Right..the loner detective, cut off from the family unit...stuff like that.

Perhaps I was being unclear. It's a little hard to think back to February. I wanted to describe a particular kind of modern fiction that's currently dubbed "literary fiction." I don't particularly like the description either, and I certainly don't think of it as a genre. In fact, as I think my other discussions will attest, I like a great deal of "literary" fiction in the larger sense.

In fact, as I think my other discussions will attest, I like a great deal of "literary" fiction in the larger sense.

I was gonna note, you've spent more than a little of your time in the wilds of literature.

Just for the record, and the sake of clarification: Teppy if you read Moby Dick and you hate it you're jake with me. I disagree, but if you put the time in and read the whole damn thing then you're beyond reproach.

Can I just note that (while there are actually interesting arguments to be made for this case) calling literary fiction a genre drives me batfuck.

Hmm. I can see why, but in many (again, mainly modern) cases, I can also see why it becomes easy to genre-ize it.

To name a couple of my favs, I shelve Slammerkin with Possession, mentally. They occupy a specific slot in my head, much the same way as RAH and Asimov are mentally slotted into the sci-fi section. (These slots are not always entirely logical: my collection of pulp fiction is mentally slotted with my collection of vintage pulp true crime, for example.)

In fact, I have my own canon of works which were written in genre and which achieve my standards of literature.

Which is probably what's generally meant by "transcends its genre", an expression I have shockingly few issues with.

Susan W

This is where it helps to not give a damn about classifying them ... why does that matter?

In the interest of accuracy--IIRC, this was deb.

Which is probably what's generally meant by "transcends its genre", an expression I have shockingly few issues with.

I guess - except I don't think you have to transcend the genre to be read as literature. You can be entirely genre, just better written. If James Joyce took every trope of a western and invested all his writing skill into it then I wouldn't say he'd transcended genre.

In the interest of accuracy--IIRC, this was deb.

Yep. Or, I'm sure it wasn't me at least.

(And, FWIW, when I use the term "litfic," I'm referring to its modern incarnation, not the classics.)

Teppy if you read Moby Dick and you hate it you're jake with me. I disagree, but if you put the time in and read the whole damn thing then you're beyond reproach.

S'cool.

Like Carver, and Ann Beattie, and Robert Olen Butler and them?Cause that's what I think of.(I mostly like them, btw.)

For the record (not all relevant to this forum):

• I hate Moby Dick.
• I still like Robert Heinlein.
• I hate romance novels.
• I like identity poems, although so few people do them right.
• I still believe rap is poetry, and the natural evolution of formalism.
• I believe comic books are literature, although so few do them right.
• I hate Madame Bovary.
• I think the "Master of Balantre" is highly underrated.
• I like Jane Austen just fine, thank you.
• I believe that the only reason that Hawthorne is taught in schools today is because there wasn't anything else from that period worth reading.
• I believe it's unfair to compare Clinton's memoirs to U.S. Grant's, as Clinton is still very much alive, and Grant's were dictated on his deathbed, to MARK FRICKIN' TWAIN.
• I think American poetry is plagued by static and basically narcistic ideas about poets' overrated sense of self.

That was cathartic. Kind of a upswell of many conversations around me, both IRL and online.