Postmodern genres are artificial systems devised in imitation of natural ones

Evidence

But the mode of Faulknerian modernism in Simon does not alternate with the practice of another style (personal style in that sense being preeminently a modernist phenomenon), but instead with something rather different, which it may be appropriate to characterize as the codification of the laws of a new “artificial” genre. The genre remains in some sense a “named” phenomenon, although if Robbe-Grillet is its inventor, Jean Ricardou can theoretically be regarded as its Eisenstein; but it is a system of relatively impersonal rules of exclusion, which offers the peculiar appearance (as in genetic engineering) of a completely “man-made” genre itself devised full-blown in imitation of the “natural” ones that have evolved organically over historical time. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 331

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the chapter’s core premise that pastiche is parody without the natural/authentic referent — an artificial genre built to imitate organic ones is the formal analogue of pastiche. — connects to: Postmodern science fiction implodes inward to revitalize fragments of simulation — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 406; Formal sedimentation names genres as layered deposits of past ideology — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 3243; the MOC “The Word Is a Fence: Language as Battleground, Property, and Partition”
• DEFINE: Defines the nouveau roman as an intentionally man-made genre, a key instance of postmodern artificiality.