Readerly pleasure exceeds the abject interpellation genre theory assigns it.

Evidence

For Holloway, readers of thrillers occupy a “thoroughly abject, feminized [sic] position … in relation to what they read.” We enjoy such novels because we know “that our abjection as readers is merely the prelude to enlightenment and ‘mastery’ over the fictive world,” which will come with conventional closure and disclosure. In other words, we are passive counters in a “pleasurable process of interpellation.” … Yet even setting aside the curious gendered language Holloway uses to indicate the thriller reader’s supposed passivity, his direct translation of coercive imperialism into the structure of genre literature, resulting in a willing abasement of the reader to imperial ideology, is surely too totalizing. Quite apart from the general fact that narrative pleasures are more variegated and ambiguous than Holloway allows, there is no obvious reason why questions of form should simply reflect wider political preoccupations so directly. As we have already seen in this book, at best they refract them. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 321

Categorization

• DEFINE: “Pleasurable process of interpellation” + the counter ‘refraction’ is exactly the critical vocabulary for distinguishing novels that interpellate readers into hegemonic views vs. those that refract and thus contest them.
• QUESTION: Where exactly does the line sit between a form that ‘reflects’ imperial ideology and one that merely ‘refracts’ it—and which mechanism does each of your novels’ narration actually deploy?