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I’ve never really liked the use of term “genre” to mean “thing bad” and really prefer it when it’s used simply as a categorization to describe content—they way the term “genre” is used in music or film. Categories aren’t indicative of quality and are used to describe content. Some genres have a less stellar ratio of bad to good than others, naturally. I also find the “literary fiction” pretty useless as it’s used as a marketing category, since it’s just basically a catch-all for something that isn’t super obviously SFF, romance, mystery, or horror and doesn’t tell you anything about the actual content of the story or even the quality—I used to work at a Barnes & Noble and a lot of what you’d find in the literary fiction section was anything but literary and some of the lines were blurry. Thrillers sometimes got shelves in litfic and sometimes mystery, seemingly arbitrarily. I remember Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell was shelved in the literary fiction section despite being pretty clearly fantasy on account of it having fairies and magic in it and not in a magical realist sort of way. I prefer the term “pulp” to mean “thing bad” and “literary” to mean “thing good,” where either can be applied to any genre. So within fantasy you’d have pulp fantasy (Sanderson, Gurm, Rothfuss, honestly most fantasy because most fantasy sucks rear end) and literary fantasy (LeGuin, Peake). And naturally some poo poo that’s kind of in the middle.
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Mar 17, 2019 00:17
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onsetOutsider posted:In that case I'd definitely agree that Stormlight Archive be classified as pulp fantasy (I love the series, sue me). Whereas stuff like Peake which is objecively more difficult to read, deserves to be called literary fantasy or whatever, which speaks nothing to the quality (I love Gormenghast too though). How difficult something is to read isn’t really a measure of literary quality. I mentioned LeGuin as an author I would consider to have written literary fantasy, and there’s nothing particularly challenging about her prose. It’s clean and tidy and very easy to read, while still having an aesthetic quality that is elevated. Prose quality is the main issue, not difficulty or ease of reading. You can have challenging prose that’s good and challenging prose that’s bad. Ditto easy to read prose. Imo the real differentiating factor is thematic weight. If you could write a term paper on it how it deals with a particular theme without resorting to completely bullshitting your way through it, it’s probably literary.
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Mar 17, 2019 00:43
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Entertainment value is totally subjective and can be (and often is) completely divorced from actual merit. I find trashy historical bodice rippers wildly entertaining. They are also not good by any reasonable metric.
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Mar 17, 2019 00:52
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Bilirubin posted:I'd suggest it was depth not weight, depending on how you define weight of course. Literature can take repeated passes of thought and reveal more meaning each time, but I know nothing so Probably the same way you’re defining thematic depth, to be completely honest. Basically just that there’s thematic meaning that goes well beyond fluffy or surface.
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Mar 17, 2019 01:24
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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. Popularity is a non-factor with regards to artistic merit. Some works of great merit are very popular. Some are not. Some works with little or no merit are very popular. Some are not.
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Mar 17, 2019 01:39
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I think it's partly that it's a more subjective field, partly that it tends to be a refuge for poor and underqualified teachers. Lord knows the ability to read and think critically is not common. In many schools the people supposedly teaching literature can't do it, so you end up with a spectacle equivalent to someone who can't count on their fingers being asked to teach math. The kids realize they're being conned, even if they don't know precisely how, and welp This is sad but it’s true. I studied to be a secondary English teacher (dropped it like a hot potato in the middle of student teaching when I realized I actively loathe classroom management and also that Kids These Days loving suck) but I had at least a handful of fellow masters in education students who actively sucked rear end at understanding literature themselves. Some were even vocal about thinking the classics were “overrated” or not that important. Also a shocking number of English teachers hate poetry and refuse to teach it any more than they’re required to (so, sometimes literally not at all). I can’t fathom why you would become an English teacher if you actively dislike one of the three main forms of literature. Like, it would be totally ridiculous for an English teacher to hate fiction or hate drama, but it’s acceptable for some reason for them to hate poetry.
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Mar 17, 2019 14:04
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Mel Mudkiper posted:The two most miserable experiences I can remember in high school were The Scarlet Letter and Lord of the Flies, and both of thes books were essentially hijacked in the name of a sort of objective puzzle solving reading. I hope one day to return to those books, especially Scarlet Letter, and allow myself to find my own way through the text instead of having to decode what it means that the seaweed made a green A. My teacher in high school mercifully avoided the "book as puzzle box" approach to The Scarlet Letter. Instead we got like a month of "Is Hester feminist?" to the exclusion of nearly anything else one might talk about when reading The Scarlet Letter which was its own kind of stupid, but at least it was easy to ignore and just forge ahead with my own reading of the story. It's easily my favorite American novel and, for better or weirder, it kick-started my lasting obsession with the Puritans.
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Mar 17, 2019 19:07
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Sham bam bamina! posted: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. There’s also the concept of something being “so bad it’s good,” where it’s badness is so over the top and absurd in such a fashion that it becomes entertaining. I think “so bad it’s good” applies more often to movies than more participatory media like books or even video games, though, since there’s a certain point where the effort it takes to experience something is greater than the “so bad it’s good” value you’d get for experiencing it.
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Mar 19, 2019 03:41
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I haven’t read any Jemisin because she wrote at least one whole book in second person and reading more than a few paragraphs of second person breaks me out in hives.
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Oct 2, 2019 20:59
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ChubbyChecker posted:But yeah, it sucks rear end. A story doesn't become better just because it's longer, it only becomes more diluted. The Wizard of Earthsea tells a better story in 200 pages than Wheel of Time or Harry Potter did with dozens of door stoppers. I’ve long thought it’s a shame that Tolkien is the fantasy writer that fantasy writers are constantly shamelessly aping when they’re not coming up with JRPG combat systems; if they’d shamelessly ape LeGuin instead even the lovely stuff would at least be concise and lovely instead of drawn out and lovely.
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Nov 23, 2019 21:00
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my bony fealty posted:Le Guin was a far better writer in every imaginable aspect than Jordan and Rowling so that helps LeGuin was a far better writer in every imaginable aspect than like 95% of SFF writers in general, to be fair.
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Nov 23, 2019 21:31
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A human heart posted:it's insanely sick how academia has been thoroughly coopted by market forces so that literature departments now have to have courses like 'YA 101' or whatever I had to take a class on Young Adult Lit, but it was specifically geared towards people going into education. Still bullshit and the continual dumbing down of secondary education is one of many reasons I said “gently caress this poo poo” halfway through student teaching and now work in an entirely different field than the one I went to school for.
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Dec 10, 2019 00:07
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