Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
This occasions a mini-rant of my own. It may just be me, but I dislike how the term litfic, as short for literary fiction, has been corrupted altered, seemingly, to mean any kind of fiction that’s not genre fiction. What was a useful, descriptive term is now so all-embracing as to mean nothing at all. What would you call “serious fiction, the kind that’s reviewed in the NYRB etc., what Hemingway and Wharton wrote before it turned classic”? That’s what used to be literary fiction. Now it’s absolutely useless as a sieve.
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LOL, it's funny--I just had a discussion about this elsewhere. How, as you've rightly said, if it ain't immediately identifiable as Genre Fic, ooops, it's LitFic, as if LitFic has become the Ort Barrel, where everything uncategorized goes to die.
Myself--for whatever that's worth--I tend to categorize books as LitFic if the "action" is primarily internal to the character(s). The conflicts and challenges are character-driven and emotional/mental, rather than fighting external problems. (Fighting Evil Empires, finding Murderers and all that).
That's not to say that LitFic is plotless. It's just that I view the goals of the characters as being decidedly different. In Genre, the characters change and develop, in service of fighting some external problem. In LitFic, they change and develop in service of fighting some internal problem, challenge or personal issue.
{Shrug}. But that's just me.
Hitch