Sex Offenders: Stranger than Fiction

Abstract

Beginning with the immense concern with form inaugurated by early modernism and its tendency to apply a model of evolution to literary activity, literature has often been valued to the extent that it breaks with established norms. While “satire” describes an approach to a subject, not an epistemological disposition, literary categories before modernism were often descriptions of the writer’s understanding of reality as represented in a text. This understanding is usually secondary to the writer’s relationship to classical models: Renaissance, Neoclassical, and Romantic literature may each be understood as approaches to remodeling or creatively imitating Greek and Roman culture. Contrarily, Surrealism, Objectivism, Projectivism, the “New Novel,” Metafiction, and so forth are descriptions of literary approaches. They may reflect philosophical dispositions — for instance, the Surrealists liked Freud and Jung and Objectivists seemed to dislike the abstractness of language — but their manifestos usually describe the role of literature appropriate to the present time, and argue for the adoption of a certain approach as a way of keeping up with the times.

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