Hi Todd,
That's a great point. I'm glad to hear that there are people
out there who are willing to fight that sort of fight,
because my experiemces with the publishing industry to date
have led me to believe that the ideas you seek to
disabuse
(and rightly so) are pretty entrenched.
That said, since you mentioned "western" and "literary", have
you read "Blood Meridian" by Cormac McCarthy? It blurs alot
of the lines between those two
(loaded word alert) "genres". Also, Kerry, you might enjoy
"Blood Meridian" as an interesting balancing of the question
of personal morality in the face of an extremely powerful
evil in one's world (as embodied by the character of the
judge).
Brian
> From:
tieresias@att.net
> That said, it is what it is, and although you might
think that genre fiction
> is
> literary fiction, it's not. That's not my take on
it, as there are hb/noir
> authors out there who I think deal with existential
questions far better
> than
> some of the supposedly "existentialist" authors in
the "literary" canon.
> Rather, it is the take of the industry. Are they
right? Who cares?
>
> I do. Because as long as we take the commercial
categorization seriously, or
> allow others to pretend that it's more than an
attempt at marketing, we will
> see a pointless trivialization of first-rate work,
and a common pretense
> that any work commercially classed as "literary"
somehow escapes genre and
> also is necessarily a better book or more worthy of
attention for that fact.
> The snobbery, from both "literary" and "genre"
camps, which ensues is as
> exasperatingly self-defeating for support of good
literary work as it is
> moronic. It does make for easier marketing,
sometimes, particularly for
> work which strokes the commonly sought-after
conventions of whatever
> literary genre the work can be shoved
into.
>
> Though HB certainly seems a child of naturalism to
me, and thus has siblings
> and cousins in the "literary" genres, some, as
already noted, well worth the
> investigation here. Also, of course, among westerns
and other "genre"
> genres. TM
>
>
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