The Fiction Factory: A Novel
Date
2018-04-24
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Abstract
This dissertation is composed of two parts. The first, a critical foreword titled “The Fiction Factory: On Precarity, Popularity, and Piecing Together Our Stories,” discusses my creative work through a theoretical lens. In it, I draw on contemporary discussions around precarity in cultural and academic work, theories of cultural industries, and scholars of the “ethical turn” in literature—such as Wayne Booth, Martha C. Nussbaum, and Marshall Gregory—to explore questions of agency and ethics in popular fiction. In complicating binaries (the sphere of art versus the sphere of commerce; work versus labour; friendship versus transactional relationships), and by taking Leslie McFarlane (better known as Franklin W. Dixon of Hardy Boys fame) as a case study, I seek to turn away from sometimes dismissive treatments of popular fiction and offer a more nuanced and charitable reading of the cultural objects—series fiction, ghostwritten thrillers, popular Young Adult novels—that live or die by the marketplace. The second part of this dissertation is the novel proper, “The Fiction Factory.” Taking inspiration from a New York Magazine exposé by journalist Suzanne Mozes of memoirist James Frey’s “fiction factory,” Full Fathom Five—a publishing venture initiated by Frey and staffed primarily by young Creative Writing MFA graduates who churn out Young Adult novels according to pre-determined formulae for appalling wages and no credit—the novel imagines a literal fiction factory, a corporation where ghostwriter employees manufacture stories for mass consumption for unremarkable wages. “The Fiction Factory” simultaneously dramatizes the corporatization of the arts and the precarity of contemporary labour (particularly labour in the sector of cultural work). The novel illustrates the cultural pervasiveness of storytelling through a commercial office in which daily business is literally conducted in (and in the service of) stories, suggesting how much, ethically, is at stake in each storytelling act.
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Creative Writing, literary ethics
Citation
Jansen, B. (2018). The fiction factory: A novel (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/31862