Am I the only person on earth who thinks the genre/literature "separation" is as artificial as the supposed "War On Christmas" and only sustained by the pretentious?
I don't mean that in a dismissive way against this article, because I realize that some authors Who Shall Not Be Named have sneered at genre in the past, but to be honest I rarely LISTEN to authors' opinions on their own works. I may love the work, I may love the author, but that doesn't mean I think they can be objective about their baby.
I've got a degree in literature and I think Atwood's works are some of the best things I've ever read, but I've no problem classifying a good fair whack of her work as apocalyptic sci-fi, along with Orwell and Philip K. Dick.
If there really is some Great War On Genre that *isn't* entirely composed of biased authors and a few pretentious readers, I guess I've been missing out because I've never heard of such a thing before the "Speculative Fiction" conversation in the other thread.
Maybe I'm just in a warm happy place, but everyone I know just uses the "literature" label as a kind-of-hard-to-otherwise-classify genre tag. "Oryx and Crake"? Sci-fi. "Alias Grace"? Literature. It's not a question of quality to me-and-those-near-and-dear, it's a question of content.