Absurdist Narratives in the Sunshine State: Comic, Criminal, Folkloric, and Fantastic Escapades in the Swamps and Suburbs of Florida

Article Sidebar

PDF
Published: May 1, 2012

Main Article Content

Jason Marc Harris
Florida Institute of Technology

Abstract

Recent Florida fiction, such as Swamplandia! by Karen Russell, Sick Puppy by Carl Hiassen, and Triggerfish Twist by Tim Dorsey, emphasize the absurdity, liminality, and criminality of the state. By utilizing folkloric motifs, genres, and rhetoric—and employing simulations of traditional narratives—these popular novels explore and exploit the national perception of Florida’s status as the “weirdest state.” Harnessing the mode of the comically fantastic, each narrative reconfigures Floridian marginality by presenting the borders of criminal identity and the manifestations of social deviance as essential features at the center of this chaotic peninsula’s culture. Disordering narrative realism, these texts reveal psychological insights and highlight the uses of nonsense for storytelling.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Article Details

How to Cite
Harris, J. M. (2012). Absurdist Narratives in the Sunshine State: Comic, Criminal, Folkloric, and Fantastic Escapades in the Swamps and Suburbs of Florida. New Directions in Folklore, 10(1), 32–84. Retrieved from https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/ndif/article/view/1929
Issue
Vol. 10 No. 1 (2012)
Section
Articles
Materials published in New Directions in Folkloreremain the property of their authors.  NDiF strongly prefers and encourages authors to honor the journal with exclusive rights to their work for the period of one year following its initial publication; however, authors may offer their work for reprint as they see fit. Submissions may be withdrawn at any point during the review process. Once the material has been published in NDiF, however, it becomes part of the NewFolk record and cannot be removed.Likewise, NDiF may emend the appearance of materials to maintain a consistency of design, but will make as changes to the text only proofreading corrections requested by the author. At the author’s request, and with the agreement of the editor, additions and amendments may be added as separate files to the table of contents.

 

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Derivative License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.

2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial publication in this journal.

3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.

4. While NDiF adopts the above strategies in line with best practices common to the open access journal community, it urges authors to promote use of this journal (in lieu of subsequent duplicate publication of unaltered papers) and to acknowledge the unpaid investments made during the publication process by peer-reviewers, editors, copy editors, programmers, layout editors and others involved in supporting the work of the journal.