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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33534 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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Although wokism has certainly a significant impact on the nature and demographics of modern fiction, it is not the only problem. Another problem, it seems to me, is that more and more modern writers have limited life experience outside of the realm of intellectuality. There have always been highly intellectual writers, of course, but fiction has also greatly benefitted from being pollinated by the works of adventurers and all sorts of other weird rugged characters. I think that there is a similar problem in Hollywood. Many modern movies seem like they are made by people who have lived their whole lives inside the LA celebrity scene.

Literary fiction is very poorly defined anyway. Do works like The Iliad, The Divine Comedy, and Paradise Lost, which depict supernatural events, count as literary fiction? Is Moby Dick literary fiction, or is it an adventure novel? How about White Fang? Is Wuthering Heights literary fiction or is it a weird tale / horror novel? Is Huckleberry Finn literary fiction or is it a young adult novel? Sometimes what should technically probably be called genre fiction becomes so famous and revered over time that even people who care about the supposed genre fiction / literary fiction divide call it literary fiction. Is the notion of literary fiction anything other than a snobby term meant to evoke status differences?

I agree with the point regarding "limited life experience outside of the realm of intellectuality." Let me expand on it.

I've written about this before (too lazy atm to link to it), however, colleges are over-specializing to the detriment of their students. Many (most?) of the pre-WW2 male literary giants had little-to-no college education. They wrote about their experiences and honed the craft of writing via journalistic or similar assignments. Hemingway's terse prose owes a lot to his career as a newspaperman.

Post-war literary, high-brow writers (Updike, Roth, Mailer, etc.) may have had more formal and complete college education, often as English majors. Again, however, they usually wrote for school papers, or maybe tried to submit to a popular magazine. (This is an interesting subplot in an early season of Mad Men).

I'd say starting from the time of the so-called "Literary Brat Pack" (Brett Easton Ellis and his ilk), you have a whole class of "writers" who go to very prestigious sounding colleges in the Northeast take creative writing (not English) classes, and basically brute force a publication maybe through an undergrad literary magazine. Then, with the help of a professor, they immediately get into an MFA program (U. Iowa helps the most!) where they can write - and just maybe publish - for years on end. If that novel doesn't hit, they can get a job as a professor and one of the fancier mid Western liberal arts colleges and get some long form piece published in an online only magazine once a year.

The point is that, much like even the hard sciences, the over-institutionalization of writing has made it brittle. You have "writers" who are writing exclusively for a tiny subset of other writers with the right pedigrees. When you know everyone by name in your market, all of a sudden social/political orthodoxy Trumps actual talent and ability and also constrains real artistic risk taking. Hence, you get so many self-indulgent think piece novels about how hard some rich kid's life is. There's literally one called All The Sad Young Literary Men by the brother of Masha Gessen. He went to Harvard and then got an MFA from Syracuse and now teachers at Columbia's Journalist school. You can't make this shit up.

Moby-Dick is 100% literary fiction. Melville wrote it after years of mainlining New England literature and Biblical culture. At the time of writing he was contributing to literary magazines and complaining to Nathaniel Hawthorne:

What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,—it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot.

I think this…intentionality…is what separates literary fiction from the rest. Melville is openly writing to convey something he feels deeply and passionately. This is not a substitute for craft, but a complement, as he pays great attention to the spiraling structure and the atmosphere. More importantly, though, it’s part of a conversation with the literary community of the time. He is making use of a common cultural context to compress even more into an already dense book.

The end result is a book that benefits from study in a way that mass-market fiction generally does not. There are countless classics which are better as romances, as adventures, as entertainment. Literary fiction has to ask of the reader something a little different.

There is plenty of so-called genre fiction that is written to convey things that the authors feel deeply and passionately, so it seems to me that maybe the author's passion is not enough to distinguish literary fiction? By the standard of passion, for example, a lot of sci-fi should be considered literary fiction, yet many aficionados of literary fiction would probably object to that.

The literary fiction vs genre fiction distinction isn’t that useful. I mean, I know it when I see it, but I don’t get all uptight about keeping genre fiction segregated from “pure” literary works. Works of surpassing quality can certainly include elements of “genre” fiction too, e.g. fantasy or sci-fi settings.

If there is a distinction that I would choose to maintain, it would be the distinction between works of art vs mere products.

I don't think modern genre conventions really make much sense to apply prior to the mid-twentieth century or so. Calling the Iliad literary fiction would be ridiculous, but it would also be ridiculous to call it fantasy, or military fiction, or thriller, even though it could fairly be said to share elements of all of those genres.

Young Adult in particular is barely a decade old as a real publishing category. Even Harry Potter doesn't really fit into the formula conventions of modern YA (despite the fact that the YA genre was in large part a product of HP).

I have always understood literary fiction as fiction where the beauty and skill of the prose and the thematic exploration are meant to be as big of or bigger draws as plot or characters. You can have literary fiction where not much happens plot-wise, but not really in genre fiction. Lines are blurry of course. And yeah a lot of it is probably just snobbery.

Young Adult in particular is barely a decade old as a real publishing category.

LOL. This is some real Year Zero stuff. Wikipedia notes many earlier examples, and notes that YA was big in the 1970s and 1980s, which I can personally attest to.

Even Harry Potter doesn't really fit into the formula conventions of modern YA (despite the fact that the YA genre was in large part a product of HP).

That is because the early Harry Potter books were not YA; they were a category younger.

"Literary fiction" as a category probably goes back to the late 19th century.

Inferential distance strikes again.

As some of the other comments here get at, there's at least a significant difference in YA-before-it-was-really-called-YA (your Nancy Drews, Hardy Boys, Outsiders, and so on; books aimed at tweens and teens that deal with heavier issues but don't contain content we'd judge unsuitable for a mind barely ready to know what sex is) and the 2010's style of YA that blossomed in the wake of Harry Potter and The Hunger Games (Divergent and so forth; books aimed more at literal young adults, who want the mature content and some of the pretension of the hard stuff); the former sort of book might typically be about groups of teenage friends getting into adventures and hijinks and learning some important lessons, the latter sort of book might typically be more about a Special Teenager being sorted into a faction, except they're so special they're above the concept of factions, and they're going to bring down the oppressive system and find themselves and all that feel-good jazz.

The above admittedly probably doesn't make a ton of sense if you were never on Tumblr in the 2010's.

What you're missing is that YA as a category is newer than Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys, and so on, but much older than 2010. Publishing did not skip from 1967 to 2010, or even 1997. YA, like everything else, has become woke/tumblrized, but there's plenty of older stuff closer to your second category than your first. The Tripods trilogy comes immediately to mind.

Yeah, ( @The_Nybbler ) this is what I was trying to get at. Probably half at least of the books listed by wikipedia as early YA (including The Bell Jar and of all things) would never be published as YA nowadays if they were published at all. I doubt even The Outsiders would make it. Pony Boy is 14 (strike one) and a boy (strike two) for starters.

Modern YA has become more of a genre than an age category, not in the least because a substantial chunk of its readers are in fact grown women and not teenagers. For a book to be classed and published as YA it is not enough for it to be about teenagers, it has to hit certain themes like you've mentioned, the fight against an oppressive and cruel 'adult' society (whether it be a dystopian sci-fi tyranny or just bull-headed teachers and parents), the narrative must be very introspective and feelings-y, the lead must be between 16 and 18 (15 and 19 are possible but really pushing it) and with very few exceptions female, there must be a love story B-plot, and it doesn't have to be written in first-person present but that's strongly recommended. There's also just a certain sine qua non 'feel' to YA prose that is hard to pin down but that I know when I see. It's not quite that it's usually linguistically simpler though that is part of it. There is a certain immediacy and immaturity (not necessarily in a bad way, though it can be, but just a sense that 'this is a kid talking') that is usually not found in adult novels. But I have read so-marketed adult novels that have made me think 'this feels like YA' and so-marketed YA novels that make me think 'this feels like an adult novel.'

That stuff is what YA as a "genre" and a publishing category has meant since the early 2010s or so. Gary Paulsen's Hatchet may be a young adult novel but it is not a Young Adult™ novel.

I doubt even The Outsiders would make it. Pony Boy is 14 (strike one) and a boy (strike two) for starters.

S. E. Hinton is a woman, so that ups the chance of it being published.

People wrote books about young people in the 70s, but that's not the same as YA as a publishing category with genre conventions almost as strict as those of say, romance, which is a much more recent thing.

Indeed, stumbling upon a YA novel in a publishing category can be jarring. I was reading through Battletech fiction and you might think that pulpy action novels based on a game would already be considered YA. And yes, if you define YA as books read by young adults, you would be right. But that’s not what YA is.

I came across a Battletech novel that was specifically designated as YA fiction. The strange tropes it introduced into the 100+ novel body of work that is Battletech were jarring and uncomfortable. Other Battletech novels involved kids, even kids at academies dealing with cliques and bullying. So how different could an explicitly YA novel be?

It’s hard to describe. All those other kids in Battletech were more “Hero’s Journey” stories, whereas a YA novel is more of a metaphor for puberty. YA fiction, even for boys, is predominantly written by women. This Battletech novel was no exception. So it was a metaphor for puberty with a female perspective.

Which novel was this?

The Nellus Academy Incident I don't recommend it.

Dude the GPTese accent is so strong on this one that it barely makes sense.

YA was an established category in the 1970s and 1980s. There were sections in libraries dedicated to it, by name. There was fiction recognizable as what we now call YA well before that, of course (the coming-of-age novel is particularly recognizable, but also teen adventure like Robinson Crusoe or the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew serieses, and the Heinlein juveniles)

YA was not, and is not, a genre.

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