Tiffany Hambley, PhD student, UNSW

My paper emerges from the site of my larger doctoral work, in which I am examining the oftentimes-fierce contemporary anxiety about the boundary between non-fiction and fiction. My research seeks to question why so much prominence has been afforded to the issue of what is legitimately ‘factual’ or ‘fictional’ in the current literary climate. What exactly does this anxiety mean or represent in our collective imagination? Who seeks to enforce this boundary, and who resists that enforcement?

In this paper I will explore elements of this question using the scientific notion of ‘taxonomy’. Arising from the Greek τάξις, taxis (meaning 'order', 'arrangement') and νόμος, nomos ('law' or 'science'), the word taxonomy denotes the practice and science of classification. Taxonomy is a key scientific tenet, yet I am keen to explore how it finds expression in literary culture also. My paper asks what we can learn from current debates about ‘viable’ and ‘unviable’ literatures. Does literary hybridity make us uncomfortable? What modes and methods do we deploy to try to establish hierarchies and order in the vast body of literary works available to us? Why does this taxonomic practice come to matter, and how does it falter?