Well what is any piece of fiction if not "literary"? Is genre fiction "illiterary"? Do we not use words to convey fictive meaning? I have to say, I'm not a fan of the term "literary" being applied solely to work that is quiet and personal and non-fantastic and, frankly, dull.
Profile
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
jenwrites- Jennifer Pelland
- JenniferPelland.com
Comments
Bourdieu's theory, in a nutshell, is that part of what has defined the discourse of "literature" or the literary since C19, as well as "high art" more generally, is a resistance to commercial or market pressures-- the genius aesthetic, basically. The more your art is separated from the market, the more "pure" and "literary" it is. There's something to that idea, I think, beyond it being "just another genre"; particularly because one of the central oppositions in the "literary field" is precisely between literary and genre fictions, which Bourdieu might say are "genre" because they cater to particular markets, and are explicitly heteronomous between the field of actual capital and cultural capital.
Postmodernism has challenged the "purity" of high art in interesting ways, of course, but I think Bourdieu is essentially correct about modernism, and we're still operating within modernism, generally. I can't do his theories justice; if you're interested, you should check it out; for an application of his ideas to genre fiction, Ken Gelder's "Popular Fiction: The Logics and Practices of a Literary Field" is good and pretty even-handed. It's particularly interesting the way that "genre" fiction appropriates the language of the market and of industry-- authors "working hard", being "productive", all this stuff-- while in literary fiction you're more liable to see language like "inspiration" or "transcendence". Fascinating. (/Spock)
Like a haiku, literary fiction should use nature as a metaphor (or substitute) for character change. For this reason literary fiction is often set in autumn, as the blowing leaves can be highly symbolic. Especially daring litfic uses the aftermath of a storm, actual thunderstorms being considered too daring.
Most literary fiction is about a graduate student in an MFA program ending an affair. Advanced litfic has a professor of literature ending an affair. Sex may be depicted as long as it is boring and unsatisfying. Characters may imagine having sex which is better than what they get, but not much.
Literary fiction is granted deep respect because it is meaningless and unpopular, and therefore better than anything with meaning or popularity.
And not all work published as "literary fiction" in "literary journals" is non-fantastic. I've tried to promote the work of Kevin Brockmeier (Iowa Workshop grad, published in the New Yorker) to my genre-reading friends, because he writes about things like a thrift-shop overcoat that can hear prayers, or a city where dead people go until every living person who remembered them has died. I've also tried to promote the work of people like Kelly Link to my lit-fic-reading friends, because I think the barriers to entry are pretty low for them. Both of them contain fantasy (or magical realist) elements, but people seem resistant for reasons other than the text itself.
1. Something bad happens to protag early in life.
2. Protag spends several hundred pages whining about it.
3. Protag either overcomes, slides totally into despair or learns that living with the past is part of life.
4. End.
Ugh. Will this love-affair with lit-fic one day be studied as a phenomenon of psuedo-intellectuals elevating the mundane beyond all possible levels? Seriously.
There is some good literary fiction out there. Amsterdam, by Ian McEwan comes to mind. Anything Jonathan Safran Foer writes--though his stuff is as surreal as Dali. Who decided these things anyway??
People who aren't smart enough to appreciate science fiction.
"My work is character driven. Yours is plot driven."
"Literary writers who 'borrow' genre tropes are said to transcend genre -- even when they don't do it nearly as well as people who have been doing it professionally for years."
Personally, I just chalk it all up to either good fiction or bad fiction, and people who don't understand that genre fiction doesn't necessarily equate to bad fiction just need educating. And the best way to educate them is to write really fine stuff.
People who don't get it, don't get it.
From the viewpoint of a renegade medievalist, the modernist genius aesthetic is a bunch of pretentious tosh, anyway.
Maybe you should just have told your alma mater that your stories were "transgressive fictions dealing with issues of body image and gender identity in a fragmented world" and left it at that.
The other day I was told no one cares about genre fiction. They called them "obscure books that no one but people who dress up in plastic armor and go to Tolkein (sp) conventions care about". though personally people who can completely dismiss any genre lose a little credibility with me.
Yet more proof that people need to look down on other people to feel good about themselves.
Okay. There's no way I can make sense of that attitude. I've never been able to understand how influence and importance are inverse to popularity.
But I can make reference to the Neal Stephenson anecdote about "And where do you teach?"
-Barbara