Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemurion
@Spellbanisher
I'm perfectly willing to admit that the conventions, and even the goals, of literary fiction are different from those of most forms of genre fiction. Literary fiction writers often use different techniques than others because those techniques better suit their writing goals. Good writers write with purpose, and use the techniques that help them best achieve it.
What I do not believe is that literary fiction writers use experimental techniques simply to call attention to the fact that they are using the technique. They use them to achieve their specific writing goals, and sometimes they don't succeed.
When that happens, people notice the technique. They often pay more attention to the fact that the author didn't use quotation marks to distinguish dialogue than to the dialogue itself.
The majority of literary fiction writers that I am aware of write to comment on or explore aspects of the human condition. If all their readers can talk about is that they didn't use quotation marks, then that writer has failed. It's not a matter of misplaced expectations, it's about a problem with the technique.
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Sometimes, as in the case of James Joyce's
Ulysses, a writer use techniques to direct attention to the use of language itself.
While I agree with the drift of your post, I would place a caveat on your last point. Yes, one can say that a technique is faulty if it detracts from the authors main purpose, as long as the readers understand when they pick up a work of literary fiction that it will contain unconventional styles to achieve a purpose. If their perspective, is, however, that deviation from conventional style, like omitting quotation marks, is ipso facto pretentious, then I wouldn't say that the author has failed in his purpose, but that the reader read the book expecting it to be something that it was never intended to be. In that case, we are in a situation similar to someone who hates alcohol complaining that there is alcohol in his budweiser.