[Prestidigitweeze]

One problem with some of the opinions expressed here is that the tolerance they're supposed to exemplify is one-sided. In order to benefit from the apparent open-mindedness of those who dislike the idea of literary fiction, you're expected to dislike it, too. You have to accept their redefinitions of your own priorities, and their dismissal of the honesty and brilliance of writing you might actually like. In order to arrive at the democracy they seem to advocate, you have to disown the very qualities in fiction that made you want to read it in the first place.

One example:

The idea that people who spend their lives studying and understanding literature in the professional academic sense have no more, and usually less, to offer than ordinary readers expressing their opinions. The point is not whether one person's opinion is more valid than another, but whether one might have more information to offer than another. The idea seems to be that academics and literary critics have nothing special to offer.

A few here seem to be saying that, if you place any importance on the project of literature (as writers like Flaubert understood it) and academic criticism, if you allow that a seasoned, industrious and talented academic might have expertise that could prove useful, then you're either an insufferable kiss-ass or a character from The Fountainhead who advocates total acceptance of cliche ideas of high culture, no doubt involving a crinkly anti-Übermensch.

I would argue that critics, linguists and scholars have had tons to teach us: critics as diverse as Cleanth Brooks, William Empson, F.R. Leavis, Ezra Pound and Charles Bernstein; linguists and interdisciplinary critics like Roman Jakobson, Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes; scholars as different as George Saintsbury and Helene Cixous (whose distrust of the word intellectual some of you might appreciate).

What exactly is wrong with acknowledging their importance?

Another:

The idea that a writer's interest in style and diction makes them inherently boring, untruthful and affected.

Many of the writers I absolutely love were willing to sacrifice story for style and are far from boring or dishonest: Virginia Woolf and John Hawkes, to name but two. Does their willingness make their methods dishonest or my love of The Waves and The Lime Twig an affectation?

If everyone's taste is to be allowed, then so are the preferences of those who prefer "literary" fiction. If I'm not interested in slapping someone around for adoring novels by Chuck Palahniuk, or even important but over-emphasized books by Christian apologists like C.S. Lewis (whose Allegory of Love is, among other things, literary criticism), then it shouldn't be necessary for the OP to poke me on the shoulder to say, "Hey, I'm not telling anyone what to do -- your taste is your taste, and I like a lot of that so-called literature myself -- but 'literary fiction' is nothing but affected twaddle that sexless elitists enjoy rubbing all over themselves. Literary = lack of story, and experts = a bunch of professors pretending their taste is better than mine. I respect your opinion, but everything you enjoy and admire is an utter waste of time."