Just came out of my monthly discussion at local café with dear friend, prof
of French Lit., who is an authority in US and Euro on Proust and Saint
Simon...and curiously enough, he mentioned the big difficulty to make even
French Lit. graduate students at U of M or other institutions of high
learning, step out of moralistic and linear story telling and far from
blaming them, he pointed a strong finger at popular culture story telling in
the media at large and especially at the type of criticism that accompanies
any artistic production, be it in mass media or even in specialised
media...(and that generates instant aversion/rejection and
classification/ghettoisation in standard rejection boxes like
independent/deviant/alternative/political/feminist/ethnic/atheist/eastern/fa
r eastern/scholarly/elitist/french/asian/post/freak/drug inspired....), for
anything outside of those canons, and his final comment was: ³and in the
last ten years the corset has gotten tighter and tighter and those kids
can¹t breathe anymore²...
Montois eating a madeleine...with tea...
On 8/10/09 12:13 PM, "jacquesdebierue" <jacquesdebierue@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> --- In rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com <mailto:rara-avis-l%40yahoogroups.com> ,
> Mark Sullivan <DJ-Anonyme@...> wrote:
>> >
>> >
>> > My point wasn't that TV and reading are comparable experiences, but that
>> time shifts and intratextuality are not anathema to popularity. They're
>> certainly part and parcel of Tarantino movies, for instance.
>> > Also, now that I think about it, not that I'm well read in SF, but it seems
>> to me that time travel books are built on characters going backwards and
>> forwards in time.
>> > Your "metaliterature" comment is interesting. Isn't this also symptomatic
>> of genre fiction? In fact, the first writer I ever heard described as having
>> written a metanovel is PK Dick. And when you think about it, even if few
>> crime novels jump around much, series do. Think of all of the facts we carry
>> with us when we are regular series readers. Yes, most series books can be
>> read and enjoyed on their own, but aren't there a lot of extras, often a
>> whole other level, a regular reader will pick up on? That's one of the main
>> reasons i try to read series in order.
>> > Mark
>
> Your point is taken. I think American readers are more often turned off by
> something other than jumping around in time. It's when they can't tell whether
> a character is "good" or "bad" that they get really nervous. This includes
> most noir literature, of course. That dichotomy between good and evil seems
> more present in this culture than in others. I know of people who reject a
> novel because they can't accept that a character is the way he is -- if you
> think about it, that is bizarre.
>
> mrt
>
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