>Katy Munger:
> > One of the mystery genre's most annoying
pretensions is the current
>> notion that extreme violence is somehow
groundbreaking or, even worse,
>> feminist if a female author depicts it. Such
passages are usually either
> > boring or offensive...
And they're not made any better by men doing it. Having
horrible, upsetting things happen to characters is easy,
making us care what happens to the characters is hard.
Violence should matter in a book. Instead what we get far too
often is the pornography of violence, nothing more, nothing
less. You can dress it up in all sorts of artistic
pretensions, but far too much of it seems tailored to guys
who read with one hand.
And miker:
>I would deduce from this that extreme violence might
be conducive to
>great literature, which seems to always border on
being either boring
>or offensive. I prefer offensive, myself.
No doubt. I, too, prefer stuff that pushes the reader, rather
than playing it safe. But I'm so bored of extreme violence or
anything else that many people find offensive being trotted
out merely to be offensive, or to prove how big a set of
balls the writer has.
There's nothing particular literary or ground-breaking about
gratuitous offensiveness. It's usually the sign of a weak
writer, not a strong one. I'd rather a writer try to mess
with my head, not my gag reflex.
And in the never-ending quest to nail down definitions,
here's a thought: It isn't violence itself that makes a book
hard-boiled. It's the attitude towards that violence that
makes it hard-boiled.
--
Kevin Burton Smith The Thrilling Detective Web Site http://www.thrillingdetective.com Five years on... -- # Plain ASCII text only, please. Anything else won't show up. # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
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