Ho no.

Not going there.

That would be W.O.R.K.

You can't wrap it up into a pithy epigram? I liked "Historically significant work on the signifier" for Art.

Go to hell.

That certainly describes some of my favourite literature....

I remember somebody on the Forge once asked R. Edwards an academic question, and his response was: "You pay tuition for that."

He's so full of it.

What the fuck is all this noise?

Quote from: Thanatos02What the fuck is all this noise?

It's just a beer hall discussion, nothing that need concern you.

Quote from: mythusmageIt's just a beer hall discussion, nothing that need concern you.

Well, though, I do like beer...

Question: Briefing for a Descent into Hell; psychodrama, scifi, fantasy?  (I've never been able to complete the book, it's kicked my ass every time I've picked it up.  There are scars.)

Quote from: droogWell, out of all the fantasy I've ever read I suppose my favourites are the original Earthsea trilogy, almost all of Leiber's Nehwon stories, Clark Ashton Smith and M. John Harrison's Viriconium books. I'm not sure what it proves, except that I'm rather fussy in my reading tastes. I cannot enjoy more-of-the-same fantasy, going back to the Shannara book I read when I was about 12. I also have failed to enjoy much of the 'literary' fantasy bruited about in this thread. Mieville just doesn't do it for me, nor Gaiman, nor even Pratchett.

So perhaps we could lay aside the "Oh you snobs!" routine?

Very close to my own list interestingly, I'd add REH but that's a good summary of my own favourites.

Quote from: BalbinusVery close to my own list interestingly, I'd add REH but that's a good summary of my own favourites.

Dad!?

It's interesting to me that there's so much consensus on 'good fantasy' of a certain kind. droog, Balbinus, Melan, myself, Gary Gygax, and Ron Edwards all have a surprising amount of overlap, for example, along with many others. What is it that makes this stuff good? That is, there's a significant sharing of taste here that persists over time.

What's also interesting in this connection is that the reasons people give for liking these books are often quite different. Ron for instance points out correctly that there are humanity-laden choices in a lot of the Conan stories, but I've never been able to shake the suspicion that these are more or less pegs to hang the story on and not what's essential or even particularly interesting about them.

I used to think I knew the difference between literature and non-literature, but I've quite lost it. The problem is there are all these transitional things, like say Henry James' "The Aspern Papers": I could point to some things that James does (bits of devastating psychology, astonishingly high mastery of craft) that are not present to the same degree even in smart fantasy and sci-fi, but on the other hand the story has many of the characteristics of the genre piece too. Furthermore, any number of 'flavor of the moment' literary writers (e.g. Chabon, Carroll) have been strongly influenced by pulp stuff, comics, etc. Maybe the distinction is evaporating in our current historical condition? But if so, and if we accept something like T.S. Eliot's version of the canon - which has survived with epicycles in at least some current theory, I think, though connoisseurs there are who would deny it - then suddenly stuff like Burroughs and Howard and Tolkien and Marvel Comics seem to get brought into the evolving historical body of literature by way of backwards appropriation. I'm really puzzled by this.

Also, how do you feel about Thierry de Duve, Pierce? I kind of liked Kant after Duchamp.

The reason why genre is not considered literature is simply because rather than embedding its metaphores in subtext and symbollism, it manifests them literally.  This makes it rather resistant to traditional "new" critical tools and therefore makes it difficult for classically trained litcrit academics to get publications out of discussing it.

This is why genre criticism has developed its own parallel system of journals.

I don't dispute that that's a factor, Mr. Analytical, and I think it was an even stronger factor 20-50 years ago. But I'm more interested in whether we here talking among us, free for the moment of the sociology of academic life, can offer any principled grounds for the distinction.

I think literary fiction is merely another genre, so no, I don't think it is a sustainable distinction.

Primarily I see it as a marketing tool in fact, it helps to sell a book to sf fans if you market it as sf, it helps to sell the same book to literary fiction fans if you market it as literary fiction and strenuously avoid calling it sf.

The Handmaid's Tale, classic sf plot, literary fiction.

The novel Children of Men was marketed as literary fiction, despite being so close to the novel Greybeard written by Aldiss (and marked as sf) that claims of plagiarism were raised.  Interestingly, film reviewers treated the movie Children of Men as an sf movie.

So, why wasn't Children of Men the novel SF?  It had the same plot as an existing sf novel, so much so that claims of plagiarism were taken very seriously (though I think coincidence was eventually accepted as the explanation) and the movie of it is seen as an sf movie.  Marketing, marketing and vanity, in that people who read literary fiction look down on sf and don't want their conceptions of it challenged.