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Originally Posted by DawnFalcon
Except you did directly dismiss it in the same breath, as "sci-fi". So all we've established there is that you're prepared to lie in defence of your literary snobbery. Again, I am utterly unsurprised. I'm convinced they slip you some sort of magic pill when you take Masters Lit, honestly...
And yes, the Hero's Journey is *common* in fiction, but the super majority of high fantasy uses it, and the vast majority of low fantasy too. With Elves.
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It's not literary snobbery at all, because I'm as ill at ease with the classification known as 'literary' (all books are literature and a great deal of 'literary' works are not well written or even interesting to me either. This classification barely exists within academic circles). For me genres (all genres including literary) are an invention of marketers, shelf-stackers and pigeon-holers. An invention that soon becomes an expectation. These expectations are like boxes placed around writers that they very rarely break free from (look at the endless Honor Harrington books as we're discussing Baen.) Genre classification reduces literature (on the whole) to same or similar (at least that is the intention). A product on a shelf that you approach because you are already familiar with what has been sold before. A safe and often bland repetition of what has come before and what will inevitably come again. It becomes Kellog's Cornflakes for the mind and soul (despite the finding of one really interesting flake in amongst the dull corn from time to time).
Steinbeck was a popular writer and he will always be that because he wrote 'stories'. He wasn't a sci-fi writer or a literary writer or any other reduction, he was merely (and there is no mere when it comes to Steinbeck) a good writer. Any expectation you have of Steinbeck is because of Steinbeck's writing and not because he was placed in a ghetto of literature.
Our whole culture has steadily declined towards a form of extended juvenilisation. And that's not really a criticism, merely observation of the current state. We're living longer so there's an expectation that our kidulthood spreads further through the years than it did before. We get married later, have children later, and so all of this has an effect on the culture we consume (hate that word with a passion, but it is the only one that fits). I, over time, have taken enough doses of that culture to become dulled by its effects, I have built an immunity. I've read enough and am familiar enough with the genres that they hold very little interest to me now. Coupled with other works being made available to me through studymy tastes have changed and so have my opinions of what I used to love.
When I was a child I spake as a child...etc
You've already decried Fantasy; for different reasons than I decry all genres, but still ignoring that there might be a diamond in amongst the cut stones. So what makes your literary snobbery, or your elitism any different than my supposed snobbery? You get a pass, do you, because you like science-fiction and I have little time for that genre? And to call me a liar is an egregious and childish simplification of my viewpoint, or any of what I've said here.