Mel Mudkiper posted:

I cannot recall a single great stylist of any merit who was widely praised for writing the exact same sentence every time

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

Online discussions of genre novels tend to start from the assumption that such works are bad and thus must be justified.

quote:

were there actually people who disagreed with his critique of GRRM, pretty much everybody here hates GRRM and has for longer than I've been modding the forum, and I suspect the general GRRM thread consensus would agree with literally anything you could possibly say negative about the man

quote:

Is that seriously a thing creative writing courses do?

quote:

It sounds mega-dumb

quote:

"Legitimate" isn't a question I'd pose; I'm not interested in that kind of gate-keeping. For purposes of discussion in this forum the useful question is usually "why should I, a random reader of this post, read or not read this book they're talking about", and that's a question with a two sided answer -- merits and flaws. If you don't address both, you've not really answered the question. It's not some dumb 1 for 1 thing it's about giving an accurate picture of the work.

BravestOfTheLamps posted:

What I'm saying is that Kay is a loving hack

rear end frog posted:

lmao i'm catching up on missed posts and just got to here and i'm so excited. tigana was my absolute favourite book when i was 15, i wept like a fool reading it for the first time, then about ten years later i decided to reread it and, well

sebmojo posted:

Both. Novels involve types, picking from a modest and comprehensible array of human motivations. The artistry comes from how they are deployed and subverted.

rear end frog posted:

since making that first post i've read through the intervening four pages and let me tell you: there is not a man posting in this forum that deserves the breath of life

rear end frog posted:

since making that first post i've read through the intervening four pages and let me tell you: there is not a man posting in this forum that deserves the breath of life

rear end frog posted:

since making that first post i've read through the intervening four pages and let me tell you: there is not a man posting in this forum that deserves the breath of life

Mel Mudkiper posted:

I am a devout post-structuralist so I hardly see that as a bad thing

Neurosis posted:

stop the presses, this conversation is in language inappropriately plain and comprehensible. summon the serpents of confusion and sesquipedalian tergiversation into this Eden of meaningful communication!

Neurosis posted:

while that post may be derisive of my rather well-worn complaint (and plagiarised metaphor), it has made me wish there were a world where the most influential philosophers from througohut history shitposted snarkily at each other over an internet forum.

A human heart posted:

Personally it's made me wish for a world where you don't have access to an internet forum

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

Mel Mudkiper posted:

While I cannot speak for BotL, one of the reasons I point out this criticism is that genre and the readers of genre tend to avoid any motivation to a level of higher aesthetic and artistic production by retreating into wholly subjective enjoyment. This is deeply frustrating for me because I want sci-fi and fantasy to be better, not simply insult it.

Take, for instance, Hemingway. Hemingway was terrible at creating women, and also not particularly skilled at creating believable dialog. In an academic setting, you can acknowledge these weaknesses of the text without feeling similarly obligated to defend the obvious merits of the work. There is no need to reinforce the majesty of For Whom the Bell Tolls if one wishes to speak as to its weaknesses. However, due to some sort of deep-seeded insecurity in the genre fan-base, you cannot focus on weaknesses in a text so explicitly without a demand for some kind of concession or mea culpa. Take, for instance, William Gibson who is just as terrible as Hemingway in writing women, and for much the same reasons. It seems that bringing up these weaknesses as inherent to the prose of Gibson to his fans often comes across as more controversial than doing the same to fans of Hemingway.

In essence, I sometimes feel genre fiction handicaps its own artistic growth by refusing to separate the wholly personal enjoyment of the text with a more detached critical eye towards the text itself.

sebmojo posted:

Hyperbole. There are grammatical similarities in similar passages of prose doing similar things at similar stages of the story, because that's how he writes, his 'style'.

chernobyl kinsman posted:

so that's just untrue, innit? it sounds like exactly the kind of insecurity that i touched on and that mel went into more detail about.

quote:

i don't actually remember, but if you'd like i can sub out GRRM for any of the other dozen authors BotL's discussed

quote:

this is nonsense. it is not common practice on this forum or anywhere else to enumerate thoroughly the virtues and flaws of any work when recommending it (or when doing the opposite), nor should it be. it's okay to say "this sucks rear end and here's why" without being obliged to reluctantly cram in a bunch of positive traits. this is especially true in a thread which, alone amongst the threads in TBB, is not only dedicated to saying that genre fiction sucks but to doing so in a clear, explicit, and thorough fashion.

BravestOfTheLamps posted:

This is lame rear end compared to even other genre stuff like Viriconium, which has a much better killer who would like to be just a poet.

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

I was referring more to general cultural perceptions. There's a general preconception that "fantasy" novels never go in the "literature" section in the store, for example. The division between "high" and "low" art, etc. If you're disputing that that separation even exists, I'm not sure how to have this conversation with you.

BravestOfTheLamps posted:

This thread is everything I could've asked for.

Mel Mudkiper posted:

The problem though is that genre fans seem to simultaneously want the privileges of literature without the consequences of it.

quote:

Capital L literature is frequently dissected critically and part of the enduring appeal of a classic novel is the ability for the novel to be read in ways which speak to the contemporary experience of the reader. Furthermore, this critiques are almost never uniformly positive. You would be hard pressed to find a glowing Marxist appraisal of a novel.

If you want fantasy and sci-fi to be literature, you have to allow them to undergo the same critical treatment that literature receives, which in many cases comes down to the very things BotL and others are doing in this thread. Real actual god honest academic criticism is about looking at the text as text, not as a story. The end result is the bones of the novel left bleaching in the sun.

Perhaps academic and intellectual value can be found in the same material in which BotL is finding his ammunition. However, that value will not be found by ignoring or underplaying his criticism. A critical perspective of a novel is not a scale on which one side we place the positives and the other side the negatives and make a final declaration about whether it is good or not by seeing which side dips down. A novel is a cultural text, made up inherently of both the vices and virtues of the culture that it inhabits.

EDIT: For example, I make no secret of my love for Blackwater. If I were to give a Feminist or Queer Theory analysis of the text, it would generally be positive. However, if I gave it a Marxist or Black Studies analysis, it would be significantly more harsh. These readings are not binary or contradictory, they can exist within a single text without necessarily being at conflict with each other. That is the beauty of art.

Mel Mudkiper posted:

If you want fantasy and sci-fi to be literature, you have to allow them to undergo the same critical treatment that literature receives, which in many cases comes down to the very things BotL and others are doing in this thread. Real actual god honest academic criticism is about looking at the text as text, not as a story. The end result is the bones of the novel left bleaching in the sun.

Mel Mudkiper posted:

EDIT: For example, I make no secret of my love for Blackwater. If I were to give a Feminist or Queer Theory analysis of the text, it would generally be positive. However, if I gave it a Marxist or Black Studies analysis, it would be significantly more harsh. These readings are not binary or contradictory, they can exist within a single text without necessarily being at conflict with each other. That is the beauty of art.

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

It's not so much that they're thinking about privileges or consequences; it's that they're wholly uninterested in that particular critical lens and see it as nothing more than trolling. So it takes some work to open up space for those discussions to happen (which is the positive aspect of this thread).

quote:

To take your example of Blackwater -- agreed. It's a great set of books, and has a lot of virtues. But I think it would be hard to write a credible feminist analysis that ignored the racial aspects of the text (and vice versa). Whichever critical lens you're using, you have to look at the whole text, not just the parts that are convenient to your analysis.

ShinsoBEAM! posted:

So here you are talking about a feminist or queer theory analysis of Blackwater would be generally positive but a Marxist or Black Studies would not. There is to my knowledge no overall and official sci-fi/fantasy literary analysis style that's approved and even then we would probably need multiple not just for subgenre's but for what the different readers are looking for.

We had this discussion in the sci-fi and fantasy thread, where genre readers tend to place different values on these criteria than more literary readers.

Plot
World-Building
Characters
Prose

Personally I order it something like this Characters > Plot > World-Building >>> Prose. I was a bit shocked in the previous thread when I found how much value literary fans put on prose. Yes it matters to me and good prose can improve the book and awful awful prose can ruin it, but it makes a much smaller impact than the other factors for me.

Even within these very reductive groupings there are many things different readers would place priority on, lets take world-building. You have internal consistency, breath of ideas, real world parallels/political messaging. I find in literary works real world parallels tend to be the most focused on while in fantasy/sci-fi breath of idea's is often what's praised. So for instance to attack a novel with a brilliant and unique magic system you could attack why it has consistency problems, showing it's not brilliant, or compare it to other systems that did the same idea but better...and hopefully earlier as well.

I have no problem if you want to apply other literary critiques to SF/F novels, but for the most part they weren't being written with those goals in mind they had separate goals, and while many of the critiques such as the one of Kay earlier I think does apply and is a negative, okay...sure, but it's not a big deal or even a small deal to me as a SF/F reader. It's not even on the level of a thing I have to tolerate. That would not stick in my head after I'm done reading. Instead it will just poof into the wind, unless someone specifically asks me about it or brings it up. I assume this is in many reasons in part why BOTL tends to critique books who's fans prop their works up as literary greats, and mostly tends to ignore books where the fans fail to claim this. But even those books with more literary aspirations in SF/F are still often appealing to the genre fans first. Hieronymous Alloy's "every author has a weakness" definitely applies to, it just comes down to whether you or the analysis you are applying places high or any value on those weaknesses.

Mel Mudkiper posted:

I guess where I differ from you is the tolerability of this behavior. People who somehow feel slighted at the idea of engaging with the text other than as a product to be consumed are loving dangerous. That's how we get totalitarianism.

quote:

The problem with this is that you are acting as if a critical analysis is an outcome. It's not. Its a toolkit. A feminist and black studies reading would intersect at the points in which they share tools and methods of analysis, but that doesn't mean that a critical reading must be exclusively holistic. A critical reading using a certain critical toolkit means engaging with the text within the conceptual parameters of the particular critical process.

Meaning, a feminist reading of a text is not insufficient because it fails to consider the novel holistically. A feminist reading means using the feminist toolkit of analysis on the text. That particular reading should not be seen as ultimate by any means. A serious reader does, and should, use a variety of toolkits when engaging with a text.

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

That said I think we're disagreeing less than it might appear. If you would allow the substitution of the phrase "a good discussion" for "a serious reader" in the last quoted sentence there, I suspect we're in (roughly) the same place.

Mel Mudkiper posted:

First, criticism is not concerned with quality. Criticism is concerned with significance. The idea that critics tell you whether or not a book is "good" has more to do with our weird capitalist bastardization of the craft. Its why I have said before there is a difference between Ebert the reviewer and Ebert the critic. So, the notion that we should have a critical toolkit to determine whether something is good misses the point.

EDIT: To clarify, when I refer to a reading being positive or negative, I am not referring to a suggestion of quality or of enjoyment. I am referring to the text's significance to a certain perspective. A negative Marxist reading would not be "This is book is bad because..." but instead "This book upholds a traditional system of..."

Secondly, you seem to suggest that sci-fi/fantasy needs a different critical perspective from other texts. It doesn't. All text is applicable under all critical toolkits. You can do a Marxist reading of Cherryh as easily as a Marxist reading of Tolstoy. There is just as much opportunity for post-colonialist assessment in The Hobbit as in Heart of Darkness.

Mel Mudkiper posted:

A serious reader does, and should, use a variety of toolkits when engaging with a text.

ShinsoBEAM! posted:

We had this discussion in the sci-fi and fantasy thread, where genre readers tend to place different values on these criteria than more literary readers.

Plot
World-Building
Characters
Prose

Personally I order it something like this Characters > Plot > World-Building >>> Prose. I was a bit shocked in the previous thread when I found how much value literary fans put on prose. Yes it matters to me and good prose can improve the book and awful awful prose can ruin it, but it makes a much smaller impact than the other factors for me.

Mel Mudkiper posted:

Well sure, a complete reading/discussion of a text requires the implementation of multiple critical perspectives, but isn't that the point of the thread?

quote:

Genre fiction considers "enjoyment" to be the sacred cow of the reading and seems to hold all critical analysis of the text as secondary to whether someone liked the book. The whole reason BotL and others come across as explicitly negative is because they are challenging the paradigm of pleasure as sacred. The focus is primarily negative as a challenge for genre readers to confront the text not as an object of consumption.

ShinsoBEAM! posted:

. Of course I know this is where reviewers step in, but those are like you said earlier, different.

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

I think "enjoyment" is worth considering in the same way that any other evaluative lens is. Often it's also more interesting and challenging to discuss -- for example, "Is Tolkien Racist" (answer: "yes, but . . .") is often just less interesting to talk about than it might be to discuss why the daydreams of a professor of Anglo-Saxon have spread to so many millions of other daydreamers.

BravestOfTheLamps posted:

Wait until my review that will settle the question (spoiler: it's the sexlessness).

Silver2195 posted:

My inclination is to assume that LotR is popular in spite of its sexlessness. Hence the movies moving the Arwen/Aragorn romance from the appendices to the main story.

ShinsoBEAM! posted:

This seems to be in support of more toolkits rather than keeping the same amount of toolkits. I understand why more *insert genre* literary criticism methods don't exist, but I'm saying that their lack of existence doesn't mean that they wouldn't be a more appropriate criticism of a work. Of course I know this is where reviewers step in, but those are like you said earlier, different.

Silver2195 posted:

My inclination is to assume that LotR is popular in spite of its sexlessness. Hence the movies moving the Arwen/Aragorn romance from the appendices to the main story.

Mel Mudkiper posted:

Like, how would someone use a genre methodology to examine things which aren't explicitly in the genre?