/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.17213626]

Is genre vs literary fiction a useful distinction or is it bullshit.

[Anonymous No.17213636]

it's human shit

[Anonymous No.17213681]

>>17213626
Genre fiction can be literary. I'd categorize it more like this:
>boring drama fiction with talking heads
>good drama fiction with an interesting setup and lots of character development. I'm thinking of The Painted Bird.
>SFF/horror/mystery/detective fiction
>smut
Then
>good, interesting non-fiction about stories
>badly written non-fiction, usually these are self-published memoirs and the like
And finally
>reference & academic

[Anonymous No.17213750]

>>17213626
What do you think it streamlines or makes easier? How do you think it could be a useful distinction?

I think literary vs genre fiction can be useful when looking at older literature which has in a sense "settled." Something that is literary is, to me, something that focuses on character and/or style intensely and does one or both well, and which is hard to "spoil" so to speak. Genre fiction loses it's luster if the events of a book are known. It becomes much less entertaining, and people rarely desire to reread it. I guess it is hard to answer question after all. Another facet of "literary" fiction that I did not pin down before is that it can often be high-minded or philosophical (though it does not have to be). Literary fiction of the present day feels more muddled because some stuff that is marketed as literary fiction is actually kind of bad in terms of style or character, but it gets pushed for a variety of reasons (maybe the authors image seems highly marketable). In the present, the bullshit of hype can cloud public opinion because, to be real, there are people out there that are 100% tone deaf when it comes to literature, and they just make their judgments based on critical consensus or whether they like the aesthetic idea of the novel without even reading it (which can be based on airy ridiculous things like whether the author is good-looking, or whether the author went to Harvard or drove a garbage truck for years, or whether the judger likes the way the cover looks). In that sense, I think the literary vs genre distinction becomes less useful in the present.

[Anonymous No.17213800]

>>17213626
It is useful if you have a need to categorize everything, like a librarian or an autist, beyond that it is not all that useful.

[Anonymous No.17214034]

>>17213626
It is not useful. Literary fiction as a classification is a fraught concept because it includes a set of literature which is drawn from a large range of genres, mediums, eras, etc. on the basis of literary merit. But literary fiction also includes a genre of fiction that is basically aspirational and serious, more likely to be character driven than plot driven, experimental or political, etc. I think the latter idea has been confused with literary merit and has come to displace the former idea, to the detriment of public culture.