I think the historical tendency may be a scale as well, since there’s this push toward fantasy and sci-fi again in literature through all the striations of form and prestige, even if the old guard of literature and creative writing don’t want to admit it.

Haruki Murakami comes to mind. He’s most often classified as a writer of “literary” fiction and a champion of postmodernism, but it’s easy enough to glean that Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (the latter of which quickly became one of my all-time favorite novels) are both contemporary sci-fi/fantasy, or, barring genre labels, that they contain truckloads of those sorts of speculative elements. So, yeah, I think your charting the modes as a cycle is very appropriate.

He marks tragedy as the form in which the hero ends up being isolated from society.

I like this definition of tragedy; the logic behind my last big paper as an undergrad, an examination of Ulysses as tragedy, more or less hinged upon it, and I got the idea in the first place from how similar low mimetic tragedy and irony seem to be. I wish I’d thought of the fiction modes as a cycle at the time; it all would’ve made even more sense to me.

In other news, nested comments should now go out to ten levels, so have fun building pyramids of text, everyone.