Posted by Sterling on 20/6/2009, 22:01:07, in reply to "Literary Fiction versus Genre Fiction"
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That's an interesting distinction, Steven. Perhaps I need to listen to the actual lecture before I comment. However, I'll forge ahead and provide my take on this issue.
The distinction based on the relative primacy of plot may well be true of mediocre genre fiction. In practice, though, I think that most of us make the call based purely on content.
Horses and six-shooters -- Western.
Magic -- Fantasy.
Space, rockets, time travel, the future -- Science Fiction
Private eyes - Mystery or Crime Fiction
and so on.
Using this classification system, literary genre fiction is not an oxymoron. For example, who can read Raymond Chandler and not find his outrageous similes arresting? He wrote labyrinthine plots, but the plot is simply a frame on which he hangs his experiments with language. Or to consider someone more contemporary, the greatest pleasure from Elmore Leonard is his remarkable pitch-perfect dialogue, not his plots.
Gene Wolfe writes science fiction/fantasy that is explicitly experimental. He is fascinated with unreliable narrators and other formalist techniques. He also possesses the remarkable vocabulary of a Nabokov or a Banville.
John Crowley writes fantasy that is profoundly moving. He is capable of producing deep aesthetic satisfaction. I think that Little, Big is the most remarkable fantasy novel since Alice in Wonderland (especially if the magic realists are excluded).
Of course, one may argue that these writers are exceptions -- and indeed they are. However, they have been dismissed to the ghetto of genre fiction not by their lack of literary merit but by their subject matter.
That being said, can social realism be considered a genre? I think it can, if the author's primary intent is to produce propaganda rather than literary or aesthetic goals. Another key to genre is manipulation. This can be hard to define since all literature strives to have an effect on the reader. However, pornography is distinct from erotic literature in its single-minded attempt to produce arousal. Similarly, mediocre genre fiction attempts to produce uncompliacted and unreflective excitement, in the manner of an action movie. If the work intends to make me want to go organize a union or fight injustice, then its goals are extra-literary. I am not particularly fond of Steinbeck, by the way, but I would have to say that since scenes from The Grapes of Wrath remain vivid for me after all these years, there is more than propagandizing in that novel.
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