concept: Commodification

the process by which people, bodies, emotions, nature, culture, or experiences are turned into objects with exchange value in a capitalist system.

White noise, TARF, UFJ, Beloved, Bloodchild

Concept: Metafiction

Fiction that draws attention to itself as fiction.
It reflects on storytelling, narration, authorship, and the act of reading, often breaking the illusion of realism.

Lot 49 & TARF

Concept: Hyperreality

Representations (media, images, simulations) become more real than reality itself,

White noise, Lot 49, TARF

Concept: Pastiche

Pastiche is the imitation or remixing of styles and genres without satire or critique

Jameson, Lot 49, White noise, TARF

Concept: Depthlessness

Refers to the loss of emotional, psychological, or historical depth.

Jameson, White noise, Lot 49, Omelas

Concept: Fragmentation

Fragmentation is the breakdown of linear narrative, stable identity, unified time, or coherent space: Reality appears as broken pieces

Beloved, Lot 49, White noise, Borderlands

Concept: Reader’s awereness

A strategy that makes the reader aware of their role in creating meaning.

Omelas, Lot 49, Beloved