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Is it the case that literary fiction is mostly pseudo-memoirs and filled with pity and sympathy stories? I checked once and this is what I found, but if someone familiar with the genre can inform me that would be cool. The issue could be that that we call this writing “literary”, when it’s really just emotional novels/novellas, ie what women have been consuming for one hundred years — gossip and wives’ tales that calls itself literature. Surely the weighty mark of “literature” has nothing to do with what the writer intends or what some capitalistic publishers desire, but how culture at large sees the work in the future.
I just… why would I ever want to consume the writing of someone who has merely been trained to write, who has spent their formative years regurgitating what their trait-conformist teachers have told them should be written, from textbook straight to to text? That’s incredibly boring and I will gain nothing. Imagine if Harper Lee and Hemingway grew up in suburbia and spent all their time gunning it at school to make it into the best graduate programs for writing. They would write nothing of value. Their writing comes from their experiences that began in formative years, their culture and inner culture. Graduate students in English are writing “literature” for reviewers and magazine writers who are also graduate students in English, none of which gunned it at developing a personality or any unique insight into living.
Largely, yes. The bright side, however, is that there is more than enough good stuff that you'll never have to fall back to the personal novellas.
I'd personally recommend jumping in the deep end: Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. Remember it was published in the 1980s and probably penned throughout the 1970s. I wonder if any editor at a publishing house today would even read draft chapter nowadays.
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I think another thing that makes it "literary" is adding allusions to stories in the Western canon and name-dropping famous thinkers. E.g. Iris Murdoch's The Sacred and Profane Love Machine does it right in the title. The big disappointment is that the references usually don't add anything or help make an argument, they just make things seem more profound.
Probably a good example of literary fiction that does actually make a sort of argument is Mann's Death in Venice, which is about an aging pedophile realizing that being educated doesn't actually make him or his desires cool.
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