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Lightning Lord posted:BotL can you eventually review some fantasy you like? Maybe Jack Vance or something. Just so the people who think you HATE FUN will shut up BotL once positively reviewed Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, for what it's worth: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3365216&userid=191162#post451886108
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Sep 11, 2017 14:04
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 09:39 |
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I actually am interested in the division between "genre fiction" and "literature," and whether a useful distinction can actually be drawn. Obviously for bookstores it's a marketing consideration first and foremost--after all, you want to shelf a book where it's most likely that someone who wants to buy it will find it--so the division between what goes on the Literature shelves or the SF/Fantasy shelves at Barnes & Noble isn't all that interesting. My own little not-yet-developed idea is that genre fiction is defined more by its subject matter than literature is. Supernatural elements or certain story beats (especially for mystery novels) might be included in a genre novel specifically because of the genre the author sees the novel existing in, not necessarily because they serve some strong thematic purpose. I should point out that I also don't think this is a bad thing by any means. People should read what they enjoy, and hell, I also don't think reading is an inherently more noble way to consume entertainment than anything else. It's not like literature never has supernatural elements, or that there are no "literary" novels that have a murder mystery as the main plot thread. It's clear that some books are written with a different purpose and goal in mind than others. I don't really know if I can completely put my finger on it, though, and I'm resistant to the idea that there's a completely clear dividing line or that something that is "literary" is Just Plain Better because of its comparatively high-minded goals. Mel Mudkiper posted:there is no such thing as objectively good and objectively bad because the concepts are inherently subjective 
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Sep 12, 2017 14:14
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Mel Mudkiper posted:My developed idea is that genre is a marketing concept and not actually reflective of the book's content but on the publisher's imagined ideal audience I suppose so. But authors use the idea, too, and I think that necessarily affects the content of their books. If Author A writes a book intending to write A Science Fiction Book, and Author B writes a book about some sort of Idea and thinks that <insert science fiction concept here> would be an interesting or effective way to explore that idea, they're going to write different books. It's not entirely about publishers. And Author A's book might be awesome and smart and Author B's book might be lovely and dumb, or vice versa, but they definitely have different goals and will approach the subject matter differently regardless of quality. Whether that constitutes "genre" is something it seems we disagree on. To me, discarding that label when writers can and do write within a genre's conventions consciously seems like throwing away a potentially useful discussion tool on principle.
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Sep 12, 2017 14:27
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Mel Mudkiper posted:The author does not determine the significance of the book. The reader does. Ultimately at best an author can only be a reader of their own work, finding what they consider personally significant in the text but not mandating that significance on others. Mel Mudkiper posted:Why is a capital A Author needed for meaning? Text creates meaning. While an author's intentions--whether they're stated or whether we're trying to intuit them from the text--are never the final word on a text, nor are they necessarily a useful starting point for critical discussion, those intentions do have an effect on the final product. It's not like fiction writing involves entering a trance state through which words unconsciously flow from an author's brain onto a page, independent of what that author tries to consciously do. Authors can set out to write different kinds of books and end up indeed writing different kinds of books. A book like The Golem and the Jinni treats its fantastical elements very differently than Proven Guilty (a Dresden Files book), even though they both feature jinni and at least one wizard. They use them for different purposes and tell very different kinds of stories with them. Their styles are nothing alike, nor are their goals as stories. Maybe we can discard "genre" as the term we use here, but how else should we describe those differences? If we want to recommend a book to someone, what criteria do we use to figure out if we should recommend something like The Golem and the Jinni or something like Proven Guilty? If we want to compare a book critically to another with similar aims, do we start from scratch every time to determine the points of comparison? We may chafe at categorization but I don't think it's an entirely useless or arbitrary exercise. Harrow fucked around with this message at 15:04 on Sep 12, 2017 |
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Sep 12, 2017 15:01
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Genre is the literal definition of an arbitrary exercise because it is literally arbitrating meaning to a text. Fair enough. For what it's worth, I wasn't conflating literary criticism and taste completely--I was mostly talking about, as you say, communicability. From a critical standpoint, I also don't totally buy in to completely discarding the author from the discussion. It's a useful tool, but it isn't the end-all, be-all of critical discussion. It's one way of critically approaching a text, but not the only correct way. But that's a different argument that I admit I'm far too out of practice to coherently argue right now.
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Sep 12, 2017 15:16
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Liquid Communism posted:Honestly, that's pretty much the norm in lit crit where the SF/Fantasy ghetto is concerned. I don't think this is necessarily true, but I think dipping one's toes into lit crit via a literature course or two, or a full undergraduate English major, can really reinforce the idea that literary criticism inherently looks down on "genre" works. The truth is that there's quite a lot of literary criticism about works with science fiction and fantasy elements, and that's not even counting criticism that specifically examines works categorized as genre fiction. Undergraduate literature courses tend to avoid genre fiction except in courses specifically focused on it, but that isn't because the whole of the scholarly community treats them as inferior or unacceptable to study. University creative writing courses also tend to look down on fantastical elements, but there are often good reasons for that. Sure, sometimes the professor or the other students automatically associate fantastical elements with lowbrow genre fiction. But sometimes it leads to a more useful question, which one of my professors in grad school brought up: what are you doing with the fantastical element that you couldn't do without it? What purpose does it serve in terms of story, theme, and character? Does it distract from that, or does it enhance it? And the truth is, with inexperienced writers, it much more often distracts than enhances. It takes a lot of work to write a great story, and adding on magic or science fiction on top just makes that work even harder unless you really know what you're doing with it.
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Sep 12, 2017 20:27
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Even then, BotL is writing reviews here, not criticism in the academic sense. They're critical reviews, but not academic criticism, and those are very different things.just another posted:I'm not saying it's bad or good, I'm just not sure if you can disentangle criticism of a text from criticizing its fans and detractors. I don't think BotL intends to disentangle that, honestly. Strom Cuzewon posted:Edit: Also you clearly don't believe that text is text because you literally just said that how a book is marketed is relevant to its genre classification. Mel's drawing a distinction between marketing and communication about books and criticism. Ultimately I don't completely disagree with them on this: genre is much less relevant to criticism (at least of a specific text--there's something to be said for criticism of genre conventions, I think) than to marketing or just talking to people about taste and preferences. As for "text is text," when we're talking about literary criticism, we're not talking about "good" or "bad" in the first place. Criticism doesn't mean reviews in this context. For criticism, it doesn't matter what an author was trying to achieve with a text--it matters what the text actually does. And the fact that it doesn't achieve certain things is more or less relevant based on what it does achieve, or the critical lens you're viewing it through. Writing a review is very different, though, but even then I'd argue that the question is less, "Does the book do what it set out to do?" and more, "Does what the book achieves make it a book I'd recommend reading?" Slightly different framing, but I think it's an important difference. Harrow fucked around with this message at 23:08 on Sep 12, 2017 |
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Sep 12, 2017 23:06
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the old ceremony posted:d&d is a bad tolkien pastiche though D&D is actually a bad game too 
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Sep 19, 2017 14:00
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ulmont posted:Sanderson has been very explicit on this. In his mind, the less you explain the magic and the less consistent it is, the less the magic can be used by the main characters to actually do things in the world and drive the plot. This was a while ago, but it got me thinking. On the surface, that famous Sanderson rule seems to me pretty reasonable. The less you establish for the reader the capabilities and boundaries of magic in your story, the more likely it is that the reader's going to find the use of magic to solve problems unsatisfying, because it can't build on anything that they already know to be true. It's an attempt to avoid magic as deus ex machina, to use an admittedly-tired term. But I think that's a really narrow view, the more I turn it over in my head. Why do events necessarily have to be grounded in some sort of very physical, immutable logic to be narratively satisfying? (Hell, why do events have to be narratively satisfying at all? There's something to be said for the intentional anticlimax.) There are other routes to that end by making them thematically satisfying or linked to what we know of the characters, their experiences, and their world. I realize I'm inviting the utter destruction of a book I love by bringing this book up, but Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell contains some of the clearest examples of this that I can think of. Magic follows rules that are more poetic and instinctive than rigid or scientific. When Strange nearly kills a man in self-defense with magic in the middle of the book, we don't think, "Wait, what spell is he casting? Does magic work that way? How can he do that?" Instead, the focus is on how much fear he must be feeling, how desperate he must be, to use magic to kill. Often magic doesn't so much solve problems in the plot as provide the inciting events for the plot and for character development, or just background texture. And when it does solve problems, it's rooted in truths about the characters doing the magic that just happens to work through the magic--in the end, what saves the day is, in part, Strange and Norrell's shared ignorance, not their skill with magic. That book breaks that Sanderson rule like crazy. Magic drives the plot and the characters do magic all over the place, and we never learn any sort of "magic system," and yet it still works because that's not what's actually important. And, as a result, it feels a lot more magical than anything you'd see in a book with a "magic system."
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Oct 6, 2017 22:30
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 09:39 |
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ulmont posted:I can't decide whether or not this undercuts your argument completely, but I wanted to point it out here. I'm re-reading the sentence you quoted from my post and it's drat near word salad so I'm going to try to rephrase it. So, the way Strange & Norrell ends involves magic solving the problem, but the book never sets up how magic works, what the system behind it all is, or what its capabilities and limits are. We haven't seen the characters do magic of this type before, and we don't have a system to puzzle out to determine that, yes, this is a thing that magic can do in this world. But I think it still works and feels satisfying because the reason that magic works has nothing to do with a system, but because of who the characters are. Both Strange and Norrell are ultimately ignorant when it comes to magic. As powerful as they are, they're basically children playing around with tools they barely understand. When they cast a spell in the end to summon the Raven King to defeat a fairy, they gently caress up because they don't know the Raven King's real name and can't summon him by it, and the wording of the spell they cast ends up placing the Raven King's power in the hands someone completely different... who happens to be just the right person to wield that power and solve their problem. They succeed by failing, which is the most Strange and Norrell thing that could ever happen. It breaks Sanderson's rule because it doesn't build off of anything we know about a magic system. We never really see that magic has any boundaries at all. As far as we know, there's nothing magic can't do. Hell, resurrecting the dead is like the third act of magic we see in the entire book. The idea that an act of magic can be the thing that solves the characters' problem should be unsatisfying and cheap, but it isn't because the magic itself isn't the important part. I should note that there are some vague sort of rules involving English magic--specifically, that it draws from contracts the Raven King set up centuries ago, and that Norrell considers summoning fairies to be totally antithetical to English magic--so I suppose the argument could be made that that's enough. But I think it's vague enough that it doesn't really constitute a system of clear rules, and given how much magic is used in the story's action, it's a really shaky foundation for making any predictions about what magic can, or will, do. Harrow fucked around with this message at 23:12 on Oct 6, 2017 |
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Oct 6, 2017 23:07
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