>literary fiction in its present form is a genre itself.
What did he mean by this?
>>7993057
That he does not read lit fic
I guess he thinks that lit fiction has become just as commercialized as other genres
>>7993061
he might not be wrong actually
>>7993057
There's a point to this. Literary fiction as a commercial category is aimed squarely at insecure middle-class wageslave types who want to appear sophisticated by reading the "right' fiction. Marketing and style of literary fiction aims to surround itself with an aura of prestige and intellectualism while still assuring the reader that the book they're buying will be thoroughly entertaining. Note how every book, even the most depressing, has blurbs about how funny it is.
Marlon James has touched on this, saying essentially that too many decision-makers in literary publishing are timid middle-aged white women with fancy degrees in literature who only like the most vanilla stuff they think will sell.
That's not to say that there aren't novels that contribute to literary discourse in ways that Martin's work cannot, but you have to accept that marketers have caught on to the core audience for "literary" fiction.
He means that contemporary literary fiction also has tropes and conventions. He's not wrong. Every period of literature has tropes. Victorian novels have tropes. American realist short stories have tropes. Part of criticsm is identifying what literature from a particular period has in common: what themes, what narrative structures, what character types. And so literary novels of our time have tiresome tropes too. One thinks of "literary" as meaning "free from convention," but that's not really true.
>>7993077
Hardly, only the ones who are practically canonized ones are prospering, the rest are obscured af
>>7993057
He's speaking against the background of the alleged divide between so-called "literary" and "genre" fiction (and the sometimes condescending attitude of readers and writers of the former towards those of the latter).
Genre is defined by features such as form, tropes, style, subject matter, setting, etc. What he's saying is that so-called literary fiction is itself largely bound by its own complex of these (which is a central criticism the condescenders tend to make of so-called "genre" fiction; alleging that it is limited, or even sub-literary, because it adheres to, or at least works with - sometimes in the sense of pushing against or subverting - certain conventions).
>>7993080
This is exactly why I'm excited by the rise of self publishing. It completely removes the risk of publishing.
>>7993057
He's right. All new "literary" books are usually about dysfunctional white middle class liberal families who grapple with the main problems of modern life or some bullshit like that.
>>7993087
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trope_(literature)
