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Hieronymous Alloy posted:has a Flesch-Kincaid readability score above the graduate level, it's littrachaw. I think you're being sarcastic here. I hope. WHOOPS edited your post instead of replyng sorry dude stupid mod powers Somebody fucked around with this message at 16:22 on Sep 6, 2017 |
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Sep 6, 2017 16:08
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M_Gargantua posted:I think you're being sarcastic here. I hope. Is sarcasm even possible on the internet? I am what I seem
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Sep 6, 2017 16:23
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Benson Cunningham posted:Sherlock Holmes is genre trash? technically he's a superhero comic 1) issued in monthly booklet form 2) has a costume (deerstalker, pipe) 3) costume derives from illustrations, not text (sidney paget's illustrations) 4) Has a sidekick (Watson) and a nemesis (Moriarty) 5) has a superpower (deductive reasoning) 6) fights crime 7) dies and returns from the dead Even Arthur Conan Doyle wanted to stop writing Holmes stories and wished people would pay attention to his "literary" works and historical fiction, like The White Company.
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Sep 6, 2017 16:27
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Literature is usually deemed literature about 75+ years after the death of the original author.
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Sep 6, 2017 17:31
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HIJK posted:Literature is usually deemed literature about 75+ years after the death of the original author. That can't be right. Oprah told me Johnathan Franzen's Freedom was the next Great American Novel like the week it was published.
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Sep 6, 2017 17:41
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Even Arthur Conan Doyle wanted to stop writing Holmes stories and wished people would pay attention to his "literary" works and historical fiction, like The White Company. Are these works any good or entertaining as a read?
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Sep 6, 2017 17:46
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TV Zombie posted:Are these works any good or entertaining as a read? No living human being knows, everyone gets distracted and reads Sherlock Holmes instead fake edit: actually The Lost World is pretty boss and the source material for several excellent MST3k episodes real edit: actually I was thinking of The Land that Time Forgot my bad Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 17:56 on Sep 6, 2017 |
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Sep 6, 2017 17:52
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It's literature if your target audience is English majors; it's genre trash if your target audience is the common man. Dickens and Chaucer used to be genre trash until the passage of time made them all but unreadable by the common man.
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Sep 6, 2017 19:09
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"Genre fiction" is an almost entirely modern development despite those kind of false equivocations. It's easily dismissed simply by noting that it's actually impossible to name the "genres" that Chaucer and Dickens wrote in.
BravestOfTheLamps fucked around with this message at 19:28 on Sep 6, 2017 |
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Sep 6, 2017 19:24
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Lifetime original movies have a lot of Dickens territory covered what with death, massive debt, social commentary, homelessness, family drama...
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Sep 6, 2017 19:38
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:"Genre fiction" is an almost entirely modern development despite those kind of false equivocations. It's easily dismissed simply by noting that it's actually impossible to name the "genres" that Chaucer and Dickens wrote in. Eh, you've got a decent point here but again it depends on how you define genre and "genre fiction." I mean, Dickens wrote at least half of a murder mystery novel (The Mystery of Edwin Drood) and Jane Austen essentially invented the romance novel genre (while writing at least one riff on the Gothic Novel as well, Northanger Abbey). You could even argue that the ancient greeks were already dividing things into "genres" -- see, e.g., Artistotle's Poetics. But you're right that the idea of "genre fiction" as a marketing category is a relatively recent development. Austen wasn't setting out to write "genre fiction," but Georgette Heyer was. edit: you also can make a stab at genres for Chaucer if you're willing to use what his contemporaries would have thought of as genres rather than modern ones; few people today would recognize "dream visions" as a genre, but Chaucer's contemporaries would have. For example, the Wife of Bath's tale falls within Arthurian romance. There's a good breakdown of Chaucer's works by "genre" here: http://faculty.winthrop.edu/kosterj/engl511/genreinchaucer.htm Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 20:08 on Sep 6, 2017 |
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Sep 6, 2017 19:49
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HIJK posted:Lifetime original movies have a lot of Dickens territory covered what with death, massive debt, social commentary, homelessness, family drama... Dickens didn't realize it, but he was actually writing Broadway / Disney musicals. Oliver!
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Sep 6, 2017 20:07
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:
That's it. I demand fantasy literature in untranslated Middle English.
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Sep 6, 2017 21:09
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ZombieLenin posted:That's it. I demand fantasy literature in untranslated Middle English. Ok, best I can do https://www.amazon.com/Sir-Gawain-Green-Knight-Tolkien/dp/0198114869 Note that this is not the same as Tolkien's translation -- this is the original ME text with Tolkien's notes and annotations
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Sep 6, 2017 21:18
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:"Genre fiction" is an almost entirely modern development despite those kind of false equivocations. It's easily dismissed simply by noting that it's actually impossible to name the "genres" that Chaucer and Dickens wrote in. Thank you.
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Sep 7, 2017 00:46
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Ok, best I can do This is amazing. Now if only I could read Middle English. Which reminds me of how much I enjoy watching videos of speaking Middle English, and Early Modern English for that matter, in the proper accents. The recovering academic in me does question the veracity and exactness of the knowledge of those accents though.
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Sep 7, 2017 16:57
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ZombieLenin posted:This is amazing. Now if only I could read Middle English. It's a lot easier to learn ME or even OE than it seems at first. Especially for ME it's more a matter of learning the pronunciation shifts and typographical changes than anything else. Specifically reading Sir Gawaine is both easier and more difficult than reading Chaucer because modern English is largely derived from Chaucer's London dialect, whereas Sir Gawaine was written in a different dialect that seems less familiar; because of that though you tend to get better and more thorough notes and annotations, so it balances out. It's definitely something you could teach yourself the basics of with a few afternoons of googling and some relevant youtube tutorials. Once you learn that þ means th and a few other handles everything's a lot more comprehensible. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme/Gawain?rgn=main&view=fulltext See? Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 17:21 on Sep 7, 2017 |
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Sep 7, 2017 17:17
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ZombieLenin posted:The recovering academic in me does question the veracity and exactness of the knowledge of those accents though. There are some notes here: http://the-toast.net/2014/03/19/a-linguist-explains-british-accents-of-yore/ The real short version is that written works prior to standardized spelling give a good reflection of how words were pronounced, we know that there was a great vowel shift that has been well-studied and we can go back from that, etc. They go into it in a little more detail starting at 3:46 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s The much longer version is here: http://historyofenglishpodcast.com/episodes/ ulmont fucked around with this message at 17:34 on Sep 7, 2017 |
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Sep 7, 2017 17:31
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ME at least isn't difficult as long as there's annotations.
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Sep 7, 2017 17:33
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Here's a source for MIddle English texts, which includes a lot of shorter texts if you want to practice reading, with introductions by researcher and notes on the text.
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Sep 7, 2017 17:45
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I guess the real issue is with my philosophy, loosely speaking, training. I can follow being able to track changes in pronunciation through phonetic spelling; however, where I get uncomfortable is when the claims go from it probably sounded something like this to it sounded like this. You can give a person who has never heard a different language or accent spoken in very precise phonetic spellings and what will come out of their mouths when trying to read them aloud might be ballpark, or it might not, but it is very unlikely to sound like a word is/was actually spoken by a native speaker. So with the absence of recorded voices, my questioning is more about the absence of qualification when people are demonstrating the "proper" way dead languages sound.
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Sep 7, 2017 17:53
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ZombieLenin posted:I guess the real issue is with my philosophy, loosely speaking, training. I can follow being able to track changes in pronunciation through phonetic spelling; however, where I get uncomfortable is when the claims go from it probably sounded something like this to it sounded like this. If I show a native speaker of English who hasn't had a day's experience with Chinese pinyin, he's going to pronounce some words dead on and others farcically wrong (fear the would-be usurper Cow Cow!). This is because he's going to assume that pinyin works just like English, or he'll make some other assumption about it that will inform his pronunciation. If I show a trained linguist Chinese written in IPA, the only question of his pronunciation will be if he can physically make the vowels and consonants that Chinese uses that English doesn't, something he can learn with practice. ME is obviously not written in IPA. It's not even standardized between contemporary authors. But linguists have multiple tools at their disposal to get drat close to how the words should have sounded. A lot of work can be done by comparing extant languages, dialects, and accents. You can get a pretty good feel for how vowels and consonants change over time in general by looking at the shifts in pronunciation that have happened across the dozens if not hundreds of languages we've studied over the last couple of centuries. While not hard and fast rules, you get the general impression that there are broad patterns in these shifts as things move from complex diphthongs to consonant clusters and back again. A good rule of thumb is that humans are lazy and we'll move towards simpler pronunciation over time, but that simpler pronunciation introduces new complexities and the process repeats itself. You can also look at specific words and see how they've changed with accents and compare that to the general drift between the accents. We cross check that against linguistic pressures. What were the Australians exposed to or who generally made up their population versus the Americans and South Africans? What continued to influence British English that stopped influencing Colonial English? You can then go between languages. If a word has a Norse root, see what the modern cognate looks like in Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish and compare that to the modern English. Then use what we know about shifts in those languages to try and work backwards. And then there's the writing itself. Authors of ME and other older languages didn't write any more arbitrarily than we do. They considered cadence, rhythm, and rhyme same as us. And that tells you a ton. You can make very strong guesses about which words were supposed to sound the same from the words they're being rhymed with even when the spelling is different. You can also figure out where stresses fall across syllables. And we take all of that information and combine it with the inferences from modern languages and we can arrive at a pretty solid answer. If you're being the ultimate skeptic, yes, it's all strong guesses based on inferences and evidence in modern languages and general patterns. But they're not just shots in the dark.
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Sep 8, 2017 00:57
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So what you're saying is, it's all a mystery and we have no idea. Got it.
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Sep 8, 2017 02:57
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TychoCelchuuu posted:So what you're saying is, it's all a mystery and we have no idea. Got it. Depends on how you feel about the soft sciences.
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Sep 8, 2017 03:45
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Lyon posted:Post a link in here when it goes up.  Here's the link for the new thread for trashing genre books.
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Sep 9, 2017 15:32
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I've got a lot of poo poo going on in my life right now. It's a comfort to know I can drop in on this thread every few weeks and see that nothing's changed.
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Oct 2, 2017 02:06
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Random thoughts: Has anyone pointed out that Rothfuss stole his "all my female characters are super hot and competent, but CHOOSE to gently caress my self-insert main character because they are liberated women" shtick from Robert Heinlein? On the genre talk, authors (or sometimes their publishers) who aspire to being writers of Literature generally try to avoid sci-fi/fantasy. Ishiguro was mentioned before and Atwood specifically labels her books as speculative fiction even though almost any definition of sci-fi would include her work. There are probably some good reasons for this. Sci-fi/Fantasy is regarded as a bit of a trash genre in the same way that romance novels are by most of the people who decide what sorts of books get awards. The idea that sci-fi/fantasy can't be "important" literature is a bit silly though. It's not like no one has ever written a science-fiction novel that is well regarded in English departments. Here's a good article about Atwood's The Heart Goes Last, which is about 40% diversion to talk about the politics of the sci-fi label with a focus on Atwood and Le Guin (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/10/speculative-or-science-fiction-as-margaret-atwood-shows-there-isnt-much-distinction) teaser quote from Le Guin on Atwood's labeling choices: "She doesn’t want the literary bigots to shove her into the literary ghetto.” Is it just me or do genre books written by women get lumped into YA in a way that books by men don't. Like pretty much anything Sanderson or Rothfuss write is just as YA as The Hunger Games or Twilight. But Sanderson's stuff get's bracketed off - his super hero books are flagged as YA, but Mistborn isn't for no discernible reason.Though, maybe that's just smart marketing on the behalf of the aforementioned women/their publishers. The money certainly does seem to be in tween-lit.
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Oct 2, 2017 07:23
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But Sanderson's superhero books are noticeably more young adult than his Mistborn books. I think it's debateable wheather Mistborn could be considered YA, while it's clear that his Reckoners books etc. are YA literature. And importantly, Sanderson and his publishers consider his superhero books YA literature, and they are marketed as such, while his Cosmere books are marketed as fantasy.
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Oct 2, 2017 11:36
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I have seen Mistborn in the YA section and marketed as such before, but the 2nd generation of Mistborn books are certainly not YA books. Rothfuss's stuff is pretty clearly YA but most of the time I hear people praising it they will say something like "It's YA but for adults!!!". Which in that case it's placement in the adult SF/F section makes sense.
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Oct 2, 2017 15:31
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ShinsoBEAM! posted:YA but for adults That's a profound burn.
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Oct 2, 2017 15:52
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Everyone should read The Traitor Baru Cormorant. It's a premiere novel that you won't feel dirty about liking a decade later.
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Oct 3, 2017 06:17
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When did you read it?
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Oct 3, 2017 06:25
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quote:In Seth Dickinson's highly-anticipated debut The Traitor Baru Cormorant, a young woman from a conquered people tries to transform an empire in this richly imagined geopolitical fantasy. Sounds like absolute drivel.
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Oct 3, 2017 08:07
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Benson Cunningham posted:Everyone should read The Traitor Baru Cormorant. yeah let me just read a book written by a book barn poster
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Oct 3, 2017 10:58
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Karnegal posted:Is it just me or do genre books written by women get lumped into YA in a way that books by men don't. Like pretty much anything Sanderson or Rothfuss write is just as YA as The Hunger Games or Twilight. But Sanderson's stuff get's bracketed off - his super hero books are flagged as YA, but Mistborn isn't for no discernible reason.Though, maybe that's just smart marketing on the behalf of the aforementioned women/their publishers. The money certainly does seem to be in tween-lit. I never particularly noticed Twilight and The Hunger Games being marketed as YA - I think they just ended up looking like it because of the sheer volumes of tweens that dove into them, and the slightly lower quality of writing from those two particular authors. Having never read Twilight, I can only repeat what I've heard, but I can directly attest that Collins definitely reads like a YA. I wouldn't say that genre books written by women are generally lumped into YA though - Kristen Britain (Green Rider) immediately comes to mind, and as an Enjoyer of poo poo Genre Fiction, I see a reasonable number of womens' names while perusing the "regular adult SF/F" section of bookstores.
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Oct 3, 2017 13:34
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:Sounds like absolute drivel. Do you have a patreon? I'd give you upwards of $5 to read it and complain about it
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Oct 3, 2017 15:05
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I dunno, I think it might be worth a shot if I see it in a bookstore.
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Oct 3, 2017 18:53
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I've always felt YA has primary protagonists that skew younger than 18, and non-YA has primary protagonists that are ostensible adults. That and most YA tends to be bildungsroman type stories, which makes sense if you're marketing your literature at an audience you would expect to try and push concepts on, rather than just entertain. (YMMV, of course. Nothing is absolutely on one side or the other.) Twilight and 50 Shades are the same story, just one of them takes place in a high school and the other post-high school.
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Oct 3, 2017 19:03
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ChickenWing posted:I never particularly noticed Twilight and The Hunger Games being marketed as YA - I think they just ended up looking like it because of the sheer volumes of tweens that dove into them, and the slightly lower quality of writing from those two particular authors. Having never read Twilight, I can only repeat what I've heard, but I can directly attest that Collins definitely reads like a YA. There's a good argument that Twilight essentially solidified the YA genre as it exists today after Harry Potter's success. The Hunger Games is very much categorised as Young Adult as well. Young Adult primarily exists as a marketing category more so than it being a quality label which a lot of people seem to use it as. Its technical definition can be super subjective and varies greatly. I've seen people refer to YA as the audience but also specifically about the age of the protagonist. Functionally it makes it easier for readers to find the next thing in a walled garden.
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Oct 3, 2017 19:32
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I always thought YA meant the main characters are, well, young adults. I wrote a book which I'd like to market as YA, but the characters are adults so I didn't think it would fit. Maybe I'll reappraise that! The Traitor Baru Cormorant is very good. It's no Ghormenghast though so I'm sure Bravest of Lamps would hate it.
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Oct 4, 2017 00:05
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