Ben Lerner, Edges of Genre: Poetry, Fiction, Artistic Collaborations is the first comprehensive academic study of a major contemporary author. Praised by The New York Times as “the most talented writer of his generation,” Lerner has often been read separately as poet or novelist, yet his work consistently transcends traditional boundaries.
This groundbreaking volume, co-edited by Yannicke Chupin and Karim Daanoune, foregrounds Lerner's practice of "generic dialogism," exploring the dynamic interplay between lyric and narrative, poetry and fiction, criticism and artistic collaboration. Gathering fourteen chapters from leading international scholars, alongside Lerner's own unpublished piece Erring Together, the book offers a sustained, cross-generic reading of his oeuvre.
It is the first study to situate Lerner's work within the broader field of contemporary intermedial writing, making it essential reading for scholars, students, and readers interested in the evolving landscape of twenty-first-century literature.
Ben Lerner, Edges of Genre: Poetry, Fiction, Artistic Collaborations is the first comprehensive study of an acclaimed writer of his generation. Lerner has often been read separately as poet or novelist, yet his work consistently transcends traditional boundaries.
List of Illustrations; List of Contributors; Acknowledgements; Erring
Together; Introduction; Part I;
Chapter 1 Love // more avant-garde than
shame: Ben Lerners Ethical Aesthetics;
Chapter 2 Bodies, streetlights,
mixed media: 10:04 and the Mediated Experience;
Chapter 3 Autofiction,
Privilege, and Redemption;
Chapter 4 Autofiction, Mediation, Parasocial
Politics: Ben Lerner Against Authenticity; PART II;
Chapter 5 The Stuttering
Novel: Reading the Prosody of Ben Lerners The Topeka School with Gilles
Deleuze;
Chapter 6 Heard melodies are sweet / but those unheard are
sweeter: Impossible Music and Poetic Voice in Ben Lerners Gold Custody;
Chapter 7 Angle of Inclination / Angle of Yaw: Lerners Conversation with
Celan;
Chapter 8 Between the Terrestrial and the Divine: On Ben Lerners
Poetics;
Chapter 9 Thrice removed: Determining Art as Thrice Removed:
Leveling Ben Lerners Tower of Representation; PART III;
Chapter 10 The
Instrument with Which Its Cut: Ben Lerners Bildung and the Song of the
Fungible;
Chapter 11 Crucial Betweens: The Politics of Intermediality in
Ben Lerners Artistic Collaborations;
Chapter 12 Virtual Theory and Actual
Practice: The Language of Critical Theory in the Novels of Ben Lerner;
Chapter 13 Kansas and Effect: Critique, Causality and the Theoretical Forms
in/of Ben Lerners The Topeka School;
Chapter 14 Ben Lerner and Conspiracy
Poetics
Yannicke Chupin is Associate Professor at CY Cergy Paris Université, specializing in North American literature and metafiction in 21st-century writing. She has published books on Vladimir Nabokov and edited Mutations of Metafiction (Revue Française d'Études Américaines, 2019).
Karim Daanoune is Associate Professor of American Literature at Université de Montpellier Paul-Valéry, focusing on Contemporary North American and Arab American literature. He authored a monograph on Don DeLillo (Atlande 2015) and edited Home and Homeland in Contemporary Arab American Literatures (Revue Française d'Études Américaines, 2022).
