Count me among those for whom genre doesn't resonate. I don't think it's because of intellectual pretensions, just the fact that I'm unable to suspend disbelief in the absence of nuanced, true-to-life characters in real-life settings. Call it a lack of imagination (or perhaps a particular type of imagination), but in order to become engrossed in a book, I have to believe that the story has either happened in the past, is happening now, or could happen tomorrow.
OK.
That does it.
Many of you need to go out and read a lot more than you're reading.
Many of you are using words without knowing what they mean. This is one of the greatest of writerly sins.
The fact that this rather nonsensical literary vs genre discussion keeps coming up over and over and over again suggests that the problem is wide-spread.
Literary fiction is another way of saying
novel. It has no agreed upon standard meaning. There
is no standard definition. It means something different to pretty much every person who uses it.
Literature refers to prose and poetry in general, including non-fiction.
Literary as an adjective has no agreed upon meaning in terms of qualitative judgments--and it's the repeated implication and assertion of a qualitative judgment that is
making me pull my hair out. Literary properly used in context can provide an idea of the prose style, without it necessarily being qualitative (see Whimsical Rabbit above).
Many of the posts in this thread demonstrate that the writers don't know what they are talking about--they really don't.
I personally prefer reading and writing lit fiction over genre.
there's nothing wrong with being a little word drunk. write for yourself, not for the raving masses.
Gee
thanks buddy. Speaking as a member of the raving masses, I think you need to go read a lot more.
Especially if you want to be published, which, of course, you very well might
not want. Particularly if you think punctuation is a tool for the raving masses or a weapon of the hegemony.
Especially if you're tossing around statements like "I'm unable to suspend disbelief in the absence of nuanced, true-to-life characters in real-life settings" after a statement dismissing all genres.
Every single novel in the English and American canon belongs to one or more genres.
I'm fine with readers or writers not liking specific prose genres--examples of which include:
Bildungsroman
Epistolary
Mystery
Horror
SF
Fantasy
Thriller
Romance
Tragedy
Comedy
Novel of Manners
Political
Western
Action/Adventure
Travel
Epic
Military
Erotic
Saga
Picaresque
Satyrical
Parody
And
many, many more.
Please think about your words. Go to a library and look up some of the terms you are using not only in unabridged dictionaries--but in specialized dictionaries like Holman,
A Handbook to Literature,
The Oxford Companion to English Literature,
The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms,
The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetic Terms, Abrams
Glossary of Literary Terms.
You guys are making me weep.
We have many many writers and authors who
deliberately write in specific genres--so let's not make qualitative judgments about the quality of their books
en masse.