Breaking the Chains of Genre: An Exploration of Hybrid Literatures

Hybrid genre, cross-genre, multi-genre, or mixed genre literature is literature that combines writing from different genres to create one text. The text created might be fragmentary or unified; it might be coherent or disjointed. Cross-genre literature is not new, but contemporary authors are more frequently pushing on the boundaries between genres in their creative and scholarly writing to produce rich, open, polyphonic texts as a result. How has cross-genre literature been deployed in different literary and cultural traditions? What advantages does cross-genre literature provide for the writer and for the reader? This course will explore the ways in which authors have experimented with mixing genres in different cultural traditions and writing disciplines as well as how this genre-bending has enabled them to accomplish various creative, narrative, and rhetorical purposes.