http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304520804576343310420118894.html?mod=WSJ_hp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsTop

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A book about these guys who create a superhero comic wins a Pulitzer...whose committee would never look twice at a superhero comic.

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I read somewhere regarding some committee that decreed James Joyce's Ulysses among the 10 greatest novels of the century... then about half the committee admitted they'd never actually read it.

As someone points out, "literary" is just another genre, despite being populated by boring pretentious snobs... my snide little voice adds, "Literary is what you write when you lack the skills to write in a more-specific genre." Perhaps some are trying to better themselves by writing SF/F.

The literary snobs are denigrating the genre even when they are writing genre fiction. I am totally into wide audiences and acceptance, but their notion that they are "elevating" the genre bothers me.

So what is literary fiction anyway? I've never found a satisfactory definition of it.

I'm not into novels that have no story or abstract themes that require an elitist to explain, but I find many authors that are placed in this category enjoyable to read, be it John Updike, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison and others. I won't name the handfuls of others who I read half of their novels before casting them aside out of sheer boredom. But sometimes I do that with genre fiction too.

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So what is literary fiction anyway?

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It was a rhetorical question

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I read somewhere regarding some committee that decreed James Joyce's Ulysses among the 10 greatest novels of the century... then about half the committee admitted they'd never actually read it.

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I read of another poll, of the British reading public, where The Lord of the Rings came in first---and the committee in charge of it all tried to throw out the results.

*****

Stephen King and J.K. Rowling are soundly and roundly hated by many in the literary clique. Yet who is going to be read in 50 years? 100 years? 200 years? Shakespeare was a commercialist and populist playwrite. Dickens too was a commercialist and populist. Were they also artists with a message? No doubt. But they knew how to pay the bills, and so far as we know, never scorned or looked down upon their audiences.

I blogged a bit about this, a few days ago:

http://bradrtorgersen.wordpress.com/2011/05/09/dont-be-shabby-be-inspiring-instead/

If the modern (post-modern?) literary tradition embraces anything, it embraces contempt. Contempt for the lay reader. Contempt for the markets and the editors. Contempt even for other artists. As if contempt, all by itself, were a virtue. Thus the urge by the literary establishment to plunder genres and take money from readers it has no respect for, does not hold in any regard, and in fact dismisses with a sniff and wave of the elitist hand.

As one commenter on my blog noted, it's the Dada mentality come to infest the written word community.

I consider the best fiction to contain both.
Consider Frank Herbert's DUNE, or works by Harlan Ellison, Norman Spinrad, Philip K. Dick, Theodore Sturgeon, or recently David Brin's DROOD or Susanna Clarke's JONATHAN STRANGE AND MR. NORRELL. I am now (finally) reading George RR Martin's THE GAME OF THRONES which I also would consider literary fantasy.

I know I attempt "literary" depth in my shorter works, crafting words and images to support themes and characters and narrative--with varying degrees of success. The problem I find is in being too obtuse. My recent THE KABBALIST: SACRED GEOMETRY is an example. There is a lot to juggle in "literary fantasy."

I love to play with different styles of writing as well (don't you?), seeking to evoke in the reader the wonder of a fairy tale or the verisimiltude of a noir detective story or the breathless pace of a thriller.

But I was tutored in creative writing by "literary" authors when I was an undergraduate umpity-umpity years ago; and they taught me the love of words: playing and sifting words to evoke my ideas, life lessons and experience, not merely to stack as bricks in relating narrative and plot. Sometimes I'll spend hours or days seeking, researching, the best word or phrase--and have fun doing it. But then, writing for me is not a livelihood or a business. And I may never have much published.

But I do believe my favorites stories and novels contain both style, psychological depth, and character and an engaging narrative and plot--however you wish to label it.
I merely call them "good reads."

Respectfully,
History

To me, the interesting fact is that a literary writer turned to science fiction and not some other genre. Why?

Two thoughts on this. Firstly, science fiction does seem to have a broader appeal. This is partly because some of it does develop simple or straight forward escapes where one doesn't have to consider the deep and meaningful to understand the story. In that regard it appeals to non-intellectuals, which comprise a larger portion of the general population. On the other hand, science fiction also appeals to a different group of intellectuals - ones that enjoy contemplating ideas, particularly technical ideas. The ability to embrace several groups adds to the broad appeal.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly for a literary writer, is the historic embracing of literary approaches by science fiction. I'd consider the entire New Wave of the 60s and 70s to be an attempt to make science fiction more literary. In that regard, spec-fic has garnered and kept an audience that enjoys the literary feel of stories ever since, and therefore holds a ready audience access for a literary writer's stories.

However, just because there is a ready-made audience, doesn't mean the writer is able to become much more popular than he was before. Readers still read for what they read before, and therefore the writer will have to deliver something that will appeal to the expectations of this broader audience. If they don't learn the expectations, all they will gain is that small group that like literary spec-fic stories. And furthermore, even if they remain true to their literary instincts, they will have to adapt to the slightly different expectations (due to different histories of the two (sub) genres). For example, the literary science fiction magazines that I know still don't like vignettes, which are quite acceptable in some literary circles.

There you go. Nothing more needs to be said. But I'll go ahead and say something anyway.

Sure, if the man writes a good book more power to him. I don't doubt his competence - it's the attitude that irks me. Of course good fiction has both literary and genre elements.

Every "genre" is more or less a descendent of what we now consider literary fiction. Austen and the Bronte sisters were the primary forbearers of “romance”; Poe and Doyle were largely responsible for “mystery and suspense”; Shelley and Poe are largely credited with “horror”; Verne and Wells popularized "science fiction"; and “fantasy’s” origins are all over the place, from ancient mythology, to Dante and Spenser, Swift and Carroll, but Tolkien is the most attributed ancestor in mainstream fantasy, excluding all the vampire and werewolf stories that are a sort of hybrid with horror in much the same way that zombies tend to be a hybrid with science fiction and horror.

My point is that all of these were “literary” writers (Tolkien was a professor of literature), and except for the two romance examples, all of them experimented in some way with science fiction and fantasy. Even Dickens and Twain dabbled in this field. Shame on them for wanting to do something different from everyone else! And shame on these uppity literary types for wanting to sell books! Curse them, curse them all!

Just because many writers of speculative fiction were not recognized for their literary qualities by the powers that be, doesn’t negate the literary qualities of their work. Many were recognized, such as Orwell, Bradbury, Golding, Herbert and Tolkien just to name a very few. But many speculative fiction writers had literary styles such as Dick, Le Guin, Wolfe, Gibson, Ellison, and Clarke. Even Heinlein had somewhat of a literary style in stories like Starship Troopers, and I would argue that Card’s first novel, Ender’s Game had literary elements.

Michael Chabon has been a strong proponent of speculative fiction from day one. Gaiman definitely has a literary style but continues to write speculative fiction and graphic novels. I, like History, read McCarthy’s The Road and listened to the audio book of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell and loved both of these. I have not read Attwood, but she appears to enjoy the genre as well.

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Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford from 1945 to 1959.

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Edited to correct my spelling of Medieval.

1. It brings that many more readers into the Fantasy genre. And I love it when my market grows.

2. Maybe these guys will write something that doesn't bore me to tears. I always love new books. I started Justin Cronin's THE PASSAGE and am enjoying the heck out of it.

What's telling is that this Duncan figured out he needed more than language to entertain lots of people. He needed "a high-concept". Good for him. I would love to sell a book to 18 countries or get a 300k first printing and a moive option.

This was interesting as well: "Fantasy fans often note that the divide between popular and literary fiction was established relatively recently by the modernists, who favored hyperrealism over plot and narrative. Throughout history, pillars of the literary canon, from Homer, Dante, Milton and Shakespeare up through Jules Verne, Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker, blended natural and supernatural elements. The pendulum may now be swinging back, with literature that can be both popular and literary, realistic and fantastical."

http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/6/russ6art.htm

[Tho after perusing various other articles, I'd characterize a great deal of the other material on that site as pretentious "literary" claptrap.]

[Having read a couple of other articles there, now, I do find the unnecessarily convoluted and obscure language annoying. It is like they are attempting to hide their ideas behind a form of paradoxical and obscurity laiden technobabble, as if the ideas themselves won't stand against any sort of scrutiny unless hidden behind a complex layering whose sole purpose is to reduce the audience to a small inner circle. Is that what you mean by pretentious? ]