[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by NicholasV

I look at most novels that can be popular as only being pulp quality, they just charge alot more for them now and perhaps take longer to write.

Only a person who has never actually read pulp fiction could write this. Pulp is the ancestor of much genre fiction, and sf in general. But it is also generally *bad.* Bad enough to make Dan Brown look like a good writer. And I can't think of anything else that would do that.

I remember this article or interview I found by some European writer(was he a Czech?) horrified by his popularity, considering it an insult to his craft that his writing became popularized, because it denotes it is of deficient quality if his work can satisfy the low threshold of the modern public. I really wish I bookmarked that article, if someone has read that same article and can remember it from my hazy paraphrasing PM it to me.

How can you think of this quote as being anything but arrogantly pretentious? Feeling superior to the common reading public is not something to be lauded, it's something to be laughed at. Particularly from this guy, who, as it turns out, was writing at the level of the general reading public.

I don't think you will see any authors of the stature of a Dickens, Camus, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Orwell, Huxley, etc. with a prospect to become widely read anymore. Writers who had something to say to us about the human condition, and the social context that this condition finds itself in a given society. If writers of such stature emerge today of necessity they must remain hidden given the societal predilections, I think Kurt Cobain summed it up well: "here we are now, entertain us." Or perhaps Huxley with, "Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today." The debased public of today can only send writers like Koontz, J.K. Rowling, Dan Brown, King, Palahniuk*, etc. to the top of the bestseller lists with their cheap gimmicks and otherwise lack of literary merit.

Let me guess, college sophomore? Who else would be so unintentionally ironic as to quote Kurt Cobain - whose albums sold tens of millions - concerning the decline of popular taste.

*Perhaps this is not so fair with him because he has no seeming pretensions and uses a more down to earth writing style closer to the colloquial. At least in his debut novel Fight Club, he actually had some incisive social commentary.

"Social commentary" is a meaningless term that applies to Jonathan Franzen as well as Christian romance novels.

Originally Posted by RolandD

I think Dickens qualifies as a pulp writer, even though his work was masterful social commentary. His works were serialized for the the masses. As for Palahniuk, all his works contain social commentary. Some more subtle than others.

No, Dickens was not pulp. Not even close.

Originally Posted by Catlady

I'm a reverse snob; I avoid "literary" fiction in favor of pulp fiction/genre fiction. I want to read competent writing with a plot.

Genre fiction is not pulp fiction. There is a lineage, but there is also a huge difference. If reading genre fiction is like making love to a beautiful person, reading pulp fiction is like making love to a beautiful chimpanzee. The lineage is there, and you can see the relationship...and yet it's not the same at all.*


*This theory has not been empirically tested. By me, at any rate.