The Genres Ablaze: Critical Looks at Sci-fi and Fantasy

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > The Genres Ablaze: Critical Looks at Sci-fi and Fantasy

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Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Thranguy posted:

But the idea that commercial value is a proxy for popular appeal should be obvious, and to deny that popular appeal has a part in measuring artistic value is intolerably elitist.

The hell is this supposed to mean?

Edit: Not ignoring Xotl's post, but I don't quite have the time to read it right now. Looks fantastic.

# ¿ Mar 17, 2019 02:06

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# ¿ May 22, 2024 10:45

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Nerdburger_Jansen posted:

I wonder if this is still "dumb as poo poo?"

Yes. I'm not sure what FactsAreUseless means by a text not being "thematic". Anything that a text communicates to a reader is a theme. If anything means anything at all, no matter how trivial or even literal, that's a theme. It is unavoidable in human communication.

Out of curiosity, I just read Orozco's story "Orientation" for context, and I would hardly call it a themeless piece of writing.

# ¿ Mar 17, 2019 04:52

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

TheGreatEvilKing posted:

my flooded house

drat, that sucks. Hope recovery is going well.

# ¿ Mar 17, 2019 05:11

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

FactsAreUseless posted:

It's not as though you can write anything that doesn't have themes, but Orozco has talked about how seeks to capture specific experiences rather than set out to explore a theme. It's not that one is a better approach than the other, I just think the defining element of literature is the prose, not its thematic depth.

Oh yeah, thematic depth doesn't have to be the focus of a text. Thanks for clarifying.

Also, hey Nerdburger:

FactsAreUseless posted:

It's not as though you can write anything that doesn't have themes

The guy you quoted is saying literally the exact thing we've already been telling you.

# ¿ Mar 17, 2019 05:55

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Where did you go to school? Jesus Christ.

# ¿ Mar 17, 2019 08:36

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Karia posted:

Is this approach working for people?

It's good.

# ¿ Mar 18, 2019 00:05

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Copernic posted:

irregardless

# ¿ Mar 19, 2019 00:26

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Reminder that this whole conversation about whether or not commercial success indicates entertainment value is because of these posts:

onsetOutsider posted:

entertainment is one of the largest measures of success imo, for this medium of entertainment that is books

FactsAreUseless posted:

Entertainment isn't a metric of anything. What people find entertaining is shaped by culture and familiarity.

Thranguy posted:

[Agents and buyers] are in the business of quantifying and predicting what will be found entertaining, with enough success that it isn't viable to dismiss their methods as pure voodoo. If it is possible to do this for profit motives it is also possible for criticism to be in informed by those methods.

So we have the undefined "entertainment" as a measure of "success" in what onsetOutsider has defined as a "medium of entertainment". What does it mean to be entertained? Does it just mean liking something? The last book I read was R�gine Robin's Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic. It's an academic monograph about Socialist Realism. I like it. I have also read The Hunger Games, a book that millions of people like. I dislike it. How entertaining are these books? The obvious answer is that they're as entertaining as the reader is entertained by them. It's a meaningless tautology; liking or disliking something is an individual reaction. An agent knows what a lot of people like, but that's an understanding of the market. Popularity is not something innate; a work's reception is not a quality of the work itself.

Thranguy posted:

But the idea that commercial value is a proxy for popular appeal should be obvious, and to deny that popular appeal has a part in measuring artistic value is intolerably elitist.

I still want to know what this means. How many other people can buy a book before I have to stop saying it's trash? If I love a book that nobody's heard of, do I need to qualify my appreciation of it in some way?

Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 01:38 on Mar 19, 2019

# ¿ Mar 19, 2019 01:33

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Thranguy posted:

I'm not saying a thing can't both be trash and have popular appeal, just there are components to popular appeal intrinsic to the text (ie not just marketing and luck) that can be understood and studied, retrospectively and, with less certainty, predictively. With enough predictively value that people can successfully make careers of it.

You literally said that it's "intolerably elitist" to not factor sales figures into an assessment of artistic value.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2019 01:47

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

onsetOutsider posted:

When we're critically examining works, I assume we're working towards a conclusion relating to the quality of the work, in an attempt to do that as objectively as possible.

Nope.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2019 01:52

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Thranguy posted:

No, to talk about fiction while not having, while actively abjuring a vocabulary and toolset for discussing entertainment value.

Perhaps I'd be more appreciative of this "toolset" if you gave me examples of its tools and how they can be meaningfully put to use. I can't make head or tail of what you're arguing for here. "Entertainment value" is something that you say is inherent to a work, but as far as you've been discussing it, it seems functionally indistinguishable from commercial performance; assessing it is simply market analysis.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2019 02:00

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

onsetOutsider posted:

What do you mean?

Critical examination is about understanding a text. It has nothing to do with whether the text is good or bad. A person's judgement of "good" or "bad" can be backed up with critical arguments (explaining just what they liked or didn't), but these are distinct things.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2019 02:06

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

killer crane posted:

I think maybe the ability of the work/artist to successfully capture the current zeitgeist. Success, value, etc. in lot of the art world is an attempt to stay ahead of trend, or set trend. So maybe popularity is a determiner in the works ability to be on or ahead of the trend.

Yeah, that's market analysis. I'm not trying to pooh-pooh it here; it's just a separate discipline from literary criticism. Capturing the zeitgeist isn't a function of some consistently identifiable "ability"; it's being in the right place at the right time, which is the confluence of innumerable factors that people study by majoring in marketing instead of English.

Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 02:53 on Mar 19, 2019

# ¿ Mar 19, 2019 02:48

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

So? What do critical acclaim or popular appeal have to do with your own judgement? You say yourself that you find "genuine value" in these films.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2019 02:59

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

onsetOutsider posted:

I'm distancing my interpretation of what constitutes "good entertainment" from both of those things.

That it is separate from them is my whole drat point.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2019 03:03

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Bilirubin posted:

Has anybody said that "entertainment value" does not equate "artistic quality" yet? Because that is also a consideration.

I mean would you consider Dan Brown "artistic"?

The ability of a "bad" work to entertain in spite of its deficiencies is itself a positive quality, whether it's down to pacing or tone or sheer audacity or any number of things.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2019 03:17

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

The entire idea of a guilty pleasure is that something is good enough in a few specific ways (or even just one) to outweigh for you all the many ways that it's bad. You wouldn't like something if it didn't have something worth liking about it.

Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 03:25 on Mar 19, 2019

# ¿ Mar 19, 2019 03:22

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

It's much better if you read the prequel series. There's a lot of lore that gets unpacked and enhances the whole thing.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2019 11:59

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Merzbow rules.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2019 20:51

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

anilEhilated posted:

Fairly sure "this" is intentional cruelty

Was about to confirm but saw people talking about Merzbow.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2019 21:18

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

MockingQuantum posted:

Is there an inherent value, from a critical perspective, in familiarizing yourself with social or historical information from outside a text in order to "enhance" your reading of that text, either before or after the fact?

Of course. It's always better to be knowledgeable than to be ignorant. The idea is not that context is meaningless; it's that there are no prerequisites that you have to take before you're allowed to read a book. This is getting more into the realm of New Criticism.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2019 21:28

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

MockingQuantum posted:

And that really, if you were to use authorial intent as a lens through which you view the text, you could only really do it with secondary sources that you should really treat as being just as divorced from the text itself as you would a NYT review, for example.

Correct. This is another idea from New Criticism. Wimsatt's and Beardsley's essay "The Intentional Fallacy" is more or less where this was originally formulated.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2019 21:32

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Gnoman posted:

The issue with Death of The Author comes in when a reader heavily misinterprets part of a work, and then proceeds to view the entire work (and, often, other works by the same author) by that misinterpretation.

For a concrete example, I've seen some claims that the D&D webcomic The Order Of The Stick is a transphobic work, with pages of criticism trying to make this point.

This revolves around two D&D jokes - the first involves an actual item in the game that changes the user's sex (taken as loot from a monster, and later used for a desperate disguise), and the second is a jab at 4E art giving reptilian characters breasts (a female lizardfolk prostitute got implants to "stay relevant").

The author was, in fact, completely bewiledered by trans people complaining about these, because it never occurred to him that the strips could even be interpreted this way. He has, as a result of this, decided that he will stay away from anything that remotely approaches the issue, on the grounds that he seems particularly blind to it and doesn't want to offend people.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2019 21:49

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Gnoman posted:

My point is not "those jokes could not be taken as offensive", it is "you should not take those two jokes to declare that the entire work is ragingly transphobic. and that the author hates all trans people."

That's not Death of the Author; that's people being mad on the Internet (and forgive me if I think that this reaction looks like a straw man).

# ¿ Mar 19, 2019 22:15

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Gnoman posted:

On the other hand, when the erroneous interpretation is being used to justify widespread suppression of the work in a specific context - Lolita is commonly a title where people try to remove from libraries, prohibit discussion in academic circles, and some retailers have outright refused to sell it - it becomes a major problem. Books that are open to such interpretations usually have something very valuable to say (in the case of Lolita, an obvious interpretation is how easy it is to delude yourself into thinking that a woman wants you, which is a ludicrously relevant message in 2019), and not being willing to oppose such objections is harmful to society as a whole.

It's completely possible to argue critically against an interpretation. An interpretation can be valid and loving stupid. Doesn't mean you need to pretend that it's fundamentally inadmissible.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2019 22:36

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Gnoman, your argument against Death of the Author seems to be that certain perspectives don't warrant acknowledgement as perspectives. That's insane. It's like deciding that a really bad book is actually not even a book because it's not good enough to count as one.

Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 22:50 on Mar 19, 2019

# ¿ Mar 19, 2019 22:46

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Your friend seems pretty cool.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2019 22:53

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Mel Mudkiper posted:

thats not what that means!

The task is left up to you by Hieronymous Alloy.

# ¿ Mar 20, 2019 16:02

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

You can take it or leave it or do anything at all with it. Hell, nothing's stopping you from treating even fanfiction as "canonical" if you really want to.

# ¿ Apr 8, 2019 08:28

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

TheGreatEvilKing posted:

Malazan has a ton of jerking it to various proper nouns and magic systems and prose that reminds me unpleasantly of Thomas Covenant.

Appropriate that Donaldson creams himself over it:

Stephen R. Donaldson posted:

Through his rejections, Erikson tests our notions of what it means to be human. He challenges us to reexamine how we think about ourselves, our world, and each other; to reexamine the stories we tell ourselves, the means by which we create our own realities. He encourages us to expand our minds and our hearts to meet those challenges. And he does so in lucid prose as seamless as oil.

I�m a student of Joseph Conrad, Henry James, William Faulkner, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, and I say this: Erikson is as serious as any of them.

# ¿ Apr 10, 2019 04:57

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

I don't know what pronouns are, but I won't let that stop me from telling other people what to think about them.

# ¿ Apr 10, 2019 18:31

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

anilEhilated posted:

I'd also say it feels pretty unfair to hold the fact that noted twit Donaldson likes the books against them.

I was mostly just ripping on Donaldson there.

# ¿ Apr 10, 2019 20:58

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Antivehicular posted:

Seamless as oil, silent as maggots

Plausible as kitchens.

# ¿ Apr 11, 2019 00:07

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Strom Cuzewon posted:

Are there any good essays on the state of modern criticism? Or at least, the criticism that the general public experiences.

J_RBG posted:

Somewhat related, I enjoyed this article about the state of american literary criticism

quote:

In December, Columbia Journalism Review published an item by Sam Eichner under the headline �What�s Behind a Recent Rise in Books Coverage?� The answer was a quest for web traffic. The editors Eichner quoted celebrated the bright new modes. There would be more recommendations. There would be more rankings. There would be more online book clubs. Instagram would be harnessed. There would still be criticism but fewer �traditional� reviews. Readers want to be served in the way fans are served. Books should be treated in the manner of movies or television shows, as occasions for collective chatter, as storehouses of shareable trivia, and once in a while as containers of detachable ideas. The overall vision was that of literary journalism as a form of higher publicity. In keeping with that spirit (the spirit of the flack), Eichner channeled his interviewees�editors from the New York Times, New York magazine, BuzzFeed, and The Atlantic, touting their own publications, trying to justify their editorial decisions and keep their jobs�and explained the recent rise in books coverage:

quote:
In some ways, mainstream book coverage is coming down from its historically lofty perch to join the rest of arts coverage, catering less to the intelligentsia and more to the casual reader, who may not be interested in literary fiction or nonfiction. With so much to watch and read and listen to�and so many people chiming in on what to watch and read and listen to�it�s no surprise readers are hungering for a trusted source who can point them in the direction of books tailored to their interests. And those same readers may be looking for the kind of full-court, blogosphere press typically reserved for watercooler shows like Sharp Objects and meme machines like A Star Is Born.

Here a consumerist vision of reading is presented as a form of anti-�elitism. The quaint use of �intelligentsia� suggests a suspect class of self-regarding intellectuals with an echo of Cold War red-baiting. And then a fantastic fictional character: the casual reader who disdains literary books but is eager for, say, the New York Times to tell her which nonliterary books to read when she isn�t busy watching HBO or listening to podcasts. And what does �full-court, blogosphere press� describe but hastily written, barely edited, cheap, and utterly disposable online jetsam? Such is the nature of the new �books coverage.� I was aware of the trend. Two months before Eichner�s story ran, my contract to review books at New York magazine was dropped. I had been told that although its books coverage would be expanding, what I did�book reviews�had �little value.�

Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 16:00 on Apr 24, 2019

# ¿ Apr 24, 2019 15:56

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

I haven't read Malazan and don't plan to, but it's really hard to take an Eragon comparison seriously. Even thread favorites like Rothfuss and Sanderson have more ambition and imagination in a single chapter than that book does in 500 pages.

Edit: Also, yes, please don't lay it on so thick in general. The song and dance you're making of your disdain has a real whiff of Doug Walker's histrionics.

Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 20:53 on Apr 26, 2019

# ¿ Apr 26, 2019 20:47

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Surly and Cotillion sound like Annie Proulx characters.

# ¿ Apr 28, 2019 18:55

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Malazan is truly the Iliad of our age.

# ¿ Apr 30, 2019 22:04

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

The Vosgian Beast posted:

This is the logic of late capitalism

Capitalism, a system wherein people are discouraged from consuming endless installments of a franchise.

# ¿ Apr 30, 2019 22:06

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

I'm seriously struggling to figure out what he meant by that. "You can do other things with your time" is the perfect antithesis of capitalist ideology.

# ¿ Apr 30, 2019 22:13

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# ¿ May 22, 2024 10:45

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

pile of brown posted:

Does it change when the revolution is accomplished and "channeling energy into revolutionary activity" is redundant?

The perfect ideal of revolution being "accomplished" never comes to pass even in a best-case scenario, and even if it did, all it would mean is that all energy is channeled into it anyway. It wouldn't be "redundant"; it would necessarily be the case. There's nothing for art's purpose to "change" to.

Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 10:24 on May 6, 2019

# ¿ May 6, 2019 10:15

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > The Genres Ablaze: Critical Looks at Sci-fi and Fantasy

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