Selling sex toys a on Facebook pretty much sums it up. Basically the contents of cosmopolitan magazine. I don’t know about the literature specifically but in general the way breaking taboos has gone mainstream is deeply annoying without the virtue of being challenging. Kind of like marvel/dc movies - too unwholesome for kids but too stupid for teenagers. Basically the target demographic seems to be middle-class pedophiles. Who needs more mind guck than what’s been crammed into all our eyeballs since puberty already.
"Fiction that is 'transgressive' pushes against something, either in form or in content. It takes what is familiar and asks us to expand on that. Literature that pushes boundaries first calls attention to boundaries, and then demands that we consider whether those boundaries were ever appropriate. Transgressive fiction can help us to recognize the world as it is, in a way that people just haven’t discussed, or it can ask us whether this is a good world -- whether it’s not just our concepts but our reality that we should move beyond." - Charlene Elsby, 2024, quote used with permission.
This is as close to a good definition of post transgressive literature as I can think of.
But maybe it was a "you had to be there to get it" sort of thing.
All examples of transgression railed against in the above piece, which, yeah, I agree with. Getting old fast. Especially the early 00s populist transgressive fiction label in minimalist fiction that a lot of people got swept up in because of Palahniuk. Elsby (a philosopher, smart cookie, and really great person, just to mention) makes a good point though, and I agree with this as the general POINT of transgression in the first place.
It's really just mad corny. I've been noticing that a lot of this so called "transgressive" writing is just rehashed esoteric fascism or nerds trying to play the villain. It's the same hipsters who were listening to Death and June and going to noise shows ten years ago.
It is usually written by either terminally online esoteric nerds or extremely domesticated white kids who wouldn’t hurt a fly. Both classes of "transgressive" writer are LARPing in the extreme. The "Transgressive Fiction" Wikipedia article is a good way of noticing this. Everything included on the list of Notable Works after about 1995 is a sort of hilarious cosplay that bears no relation to the "taken from real life experiences"-based works of Henry Miller, Hubert Selby, Jr., etc.
(and we will be releasing articles on the sort of trite unlistenable music usually repped by these types, which are their own special form of Dad Rock...David Tibet, etc.)
Selling sex toys a on Facebook pretty much sums it up. Basically the contents of cosmopolitan magazine. I don’t know about the literature specifically but in general the way breaking taboos has gone mainstream is deeply annoying without the virtue of being challenging. Kind of like marvel/dc movies - too unwholesome for kids but too stupid for teenagers. Basically the target demographic seems to be middle-class pedophiles. Who needs more mind guck than what’s been crammed into all our eyeballs since puberty already.
"Fiction that is 'transgressive' pushes against something, either in form or in content. It takes what is familiar and asks us to expand on that. Literature that pushes boundaries first calls attention to boundaries, and then demands that we consider whether those boundaries were ever appropriate. Transgressive fiction can help us to recognize the world as it is, in a way that people just haven’t discussed, or it can ask us whether this is a good world -- whether it’s not just our concepts but our reality that we should move beyond." - Charlene Elsby, 2024, quote used with permission.
This is as close to a good definition of post transgressive literature as I can think of.
But maybe it was a "you had to be there to get it" sort of thing.
All examples of transgression railed against in the above piece, which, yeah, I agree with. Getting old fast. Especially the early 00s populist transgressive fiction label in minimalist fiction that a lot of people got swept up in because of Palahniuk. Elsby (a philosopher, smart cookie, and really great person, just to mention) makes a good point though, and I agree with this as the general POINT of transgression in the first place.
We love Charlene and her work and have been in a few group chats and other spaces with her…!!
She's a friend, though I no longer remember how that came about. I owe her a care package and many trinkets.
It's really just mad corny. I've been noticing that a lot of this so called "transgressive" writing is just rehashed esoteric fascism or nerds trying to play the villain. It's the same hipsters who were listening to Death and June and going to noise shows ten years ago.
It is usually written by either terminally online esoteric nerds or extremely domesticated white kids who wouldn’t hurt a fly. Both classes of "transgressive" writer are LARPing in the extreme. The "Transgressive Fiction" Wikipedia article is a good way of noticing this. Everything included on the list of Notable Works after about 1995 is a sort of hilarious cosplay that bears no relation to the "taken from real life experiences"-based works of Henry Miller, Hubert Selby, Jr., etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgressive_fiction
(and we will be releasing articles on the sort of trite unlistenable music usually repped by these types, which are their own special form of Dad Rock...David Tibet, etc.)