Challenging Narrative Realities: Antoine Volodine.

This paper argues that the work of Antoine Volodine and his heteronyms (Manuela Draeger, Lutz Bassmann) interrogates genre and convention in an uncompromising way that moves significantly beyond the generic interrogation conducted by most contemporary writers. It suggests that one productive way to think about his work is to think about it not in terms of traditional genres at all, but through the kind of cross- and multi-genre tonal corpora that recently have cropped up as an alternative to genre, such as Ann and Jeff VanderMeer's notion of the Weird. It goes on to think about the relationship Volodine's work does or does not have to science fantasy, a defunct subfield of science fiction which on paper seems to have a great deal in common with his work. I discuss the parameters of Volodine's work in relation to Gene Wolfe, Michael Moorcock, and Cordwainer Smith. I speak in particular about his deformation of place names, his creation of new genres that only he uses (the narrat, etc.), and the significance of the fascination of a defunct light switch in Lutz Bassmann's Avec les Moines-Soldats, as a way of opening up a different sense of what Volodine's work accomplishes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]