MEH wrote:
"Well, I see something being an active pursuit when a
person/individual is mentally engaged--but I guess that is me
the academic..."
To tell you the truth, the image I was thinking of was a
bunch of fans watching a football game. Not being a sports
fan, I find their engagement kind of amusing (or annoying,
depending upon my mood and how much distance I can get). They
sure ain't passive. And they are mentally engaged, too, as
they critically discuss strategy, players' history, etc. And
I think the same can be said of fans of genre fiction.
"And, when you are dealing with people who like 99% or better
in a given genre, you are not dealing with critical
readers."
Even if completists find value in every word ever scribbled
by a preferred scribe (and is that really any different from
academics who want to pore over a revered author's papers,
everything from early drafts to shopping lists?), I refuse to
believe they find them all of equal value. For instance, I
know a lot of fans (myself included) who spend a lot of time
ranking the works of favorite artists. They may extend the
auteur theory to its breaking point by finding great value in
an author's least works (or even perversely liking the worst
best because they are so odd and idiosyncratic), but the
search for value is due to the way the best works moved them,
and the value found is in how the lesser works illuminate the
best and/or how the individul works function within the
metanovel of the author's entire catalog.
For example, I doubt anyone would claim Block's pseudonymous
sleaze novels are his best work, but many of us are
interested in reading them. Part of that comes from the
simple enjoyment of the story told. I very much enjoyed Lucky
at Cards as a good read. That does not, however, mean that I
thought it was anywhere near as good as, say, his Girl with
the Long Green Heart or Eight Million Ways to Die.
Once read, I also found value in this lesser work as it
illuminated various fields of production, to use Bourdieu's
term. It told me about the evolution of Block's writing, an
early work to compare to later ones. It told me something
about the state of publishing at the time, how there was
market for sleaze novels and how that market served as an
apprenticeship for many genre writers of that day. It also
revealed society's values in there being a market for sex
novels and how graphic or not the sex could be in books of
that day.
Mark
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 16 Nov 2007 EST