"Literary fiction" and its antonyms

I've read through this thread a couple times now and I'm still having trouble finding anything approaching an objective definition of the term. It seems to be shorthand for "writing I like," or possibly -- and I realize this is as much in need of definition as the original term -- "highbrow" or "serious" literature.In short, in some ways it feels like people are using it to look down their noses at other fiction, cf. the "ghettoization" of genre fiction described upthread.

I spoke to the friend who introduced me to the term tonight, asking for clarification. She said she doesn't like the term, but her signpost for the distinction boils down to what the reader cares about, or is supposed to.

Is your processing of the book fundamentally about the events happening in the book? For example, a lot of fantasy readers consider George R. R. Martin pretty well written. But when Martin writes about a war, what you care about is the war. How is the war going? Who's winning? Have bad things happened to characters I care about?

Compare to your mental picture of what constitutes "literary fiction." There are plot events happening, sure. I don't know if any of you have read Aimee Bender's The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake -- I read it when Amazon picked it as an editor's pick a few years ago. It's a magical realism novel about a girl who develops the ability to taste the emotions of whoever made the food she eats. (It's quite good, I do recommend it.) So that's what's going on on the surface. As my friend said -- I'm paraphrasing here -- girl develops magic emotion tasting powers, whoop de fucking doo. The point isn't the events, it's about the themes and ideas being explored. The plot is a vehicle. Critically, there's something going on under the surface and the plot is a means to that end.

I'm still kind of groping my way towards a better definition. I'm not sure if this one covers too much, or covers too little, or both, or if this definition is entirely unhelpful. Thoughts welcome.

I think the key words there are "supposed to." And I think the "supposed to" is largely academic in origin, and I'm not buying. I have a degree in Literature, I read a ton of genre fiction and a ton of both "classics" and modern literary fiction, and theme over plot and character is half poppycock. I'll explain. BTW, I'm aware that the following is not academically approved, but I believe academia has done a great disservice to the general topic of fiction.

What I mean is that, to me, to qualify as quality literature, a work should meet three criteria: (A) be well-written; (B) have quality characters and story; and (C) have themes that gave the reader something to think about, preferably continuing after the book is set down, assuming the reader is a thinking person. To be of any worth, a book MUST MUST MUST have compelling characters and plot in addition to great themes. It must tell a STORY. It ought also to be well-written. Personally, I don't read anything without caring about the characters and what happens to them. And don't know why anyone would (we're talking about fiction here, obviously).

I'll give an example. I recently read three "classic" romances that I had previously missed. Pride and Prejudice was well-written if a bit breezy, enjoyable to read, and presented compelling characters and a tale well-told. It also had those oh-so-important "themes" you've heard your English teacher tell of. Jane Eyre also well-written if quite a bit less breezy, enjoyable though a little less fun to read, and presented compelling characters and a tale well-told. It was also dripping with "themes". Wuthering Heights was poorly-written, a slog to read, and presented cardboard characters every last one of whom was a hateable ragebaby, joined in a pointless tale. I despaired of finding any "themes". All my personal opinion, of course. My point, and I do have one, is that I would consider two of those novels successful "literature" because they were (A) well-written; (B) had quality characters and story; and (C) had themes that gave the reader something to think about. The third one should be composted.

On the other hand, there is plenty of so-called genre fiction that meet criteria (A) and (B), but fail at (C). That doesn't mean they're of no value, and I read plenty of them, but if they don't deliver something though-provoking, they don't step up to the next level. But if they do, they ought to be eligible for inclusion in the canon.

Where I think academic assessment of "literature" fails, and here is that "supposed to", is that (C) is given way too much weight, bringing dull, indifferently-written works to acclaim. Dickens for one, as has been noted in this thread, has a fairly severe (A) deficit. A more common issue with approved literature is a gross failure of (B). What is the point of pretty words on a page or nattering on themes of life and death if not in the service of a great story? Again, I'm talking about fiction. You can write and I can read a philosophical or historical or political or sociological work if we want to mull over the mysteries of life without a plot.

That's my story and I'm sticking with it. I'll make my way to the dunk tank for requisite abuse.

I should probably delete that but blood and bloody ashes. If anyone finds that beyond the pale, just pretend it was a contribution to the Drunk Thread.

I don't think I understand your objection.

This doesn't pass the sniff test to me. At minimum two of these three boil down to "it can't be shitty," which is another way of saying that literary fiction means "books that I like."

Which is kinda cracking me up, because I have long claimed that the single most important thing that my literature degree taught me was:

Quality is not the same thing as taste.

Or, perhaps less succinctly but in a more useful manner: "what I like" and "what is of high quality" are two categories that frequently but not always overlap, and it's a valuable skill to be able to recognize when something--especially literature, but not only that--falls into merely one of those categories, rather than both. Can You Forgive Her? and White Noise and Heart of Darkness are all brilliant pieces of literature that I loathed; the Nancy Drew books that I read as a child were very dear to me, but that doesn't make them high art.

Really, I get suspicious of any discussion of Quality In Literature that equates high quality with personal taste. If taste didn't vary so damn wildly, the bookstore would be a lot smaller, and a lot more authors wouldn't be able to make the rent.

As someone who reads a lot of "genre" fiction and a lot of "literary" fiction, as well, as a smattering of classics, I've come to think that there's really no distinction (at least on the edges) between lit-fic and genre-fic. Two examples that jump out at me are Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities" and Mark Helprin's "Winter's Tale."

Both are routinely shelved in mainstream literary fiction, and I'd have no trouble giving either of them to my 15-year old who reads almost nothing that's not fantasy.

To some extent, I think, these distinctions come out of an author's pedigree. Helprin was already known as a straight-forward writer before "Winter's Tale," and Calvino has some big-time academic cred. Gene Wolfe is a genre writer, so something like "Peace" gets shelved in sci-fi, even if it could just as easily be shelved with mainstream fiction.

I think that even the discussion of themes is a little bit contentious. Nabokov, for example, disdains novels that are "relevant;" for him, the quality of writing is all-important. (At least, that's what I understand from his "Lectures on Literature.") Come to think of it, Nabokov's list of great literature is kind of interesting, since he puts in both "Bleak House" and "Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde," both of which take some slagging in literary circles.

[edited to add] One other thought -- I think there's "literary fiction" and there's "mimetic fiction." The two often get conflated, because most so-called literary fiction happens to be mimetic, but they shouldn't be. I think that mimetic fiction is something of a genre, whereas I'd say that literary fiction isn't really.

These are my disconnected thoughts for now...

Not at all. Obviously quality is not equal to "stuff I like." But it's foolish to pretend that there's some objective standard of literary quality, and I maintain that academia tries to create such an objective standard by only certifying as literature that which tackles "themes" without genre trappings, while plot and character can be incidental, as you said in your earlier post. I maintain that plot and character are essential, at least in long-form fiction, which should tell a story. My first two criteria -- well written and effective plot/character -- are not more subjective that "themes." Whether a work tackles the great themes and does so effectively is, in the end, just as subjective as whether a book is well-written.

Obviously, people's assessment of well-written will differ, but there is some baseline minimum. We would all agree that whatever that standard is, a large percentage of fantasy novels don't meet it. If Dickens doesn't meet it either, why should he be considered of any more literary merit than R.A. Salvatore?

Secondly, it's obvious to me that a novel must have effective character and story. Again, this is subjective, but it should be recognizable. I slagged Wuthering Heights not because I didn't like it but because I can argue both that it is poorly written and lacks compelling, thought-provoking, characters and an interesting plot. Fadeaccompli's example of Heart of Darkness is an excellent counterexample -- I despised it, and I thought it was boring as hell, but I could never argue in good conscience that it's poorly written or doesn't satisfy, on some level, plot/character considerations.

Listen, in the end we would likely agree on where 99.99% of written works belong. I am just arguing that some "genre" works (A Winter's Tale is a great example; The Martian Chronicles would be another one) belong with literature, while some of what has been recognized as great literature belongs in the remainder bin.



*notice I didn't once bring up Hemingway, my personal white whale.

What about various postmodern stuff that really doesn't have a story?

Actually, from bits that I've read here & there, my understanding is that Dickens's literary star is on the rise. I think that his reputation dimmed because he's so out of keeping with a modernist sensibility, but the further we move away from that period, the more his strengths come out. These things definitely come and go -- I know that John Donne's reputation regularly waxes and wanes depending on the fashion of the day.

And yet, Nabokov, for example, really runs down Josef Conrad. Not that he's the sole arbiter of quality, but he's obviously a guy who spent some time thinking about good and bad literature.

I think it's very hard to pin down great novels; it can be easy to say why this book or that is bad, but it can be maddening to say what's good. For example, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller is pretty widely recognized as a great novel (and is a one of my favorite novels ever), yet it's story is, to be charitable, hard to pin down, and the characters even more so. And it's definitely not the story that draws people to Ulysses.
I think that some novels just seem to have their own voice, and we call that great writing, whether it's the similes in Homer or the voices of Ulysses or even the characters in Dickens. And it's possible to recognize that voice, even if we don't like the novel (I didn't like Moby Dick, but I can see it's unique place). But the disagreements come when a novel really feels like it has that voice to one person, but the other person is completely deaf to it.

The thing is, though, these are exceptions proving the rule of genre vs. (hyphenated -realist) literary fiction; however competent you don't expect to see the rest of the "science fiction" or "fantasy" or "mystery" or "thriller" sections to be reviewed by or given prizes by the curators of fancypants fiction. Someone at a margin like Iain Banks gets, say, favourable reviews in the Guardian.

To Inigima and OZ I'd basically say that I (and the links I dropped in the OP) am describing how I see things being schematized, not endorsing that schematization. In reply to the idea that there is no "checklist" for what is labled contemporary literary fiction I'd reiterate what I suggested in this post; if a very competent genre author took steps X Y Z to make their work conform to certain emphases one sees in modern realist fiction of the Booker-prize-trawling persuasion, people would perceive the results, if successful, as added "literariness."

Most books don't get reviewed or given Booker prizes, so it's not really a surprise that genre fiction doesn't get a lot of mentions. Having said that, I'm looking at the NYT's "Notable books of 2012" list (The NYT book review is at least somewhat fancypants). First up is Alif the Unseen, which the review claims is something of a fantasy/dystopia. Third is An American Spy, so spy fiction. Bring up the Bodies is historical fiction, another genre. Canada is crime fiction. I'm not sure what to classify Hope: a Tragedy as, but it's not mimetic fiction.

At this point, I don't particularly want to go any further down the list, but it's not clear to me that non-mimetic fiction is particularly marginalized.

Versus all the other books on the list there, and my suspicion is that to get onto that sort of list, or to get Banks' reviews in the Guardian* while writing something "genre" it really helps if you take the hypothetical "literarization" steps I mentioned above to resemble, stylistically, modern realism (or magic-realism or postmodernism or what have you). And I don't say that as a knock on those authors, I'm a big Banks fan. Nor do I claim that that somehow makes it not "science fiction" or "spy novel," but it's going to be very easily distinguishable from Asimov-likes or Flemming-likes.

*And that list and the review its in, or Guardian/NYT reviews in the book section, are in turn a lower fancypants tier than LRB/NYRB. No normative judgement implied.

I'm honestly not sure what point you're making. Are you saying that the fancy-pants guys are less accepting of fiction with cardboard characters (Asimov) and cut-out villains (Fleming)? Sure, that's not exactly a revelation. But I'll note that 11/22/63 made the NYT's list in 2011, and nobody's ever accused Stephen King of pandering to literary mavens (at least, not that I know of).

As for the Man Booker, Hilary Mantel won for a historical novel pretty recently. Now, of course you can argue that she had to make it different from other historical fiction genre novels, but so what? They choose one book a year; of course they're going to choose something that they think isn't run-of-the-mill. Maybe you or I wouldn't agree with every book they pick, but I hope you're not arguing that they should give the prize to the British equivalent of James Patterson.

In terms of "what is the purpose of the thread," I'm more interested in talking about the fact that it's curious that certain stylistic preferences are effectively operating as a "more literary/less literary" scale - to what extent we think that phenomenon is arbitrary, to what extent we go along with it anyway, why and how? - and various other things that more or less take it for granted that that initial position is true. So I'm effectively mostly addressing the posters agreeing with those premises. With those who disagree with them I'm a bit more limited to "Well, I think it does, because XYZ," I understand it might seem a bit repetitious or contrary.

No idea lately, but I'd note again that there are sort of tiers of literary review going from respectable broadsheet book sections (with lots of genre interest) to those broadsheets' standalone book review sections, that look a bit more like NYRB/LRB, and then there's organs like NYRB/LRB that are just short of (but probably more relevant in a cultural elitism way?) than academic lit-crit. The higher you go, the more (I have the impression that) the "'literary fiction' privileged over 'genre'" norm is taken for granted, even if it's on some level acknowledged to be snobbery. "A couple of books on the NYT's 100 notable books of the year," even with some high up, isn't at all inconsistent with that.

It might represent progress, I don't know, not having read those books yet. (She's won two!). I do know that if I read a brilliant sci-fi novel next year by a Commonwealth author not named "Atwood" I won't expect it to win (on a more basic level than "most books aren't likely to win"). On which note, the classification of Atwood's 'Blind Assassin' as 'historical fiction' on wikipedia's Booker list is pretty questionable.

I agree that there are a certain set of preferences that we call literary fiction. I don't think they're particularly arbitrary as a whole, even though people may disagree with particular works. But I'm arguing that those preferences are orthogonal to the preferences of so-called genre fiction; you can find works which fulfill both.

But I'd also say that the preferences of realistic/mimetic fiction are also orthogonal to those of "literary" fiction. Hence we have winners of the Booker like Life of Pi, or The Satanic Verses, which was a runner-up; neither of these is the sort of realism that you'll find in, say, Jodi Picoult.

First off, we're not talking "a couple of books," I found four before I finished with H, which is almost 10% right there (there are 50 fiction books in the list). Second, I use the NYTBR because it's just more convenient for me than the NYRB. But my brother-in-law is in academia, and I get the impression from him that mimetic fiction is now seen as just another genre.

The Booker Prize goes to a certain kind of fiction, no question about it. It's a kind of fiction that most writers don't write, genre or not. I wouldn't necessarily expect a sci-fi novel to win any of those prizes, partly because sci-fi that's also literary is as rare as hen's teeth. But The Road won the Pulitzer, so you never know.

I guess what I'm getting at is that I don't think they're necessarily biased against sci-fi as a genre. It's that they're looking for a certain something that genre fans in general don't care about, and may even find off-putting. If a book offers both, then great. I also think that academia is more open to genre fiction than it was, say, 40 years ago. The impression I get from people like my brother-in-law and from reading a bit of lit-crit here and there is that there's been a move away from the primacy of mimetic fiction for a while now.

Well, whether or not our definitions differ we seem to have a similar sense. And by "a few" I did mean like <=10% or so.

I like "mimetic fiction" as a concept in certain ways but as a concept I think it might run afoul of "hyphenated realism," magic realism for example. If you have a book that's meditatively paced rather than face paced, that has verisimilitude-oriented dialogue, that doesn't have the tidier economy of plot- and character-outcomes that we usually expect in genre writing, it'll have much the same feel as a piece of "realist literary fiction" even if it happens to involve fantastic elements. In a sense each of those characteristics is itself "mimetic," but I don't think as an umbrella term for a book it normally encompasses works with sf&f/other fantastic elements.

I'm mostly using "mimetic" to distinguish it from "literary," in that I think the conflation of mimetic fiction with literary fiction ends up with these weird value judgments about whether genre fiction can be literary.

So, for example, most of Italo Calvino's work is no way remotely realistic/mimetic; it's not any kind of "hyphenated realism." But it's also clearly on the literary end of the spectrum. And you've got someone like the "Water for Elephants" author, which is (I think) mimetic, but IMHO not particularly literary.

I don't have a ready pigeonhole for Calvino, but I'd say being a celebrated writer/journalist and working with story-length fiction helped. And perhaps "formal experimentalism" gets its own pass into the literary, in spite of not having much to do with the mostly realism-oriented attributes I associate with literary fiction?

I do think the realism-related (or by a certain definition "mimetic") characteristics I noted in my last post would tend to get a book a "literary" label whether or not some of the subject matter is fantastic or historical or genre-evocative.

I agree that those qualities are sufficient to get a book a "literary" label (although, probably not for major recognition), just not sure that they're necessary. But I find that I get stuck trying to define the necessary part. We can say that Calvino, say, is experimental, but there are a ton of writers who are non-mimetic who get the "literary" label. I'm thinking of, say, Life of Pi, The Satanic Verses, Pale Fire, huge sections of Ulysses, and these are just books that jump immediately to mind.

And they all have more academic cred than, say, the latest Nicholas sparks.

I'm not sure where I'm going with all this :-), just sort of noodling around the question. It's good to have someone to bounce these questions around with other than my wife, who's firmly in the camp that there's no intersection between lit-fic and sci-fi.

I think there's kind of an ill-defined inconsistent adoption of fiction from outside the "obviously appropriate forms and topics" lit-fic. To address that list, Rushdie was established before The Satanic Verses, Life of Pi I had sort of pigeonholed into the "literary by the standards of the Coles bestseller shelf," and Pale Fire and Ulysses are both by authors whose working periods sort of straddle the establishment of the 20th century definition of what is and isn't literarily meritorious.

Not that that isn't nitpicking for the benefit of a "rule" that is undermined the more exceptions there are.

Rushdie was a magical-realism/fantasy guy from the start, though, and Life of Pi won the Booker. But then throw in Infinite Jest, Borges' short stories, and think we're just looking at something bigger than the question of slow pace and "realistic" dialog.

I think jeffd hit it on the head earlier when he said that Infinite Jest was life-changing. It's not that every "literary" novel is life-changing, but I think they aim to make you look at the world in a different way.

Also, I think the "make you see the world differently" is a decent rubric for how we look at genre fiction. People often class Le Carre as more literate than Ian Fleming because the former is trying to make the reader question his views of right and wrong, of what betrayal really means.

I'm not sure; I think that can be accomplished by books that are definitely within genre that happen to make interesting points, via dialogue, plot problems presented, what have you. I think LeCarre - I'm a big fan - meets a lot of what one might call the "checklist of literary story features" even if, say, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, is pretty taut and just-so. To the extent that he's still seen as a very literary spy novelist I think it might just be because his books are almost all about spies.

See James Wood for a critic who claims that Le Carre is not literary. (I don't agree with him, as it happens). His case isn't really built around the tautness of narrative or the like, more the flatness of the writing. I don't have a handy link, but a quick search on James Wood Le Carre will turn up some discussion of Wood's claim.

(He's a pretty important literature critic, teaches at Harvard (or did, don't know if he still does))

Seems like his review of Absolute Friends kicked up a fair amount of dust by virtue of being thoroughly disagreeable. What isn't obvious - that his "realistic" espionage world is emphatically fictional, eg - is thoroughly debatable, like that Woods' species of psychological treatment is the only real way to go.

As much as I don't cry up the revolution against the "literary fiction tyranny" which is sort of broad and consensual, I detest that sort of thing.

I'm not a graduate in the Masters degree, sense, but I do have my Bachelors with the concentration in Creative Writing and took as many classes in it as I could. I also worked for a year as an intern with a nonprofit Literary Magazine.

Now as I think most agree in this forum the term "literary" tends to differ from person to person, though the broad expectation of quality character/plot/theme remains- and I think, in the academic setting, this is where a big problem dwells.

I was in one class tailored to cover all the bases in case a student hadn't written anything ever in a creative capacity, and all the students seemed to enjoy it despite the fact there wasn't much challenge in the prompts given to us. I think this is mainly because we weren't given many limitations either, at least towards "genre". It was just write and receive a critique on the big three and personal style/places for improvement.

The next class up, is where the students encountered academic "literary" expectations- and were largely confounded by it. Genre writing was not wanted and usually received a lower grade from the professor if submitted, but I believe it was what the majority of the students had grown up reading/enjoying and aspired to write themselves one day. I can remember discussing what was "literary" outside class hours with my classmates, and usually found the answer to be mostly confusion mixed with anxiety over what sort of story would receive a good grade. One student I remember was hostile to the term because she couldn't receive a clear-cut answer to what "literary" writing actually was from a professor.

My university's Creative Writing program isn't low ranked by any means, but in terms of fostering aspiring writers within the lower levels... well, it seems more like they're weeding out with frustration than pointing out the various paths to author-hood. Academic "literary" standards give a very narrow window to write within, and personally, are not how I'd like to tell my stories. I don't I'll go ever for back for a MFA in fiction.

In the publishing field, I've definitely learned one has to know their audience and which publisher would actually be interested in your work. It is very much catering to the tastes of the business, and girding your loins for rejection notices (or no response at all) because your story might be too wide to fit into their categorization system. Literary and Genre seem to me to very much be for categorization, because systems are far easier than taking on works one at a time to find the high and low points of interest whatever the setting/characters/plot/style.

Ah, sorry if this is all too much my personal opinion, just wanted to give my two cents.

Speaking from the experience of grad history, I'd say that sort of confusion over what one might call meta-professional questions - what are our standards and ideals as a discipline, even defined plurally? What is the history of "the history profession," what are we supposed to think about postmodernism or critical theory or empiricism, how have the academic fads ebbed and flowed - was something I felt as well.

I'm not sure if it was just a little bit too contentious or inside-basebally to even be covered in grad courses, or if not that many people - students or profs - were in doubt about their own preferences enough to engage in sustained debate/discussion. (Even if this stuff bugged me, it wasn't like I wanted to take a course on theory.) We either made our own choices, if we thought about such things, or perhaps more commonly aligned ourselves with academic mentors, either advisors or favourite scholars.

My favorite editor once defined genre as a marketing category. Or less succinctly: a genre label is attempting to answer "Where does the store that sells my books put it so that the sort of people who like this book can find it and buy it?"*

I mean, it also ends up defined by a lot of subtler stuff. A bookstore with a SF&F section is lumping a huge number of subgenres together, which readers then pick out from each other by blurb and cover art and author. You end up with a lot of hilarious cover trends because, well, even if it doesn't accurately represent a character/scene/aspect of the book, it's telling people what subgenre the book is, so that the people who like that can find it easily. (At least in theory. As with anything else, it's an imperfect science.) And some books get shelved in multiple sections, or shift between sections as time goes on...

But it's something I try to remember when I'm getting het up about what does--or doesn't--define a genre. (Speaking purely of fiction, here, not non-fic.) Because genre ultimately isn't some stamp of approval, or lack thereof, whether that genre is Historical Fiction or Picture Books or Modern Literary or Paranormal Romance. It's an attempt to make sure readers can easily locate the sorts of books they want to read.

* The effects of online retailers letting books be easily sorted in multiple genres and subgenres on this sort of genre labeling is left as an exercise for the reader.

I'm guessing this varies, as my undergraduate history program had one course which was primarily focused on those questions and another two which put significant time into them.

Well I took an ambitious cultural history course that, by virtue of its syllabus, sort of tested the strengths and limits of critical turn scholarship, and my honours advisor was a Hackett-Fischer-assigning empiricist, but beyond students or profs making oblique catty sounds about "postmodernism," it was never what I'd call 10,000-feet-high and explicit. This was in two schools with decent history departments.

Personal bias for what each creative writing professor wanted, was definitely something that had to be gleaned from the readings they assigned and what they pointed out as meriting interest. I think most students were frustrated because they had to create a product without having concrete goals to guide the process towards a stellar grade- but really that's part of the learning process, and for authors, I think one must master how to balance being true to your story and making it accessible to the audience.

Oh, forgot to mention that I was able to take two classes specifically focused on literature within a certain genre: Gothic and Science Fiction.

They were both very fun classes (and as I'm fascinated by visual storytelling, I loved that films were included as texts) that proved both genres held the big three and each tackled their own sets of themes. I think my Gothic prof balanced her approach better than my Sci-fi prof did his (well that and he choose one book that practically the entire class wanted to build a bonfire from- Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia (1976) by Samuel R. Delany the narrator is insufferable).
But reading Bluebeard and The Bloody Chamber then watching Pan's Labyrinth, alongside reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and comparing it with Bladerunner were definitely some of the funnest texts I tackled in school.