“Genre” vs. “literature”

11 comments on ““Genre” vs. “literature””

1. Fragile Mind says:
   July 25th, 2006 at 7:47 am

   I suppose that the genre labels are useful as a rough guide for what one can expect to find in a particular book. That is, if someone picks up a “western” or a “mystery,” that person can be pretty safely assured as to the general parameters of the story inside. (Guys in hats herding cattle in the former case, a detective and a dead body in the latter.) Similarly, “literary” is often used as a substitute for “highbrow,” which is often stretching a point, to say the least.

   My problem with these designations is that they tend to be too rigid, and don’t allow for any permeability between them. For instance, how to describe Annie Proulx’s story “Brokeback Mountain”? Is it a “western”? Is it “literary”? Is it a “literary western”? And, if it’s the last, what’s the difference between a “literary western” and a conventional “western”? And where does the work of Elmore Leonard fit into this rubric? He writes what most people would consider “genre” fiction, but I think he’s much more “literary” than many writers who attempt to be self-consciously highbrow and important.

   And then there are writers who are usually categorized as “literary,” but who often stray into “genre” territory. Dickens, Joyce Carol Oates, and Nathaniel Hawthorne are all in this camp. Do they suddenly somehow become lesser writers simply because they choose the detective story or the gothic as a mode?

   To me, it doesn’t matter what an author chooses to write about, so long as there’s a good story told with some modicum of linguistic flair. I’ll continue to think of Poe, Philip K. Dick, Owen Wister, and Lawrence Block as “literary” writers, just as I’ll continue to think of Philip Roth, Haruki Murakami, Cormac McCarthy, and Mary Gaitskill as cracking good storytellers.

2. Nishka says:
   July 25th, 2006 at 8:32 am

   I completly agree with fragile mind. Though six months ago I would likely not have. Having an MA and a swack of ‘literary’ publications I’ve always considered what is thought of as literary to be better than and above other genres. Then I started reading ‘genres’ for fun and interest. One of the first I read was Jon Evans’ ‘Invisible Armies’, and until the hollywood ending it read as a literary novel. Yet would it ever be considered for th GG or Giller? No. I read the winners of the GG and the Giller every year and am often bored with what I find there. But breaking down these differences would be impossible.
   It seems, in the end, to have to do with sales. Audience, that is. Mass, or not. Another land of easy discrimination for those who wish to look down upon something.
   Greene would be another author to add to that list of leaning both ways. And where does someone like Tom Robbins fit in?

3. Dave Ross says:
   July 25th, 2006 at 10:48 am

   A novel qualified as Literature (note capital L), to me at least, promises more depth than genre fiction.

   I believe it’s an important qualifier.

4. Jefficus says:
   July 25th, 2006 at 11:08 am

   The various genre categories are book-seller-speak for “geeks stand over here, we don’t want you rubbing elbows with normal folk.” By implication the “literary fiction” tag seems to mean “better fiction”, since it is free of all those silly genre crutches.

   Playing devil’s advocate for a moment, how else is a book seller supposed to organize their collection to serve their customers’ needs? Should all books be arranged alphabetically by author? Perhaps by title? Why not the Dewey system?

   The point of the coarse categorizations is, obviously, to try to assist book buyers in finding the things they’re most likely to want. Some good sellers actually cross file the more genre-busting examples, putting, for example, Brokeback in both the literary and western sections.

   The categories are an unfortunate necessity and I, for one, don’t see any way around them for as long as people need to browse through physical stacks of book spines to make their choices.

   But that raises a tantalizing question. As electronic browsing gains popularity, might that have any sway in eroding the somewhat rigid classification system? Cross-catagorizing of titles is commonplace in the web marketplace. So is micro-categorizing. Instead of just labeling a book a “sci fi” they go so far as to label them “time travel sf”, “alternate universe sf” and so on.

   All of this, however, just serves as starting place in the electronic browse world. Once you’ve found a title, recommender systems often take you to extremely distant sections of the ’store’. You liked “Bridges of Madison County”? Well you might also like “The History of Trestle Bridges in the Canadian West” and “Landscape Photography Essentials”.

   My point is that electronic bookstores may end up going a long way toward blurring, not the classification system itself, but the rigidity with which titles and authors are entrenched within any one class.

5. Fragile Mind says:
   July 25th, 2006 at 11:41 am

   Jefficus makes a good point, and the issue of where bookstores stock various titles speaks to the question of whether a book (or a writer) can achieve crossover appeal among those who read only one kind of book or the other. I, for one, am not a sci-fi fan (don’t all pounce on me at once), but I quite like Philip K. Dick, whose work I might never have encountered had it not been shelved with the literary fiction in my local bookstore. Similarly, James Ellroy can be found variously in the mystery or the literature sections of different bookstores, which testifies to the difficulty in catagorizing exactly what kind of fiction he writes.

   As I said, the various classifications are useful as rough guides to what book buyers might enjoy. (If you liked Innocent Blood by P.D. James, you’ll find other books like it over here.) And there is a sliding scale of quality within genres, the same as there is a sliding scale of quality among books that are categorized as “literature.”

   But good writing is good writing, regardless of what mode a storyteller uses, or where a bookseller decides to consign a given title. What is unfortunate is that with all these designations, unadventurous browsers who never venture outside their favourite section in the bookstore might be missing out on a lot of really good stuff.

6. Dave Ross says:
   July 25th, 2006 at 12:48 pm

   Why does everyone who’s into genre fiction seem so apologetic about it? Or defensive?

   Everyone I know that’s defected adopts this aggressive ‘don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it’ attitude, or tries to bring me into the fold with them (maybe to lessen the guilt?)

   I don’t think genre fiction needs any more converts. They have a large enough readership already. Save your breath, and argue for Literature.

7. Andrew Kaufman says:
   July 25th, 2006 at 1:40 pm

   Literature is a genre, with conventions and subjects just as rigid as Western, or Science Fiction. That’s why it’s just it’s own section in the book store, right along side Mystery and Self-Help.

8. Bort says:
   July 25th, 2006 at 1:46 pm

   Its an interesting debate and I can see both sides.

   On one hand, genres can be seen like poodles or pitbulls (which is to say, subcatagories of literature). However, I don’t think it is very satisfractory to say that all of what is called “literary fiction” or “general fiction” is merely another genre.

   It sounds smart, but reality doesn’t hold up. There aren’t any genre conventions that encompass everything from Joyce to Twain to David Foster Wallace to Carver to Austen, etc.

   The normal response to that is for someone to say that all those authors are just parts of subgenres of literary ficton, but I again find that unsatisfactory.

   I can take a genre genre, lets say “high fantasy,” and know pretty much exactly what I’m getting from the book. THe authors are going to be very similar in their literary ancestors, the plots and characters and world will be similar, etc. Contrast that with some popular literary book, say “Jesus’ Son” to name one I just read. You can, I guess, claim its part of a drug addict recovery genre, but such an artifical genre would include books incredibly disparate form one another, far more than two Robert Jordan and Tolkien books.

9. Bort says:
   July 25th, 2006 at 2:00 pm

   #

   # Andrew Kaufman says:
   July 25th, 2006 at 1:40 pm

   Literature is a genre, with conventions and subjects just as rigid as Western, or Science Fiction. That’s why it’s just it’s own section in the book store, right along side Mystery and Self-Help.
   

   See, this is exactly the kind of absurdity I was talking about. It is simply impossibel to come up with a list of conventions that encompass the majority of “literary fiction” in the way you can about Westerns, unless you lirst for literary ficiton is going to be 100 times as long as for Westerns, in which case you’ve lost the point.

   Whenever I’ve been in arguments like this before, and I press people on the above, all they come up with are “conventions” like “trying to be original” or “striving for depth”…. things that are so amporphus and general I don’t believe they can properly be caleld “genre conventions.”

   To put it another way, one can read a Robert Jordan book and love it and assume you have a decent chance of liking another book in the fantasy section. If you narrow it more, to say “high fantasy,” and you probably have a very good chance of liking another book in the section.

   However, if you really like Raymond Carver, you have no gaurentees that another book in the literary fiction section will be anything like it in any way shape or form.

   -

   Two other things I’d say:

   a) People should remember that merely because you can point out examples that blur the lines of genres, does not mean genres have no usefulness. Pretty much everything in life has exceptions, and also pretty much everything in life has a degree of arbitrariness in its cut-offs (When does a hill turn into a mountain? We are forced to pick an arbitrary height. But this doesn’t mean that the terms “hill” and “mountain” have no meaning and no utility.)

   Its interesting how most people have no problem whatsoever talking about genres in other art forms (I rarely see metal fans screaming about how its unfair metal is seperated from general rock at the music store) but have such a problem with it in literature.

   b) The other thing I find funny about this debate is that the people who are most rabid about seperating things into genres and zoning off the genres are the same people who complain about genres and say they mean nothing.
   I’ll have a friend go off about how genre names are just a marketing ply by capitalists who hate nerds and then turn around and tell me how he loves “hard sci-fi” and hates “soft sci-fi” and then open up his “High Fantasy Weekly” magazine.

   The supposed enemies only talk about genres in very loose terms. The people who apparently hate genres are, however, obsessed with defining and relgating genres.

10. Franklin Carter says:
    July 25th, 2006 at 2:55 pm

    Both “genre fiction” and “Literature” can have negative connotations. “Genre fiction,” for example, can bring to mind words such as “generic,” “formulaic” and ultimately “predictable.” But “Literature” can bring to mind terms such as “long,” “tedious,” “self-consciously arty” and ultimately “boring.”

    I think, along with some of the other writers on this page, that the terms “genre fiction” and “Literature” are just artificial divisions. Great writing exists within genre fiction, and crappy writing exists within Literature. Great writing exists within Literature, and crappy writing exists within genre fiction.

    But I am fascinated to read that people “defect” to genre fiction. Is that like bolting over the Berlin Wall?

11. ZW says:
    July 25th, 2006 at 9:54 pm

    Dude, the Berlin Wall fell, like, years ago!

    Good writing is good writing, as someone said above. Eco’s written some riveting detective stories; ditto Dostoevsky, ditto Paul Auster. Cormac McCarthy’s _Blood Meridian_ is a disturbing–if ultimately quite uneven–explosion of the Western genre. I read a lot of Sci-Fi and Fantasy when I was younger, most of it pretty crappy and generic, but Miller and Silverberg and Brunner still stick in my mind as being exceptionally good writers. “Literature” qua genre is often a euphemism for a book in which nothing much happens, but the language is very “poetic.” But “literature” as a qualitative assessment of a book’s verbal, intellectual and emotional power is meaningful. Forget the bookstore corraling techniques, keep your ear to the ground and sheep, look up!

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