Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
Just tell him litfic is just another genre with its own little formula.
Then watch his blood pressure spike.  |
That's not necessarily true. A thousand years of fiction (starting with Lady Murasaki) can't be said to fall into a single genre or formula even when it
was considered popular fiction in its own time. If you use the term
genre fiction in the broadest sense (i.e.,
mode), many works of literary fiction do fall into different genres, but just as many don't fall into any genre which has been defined so far.
Chip Delany once called literary fiction "the tyranny of the subject," but to do so, he had to jump from plot and setting conventions (which normally define genres) to aspect emphasis, which is a fairly broad leap.
I would argue that mere subject matter should never be used as a way to dismiss any novel apart from the actual writing.
I'm not a fan of the western genre (I like Cormac McCarthy, but I can't read a page of Zane Grey), but I have no problem with the idea of a genre western being rediscovered as a great literary work. If that happened a few more times, you'd see professors poring over reams of moldering paperbacks and writing volumes about coded content. And if I happened to stumble onto a western I felt was great, I'd praise it to anyone who cared to listen.
Even so-called genre fiction, when allowed to develop freely, isn't always plot-driven and probably shouldn't be labeled according to subject or setting.
Anathem manages to do everything, but certain science fiction novels from the '60s and '70s don't foreground plot at all.
The Ticket That Exploded is an obvious example (also for its parody of different genres), but so is
Dhalgren. Meanwhile,
Cosmicomics and
T Zero by Calvino are more obviously plotted than certain SF classics. Ditto for the
Ficciones of Borges vs. the detective stories of certain acknowledged practitioners.
I'm also waiting to see meta-genre acknowledged as a kind of genre -- one which often suffers when jumping modes becomes as arbitrary as switching channels, and the direction and concision of the narrative suffer as a result.
A more broad definition might be that literary fiction is fiction which has been
deemed to be meritorious. Rather than calling literary fiction a genre, I'd say that genre is often an arbitrary idea.
Genre is frequently used as a kind of lens which brings its own history of usage and conventions. Modern fiction may use different lenses so freely that it can't be said to adhere to an independent genre. Paranormal romance (as self-defined) is a spliced genre, but a book by Robert Coover can be like a theme and variations with a different genre informing every chapter. People call that literary because they don't know what else to call it.
Genres tend to be defined by common characteristics in plot and setting. Certain kinds of literary fiction can be said to have traits in common, but the overriding traits are ones of emphasis, not plot. Better to say that certain
readers of so-called literary fiction, like those who read genre fiction, might have their own forms of self-definition and conceptual confinement.
Russian futurist writings often have several traits in common, but I don't think one can accurately refer to a Russian futurist
genre.