>literary fiction vs genre fiction
why is the former superior to the latter?
I didn't understand those articles I read on the net.
What I got was:
Literary fiction seems to put emphasis on style and themes
Genre fiction seems to focus on plot.
Is Candide literary fiction or genre fiction? What about PKD's do androids dream of electric sheep?
>>7738326
>literary fiction
Candide
>genre fiction
PKD
This is not to say that there are not crossovers (Tolkien and Stanislaw Lem for fantasy and sci-fi, McCarthy for the Western) but genre fiction usually exists within a specified genre like HORROR, which would be ok if for some reason, probably lack of originality, most authors in genre fiction do not innovate (Orcs are attacking!), or if they do, clearly do it in reaction to a set standard (like Orcs being good guys).
>>7738352
But say, what if a tolkien fantasy was re-used to make a satire on modern society (like turning politicians into elves, the lower classes into orcs, etc)? would that turn it into literary fiction?
>>7738366
yuck, that sounds like a kickstarted city building game.
And yes, most fantasy is stuffed full of overdone allegory. A possible exception are Brave New World and 1984 read as sci-fi, but they did something original at that time, you cant go back and reinvent the wheel.
Genre fiction is about sticking to conventions inherent to a specific genre so it's easily marketable and consumers know what to expect
Literary fiction is about experimentation/breaking conventions or at least not sticking with a specific framework
>>7738373
so originality can grant the status of literary fiction to something?
also another question
Is turgenev's 'Home Of The Gentry literary' fiction?
What about Golgoi's 'how the two ivans quarreled'?
both of them don't really seem to bring anything original or significant to the table.
>>7738326
This is the best explanation I've read:
[literary fiction]
The genuine artist presumably undertakes to set forth some vision of life—some
imaginative apprehension of it which he hopes will engage our imagination. He gives us his own intuition—his own insight into the human situation. It may prove to be a paltry insight; it may constitute a trivial view; but it is at least one which the artist has had the faith to explore and to test by attempting to objectify it for us.
[Genre, commercial fiction]
But the worker on the mass-production line that is turning out prefabricated entertainment starts from a radically different assumption: he gives nothing and means to give nothing. Rather, he hopes to play upon the stock emotions and stereotyped attitudes already present in the minds of his audience, releasing them by applying the proper stimulus, giving the reader or the auditor the illusion of something new but actually making sure that he never departs from the limits of the sure-fire stereotypes.
literary genre is that which is endowed with bourgeois spooks and loved by plebs who think they're patrish
>>7738409
bretty good.
you're obviously new here
>>7738409
Interesting, thank you.
>>7738390
This is theoretically true, but in practice "literary" fiction in the contemporary sense has turned into its own pseudogenre of bland, inoffensive, but vaguely "intellectual" books that are basically all grounded in the same banal form of realism.
>>7740345
Sooo true. Nice one
>>7738326
The distinction is arbitrary and confuses cause and effect.
Threads like this are the proof that /lit/ is the worst place to actually discuss literature. People keep repeating an arbitrary division that is decades old (see >>7738409) and that is mostly just perpetrated by newspaper "critics" and reviewers, or by armchair literates who want to fall in the basest forms of tribalism that plague every other kind of fandom.
Protip: post-modernism made the distinction irrelevant.
>>7740345
anodyne.
>>7740345
that's why I plan on shaking the scene up
>>7740775
>post-modernism made the distinction irrelevant.
Care to explain?
>>7738326
If you mean literary vs genre as in categories in book stores, then >>7738390
If you mean "genre" as in lol it's fantasy cuz it has magic, then there is no distinction because great literature uses sf/f or horror or romance or mystery elements all the time and only becomes "great literature" through aesthetic beauty, intellectual eminence, or historical importance.
>>7741525
>great literature
get back to your gene wolfe thread.
>>7741507
He thinks that nihilism and existentialism in modern lit shatters genre as it is the overarching themes that tie varied works together.
He probably sucks gene wolfes cock.
