RE: RARA-AVIS: Genre and its discontents--jumping off or on an as ide

From: tieresias@att.net
Date: 27 Nov 2002


Hi Todd,

That's a great point. I'm glad to hear that there are people out there who are willing to fight that sort of fight, because my experiemces with the publishing industry to date have led me to believe that the ideas you seek to disabuse
(and rightly so) are pretty entrenched.

That said, since you mentioned "western" and "literary", have you read "Blood Meridian" by Cormac McCarthy? It blurs alot of the lines between those two
(loaded word alert) "genres". Also, Kerry, you might enjoy "Blood Meridian" as an interesting balancing of the question of personal morality in the face of an extremely powerful evil in one's world (as embodied by the character of the judge).

Brian
> From: tieresias@att.net
> That said, it is what it is, and although you might think that genre fiction
> is
> literary fiction, it's not. That's not my take on it, as there are hb/noir
> authors out there who I think deal with existential questions far better
> than
> some of the supposedly "existentialist" authors in the "literary" canon.
> Rather, it is the take of the industry. Are they right? Who cares?
>
> I do. Because as long as we take the commercial categorization seriously, or
> allow others to pretend that it's more than an attempt at marketing, we will
> see a pointless trivialization of first-rate work, and a common pretense
> that any work commercially classed as "literary" somehow escapes genre and
> also is necessarily a better book or more worthy of attention for that fact.
> The snobbery, from both "literary" and "genre" camps, which ensues is as
> exasperatingly self-defeating for support of good literary work as it is
> moronic. It does make for easier marketing, sometimes, particularly for

> work which strokes the commonly sought-after conventions of whatever
> literary genre the work can be shoved into.
>
> Though HB certainly seems a child of naturalism to me, and thus has siblings
> and cousins in the "literary" genres, some, as already noted, well worth the
> investigation here. Also, of course, among westerns and other "genre"
> genres. TM
>
>
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