When the Novel Looks like a Different Genre: The Scrapbook as Structuring Genre in The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt

Abstract

There is an increasing number of novels that stylize discursive genres which are not historically associated with literary texts as the structure for the plot and which are crucial to make sense of the text in multiple ways, while exploiting their graphic potential ostensibly. More than just literary oddities, these narratives must be conceived as inscribed in a context that is witnessing the increasingly active role of experimental graphic exploitation in contemporary fiction in the 21st century, and which demands active and competent readers to approach them. Bakhtin's theory of the novel allows to shed light on them as it conceives the novel genre as a sociocultural discursive construct, a genre with memory which, by means of its resources, creates expectations and configures its readers according to cultural changes and other discursive genres. From this view, the novel is in constant transformation: a genre that feeds from social discourses to convey a world vision and to discuss the problems of its time. The present work proposes a bakhtinian reading of The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt: a novel in pictures (2011), by American Caroline Preston, a novel that looks like—that is, appears as—a scrapbook.