View Full Version : Literary fiction ? the hows and whys and wherefores
Sybarite
11-Jul-2008, 10:19
How and why did you starting reading 'literature'?
Not reading per se. Did you always read literary novels or did you have a Damascus moment when something triggered your interest in literary fiction?
How do you define literary fiction ? and what do you get out of it that you don't feel you get out of more populist novels?
I don't think there was an obvious moment. My grand-grandfather, my grandfather and my grandfather's second wife were / are all literature academic. My grandmother and my mother were / are French teacher. My father used to have a used bookshop and took me, when I was a little kid, to rare books fair. I didn't have a telly home until I was thirteen. Books and literature were always present. Besides children books, I got my first contat to literature when I was 10 via watered-down versions of classics such as Moby Dick or Tom Sawyer. I guess it doesn't count. Around the same time, Jules Verne. I read the French classics from my parents shelves from 11 to 13 and then I lapsed. I went into the dark ages of teenage lit. Koontz, King (he at least was a good school in storytelling), Rice etc. I only got out of that at 18 through, believe it or not, Bret Easton Ellis who, in interviews, made me aware of Joan Didion, Don DeLillo and Martin Amis. It's Amis who in turn pushed me in the direction of Bellow and Pynchon. This triggered the rest...
So I don't know if I had a "Damascus moment" but if I were to name one, it would be reading Amis' London Fields. This book really showed me what could be done and what could be experienced thanks to superb writing, great mastery of the structure, constant stylistical and narrative inventivness, etc. It really paved the way to my (at the time) future readings.
I don't think I know how to define literary fiction / want to define literary fiction. I know it when I read it, same as I know great music when I hear it and I make the difference between Die Hard 4.0 (however much I happen to enjoy it) and Rashomon without needing to resort to a definition.
Stewart
11-Jul-2008, 11:15
Did you always read literary novels or did you have a Damascus moment when something triggered your interest in literary fiction?
Hmmm. I grew reading horror novels, for the most part. Stephen King, James Herbert - that sort of thing. Then, one day, well - over eleven days - I read Clive Barker's Imagica, which put paid to the aforementioned. He just seemed so much more interesting and his prose scanned in such a way, for a teenager who dabbled in fiction, that it was influential.
By the time I was about twenty, twenty-one, I was still reading that sort of stuff, the occasional genre piece - typically crime - thrown in. I used to sail, so being four months away, you read whatever others had with them, swapping books all the time. Some had utter tat, while others had interesting novels and non-fiction. It was around that time, too, where I found myself buying some books based around films or songs - William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch and Douglas Coupland's Girlfriend In A Coma spring to mind.
What I found most interesting was that after reading something now, I would return to those I'd read before and found that I couldn't, or that it was less enjoyable. Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal And The Whitei was one super-enjoyable novel I recall. Then, almost five years ago, I embarked on Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco, which changed everything. Most probably went right over my head, but I could still follow the story, enjoying details, tricks, and jokes along the way.
It's only in these last five years that I've really said goodbye to what I used to read and moved into what I see as literary fiction, mostly thanks to the names and recommendations of certain people at Palimpsest (http://www.palimpsest.org.uk/forum/index.php), which has had me keeping a reading list since August 2005. (2005 (http://www.palimpsest.org.uk/forum/showpost.php?p=22848&postcount=24) | 2006 (http://www.palimpsest.org.uk/forum/showpost.php?p=28970&postcount=16) | 2007 (http://www.palimpsest.org.uk/forum/showpost.php?p=52206&postcount=6) | 2008 (http://www.palimpsest.org.uk/forum/showpost.php?p=80615&postcount=5)).
In the last year, I've noticed that I've been reading a lot more translated work and have been developing an encyclopaedic knowledge of the subject, even if I haven't read too many of the titles that could be considered the world lit canon. It's partly this, having been a member of a number of book forums online for a number of years, mostly catering to a genre structure, that I thought it would be interesting to get this place going - a book forum that doesn't group things into genre, but prefers to explore the world.
How do you define literary fiction ? and what do you get out of it that you don't feel you get out of more populist novels?
I don't know if I can define it as it's something that is more instinctive. And that's all I think on the subject.
But, looking at "literary authors" stacked on the shelves, you can see by the varied sizes of spines that the story is as long as it has to be, whereas popular fiction tends to be similar in size from book to book, indicative of a dull old formula. I just know which I'd rather read.
On the subject of formula... I can't remember who it was, but some writer said that the difference between good literary fiction and the rest (ie I guess bad literary fiction and all that remains) was that the latter relied on formulas that were used books after books while the former might stick to the same themes over and over again but were altering the formula with each books.
I don't think it's true generally, but it certainly does make sense for quite a few great writers.
Mirabell
11-Jul-2008, 12:43
On the subject of formula... I can't remember who it was, but some writer said that the difference between good literary fiction and the rest (ie I guess bad literary fiction and all that remains) was that the latter relied on formulas that were used books after books while the former might stick to the same themes over and over again but were altering the formula with each books.
I don't think it's true generally, but it certainly does make sense for quite a few great writers.
That's a common idea, especially when critics try to define style as period style and show how major literature (aka genius literature) relates to that. one of the more cogent enterprises is Adorno's (http://shigekuni.blogspot.com/2007/09/die-kulturindustrie-als-retter-der.html).
On the opther end of the dumb scale squats Bloom.
Such good questions, one thread can hardly contain them.
In my case, early exposure at home via Heritage Press editions, secondary school rejection of assigned reading in favor of Sci-Fi, college renewed appreciation: classwork provided some tools, but the prime mover was Pynchon (John Barth and Don Barthelme and Kafka and Poe and Borges and Nabokov and so on and on [did I mention Beckett?] getting honorable mentions), when I finally got the joke, that storytelling in the literary mode was playing with ideas, and in particular with ideas about storytelling. This is the aspect of lit fic that sets it apart for me. It also explains why this board is of interest to me: truly inventive writing can happen any time and anywhere, but certain times and places seem to have much more going on; in the 20&1/2 century, the torch has passed from the USA to Latin America to Eastern Europe ...
One of Dan Green's (http://noggs.typepad.com/the_reading_experience/) ongoing themes is sorting the good from the bad in literary fiction (e.g. 7.7, which points up the mediocrity of literary affect that treats lit fic as genre).
Mirabell
11-Jul-2008, 13:24
How and why did you starting reading 'literature'?
Not reading per se. Did you always read literary novels or did you have a Damascus moment when something triggered your interest in literary fiction?
How do you define literary fiction ? and what do you get out of it that you don't feel you get out of more populist novels?
I don't really like this question.
But, slowly.
I started off as a voracious reader, I read many many classics before becoming a teenager, many Germany classics, all of Hugo's, Dickens' and Balzac's translated prose, things like that. I also read all kinds of fantasy, good and bad, spy thrillers good and bad. I read all sorts of non-fiction books on history and physics. Then I learned English, partly on my own, and started with readingf thrillers, rereading some classics and only very late edged on into po-mo territory. Barth, Barthelme I can't have known (i.e. read) for more than three years now. Of the big names, pynchon is the only one I have known (i.e. read) for a while now. So the categories 'literary' and 'populist' were always dubious to me, I read both, in similar quantities (not even counting Philosophy).
And then I started studying literature, and stuff like cultural studies then totally wrecked any high/low dichotomy I could defend (yes I use it, too, sometimes, but that's laziness). I wrote a paper on vampire stories, one on Delany's Babel-17, as well as stuff on Benhard, Adorno, Semprun and heavyweights like that.
It doesn't make much sense IMO to say
ideas about storytelling. This is the aspect of lit fic that sets it apart
Genre writing is as consciuous of its own making and full of ideas about storytelling and gender and whatnot as any literary text. There may be texts which are not as good as others, but rarely can one make that distinction without having to say in what respect they are better/worse (for example: SF is traditionally dazzling with ideas but weak on the writing). And 'populist'? Literary fiction tries to appeal to its own demographics as well, it is as much part of period style and conventions as any other sort of genre fiction. Genius literature, if we have to have that term, exists in genre- as well as in so-called literary fiction.
In my experience with dealing with readers, that Damascus moment usually means that they have become sort of uptight
Irene Wilde
11-Jul-2008, 13:51
Hmmm....
Being the pretty and popular child I was (how little things change over the years) books were my friends and read anything and everything -- mail addressed to occupant, the backs of cereal boxes, all the standard kid-lit and YA-lit of the time, GWTW, Anna Karenina, Shakespeare, Danielle Steele, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jacqueline Susanne, Harold Robbins, crime and detective fiction, anything and everything.
In college I took a lit. course -- Faulkner and Joyce left strong impressions on me, and I guess that's when I started paying attention to what I read and making choices instead of just consuming as much as I could. Then there were some years when I didn't read at all, which is an altogether different subject.
I started reading again about seven or eight years ago. Pretty and popular as ever, but now a mom and working full-time, I no longer have the luxury of time. My guideline for reading these days is "life's too short to read bad books" (or drink bad booze or watch bad film or..you get the idea).
Nothing complicated in my reasons for starting to read literary fiction (and some poetry):
1) My mother read to me when I was a child in Dutch. Children's books.
2) My father ditto, in English.
3) I discovered Biggles at about the age of nine.
4) I discovered the existence of other languages at school and as a teenager.
5) I went a grammar school where they had set books in English, French and German (including Camus' "L'Etranger", incidentally). We did a good sprinkling of things.
By the time I was eighteen, I wanted to read languages and the literatures attached to them. This did mean some neglect of English literature for a few decades. But you can't do everything. I started with Swedish at university, and later discovered Estonian, Flemish and a number of other literatures. Living in different countries also made me realise that each country has its canon. That is an essential discovery. While some authors, such as Shakespeare, Balzac, Goethe, Tolstoy, and so on, are truly ageless and international in their scope, some authors more rooted in their country interest me too.
In my case it was a number of gradual influences and discoveries, not a sudden revelatory moment when I realised that literature is worthwhile, fun, etc. But having said that, I suffer from the same encyclop?dic problem as Stewart, i.e. I know the names of lots of authors and novels, but that doesn't mean I've read them all.
I don't really like this question.
It doesn't make much sense IMO to say
ideas about storytelling. This is the aspect of lit fic that sets it apart
Genre writing is as consciuous of its own making and full of ideas about storytelling and gender and whatnot as any literary text. There may be texts which are not as good as others, but rarely can one make that distinction without having to say in what respect they are better/worse (for example: SF is traditionally dazzling with ideas but weak on the writing). And 'populist'? Literary fiction tries to appeal to its own demographics as well, it is as much part of period style and conventions as any other sort of genre fiction. Genius literature, if we have to have that term, exists in genre- as well as in so-called literary fiction.
In my experience with dealing with readers, that Damascus moment usually means that they have become sort of uptight
Nonsense, mostly. That writing is assignable to a genre (such as SF) doesn't mean it's nonliterary. And I don't exclude 'populist' -- Shakespeare in his own time was pretty happening. But it's a different thing entirely from genre writing. Now admittedly "ideas" is vague, but whaddayawant in one paragraph? (NB: my 2nd paragraph dealt with treating lit fic as genre, and its failure -- like you can throw in a couple allusions to great works, polish up the words, and poof! so-called literary fiction, Tommy Bernhard luvs ya)
Mirabell
11-Jul-2008, 14:15
try to think before posting
That writing is assignable to a genre (such as SF) doesn't mean it's nonliterary.
genre fiction is a fixed term, that is these days clearly offset from 'literary fiction', which has arguably become a genre in and of itself. Genre fiction - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genre_fiction)
god. "nonsense". look who's talking.
Mirabell
11-Jul-2008, 14:23
the thing that bugs me most about the high/low dichotomy, if it is used with a tendency to equate it with a good/bad dichotomy (as an aside, the whole concept of guilty pleasures bugs me too, or amazon reviews where readers, especially Germans, say: yeah it's good/fun but not 'Literature'. What sort of inane distinction is that?) is the way that it enhances books which have made it to the high shelf (or have been written for that shelf all along) but which are not actually good. There are so many canonized, overrated, overblown writers, one of which is, I maintain, Thomas Mann, another of which is Goethe, half of whose works could go into the bin for all I care. There's that canon issue again.
On the subject of formula... I can't remember who it was, but some writer said that the difference between good literary fiction and the rest (ie I guess bad literary fiction and all that remains) was that the latter relied on formulas that were used books after books while the former might stick to the same themes over and over again but were altering the formula with each books.
I don't think it's true generally, but it certainly does make sense for quite a few great writers.
Formula isn't quite right, but context has a lot to do with it. Good literary works establish their own context (including use of language) where the rest take an estabished form as a given.
try to think before posting
try following your own advice
genre fiction is a fixed term, that is these days clearly offset from 'literary fiction', which has arguably become a genre in and of itself. Genre fiction - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genre_fiction)
god. "nonsense". look who's talking.
Part of the nonsense is the restrictive definition of what constitutes genre. Like everything has to be assigned a particular category in order to make sense of it.
But hey I enjoy nonsense, it can be literary too.
Mirabell
11-Jul-2008, 14:35
try following your own advice
Part of the nonsense is the restrictive definition of what constitutes genre. Like everything has to be assigned a particular category in order to make sense of it.
But hey I enjoy nonsense, it can be literary too.
Y'know. I can repeat it again (but only once, after that, no lollipop).
I USED A FIXED EXPRESSION
which means what it means. Details are not up for barter.
Mirabell
11-Jul-2008, 14:42
Formula isn't quite right, but context has a lot to do with it. Good literary works establish their own context (including use of language) where the rest take an estabished form as a given.
I still maintain that it's more profitable to use the term style (which would then refers to everything, not just the language) and see how and where a given text breaks with a sort of genre- or period style.
The rest is nonsense, to use yr own benign term. Every single text, including Stephen King's Cell or Bridget Jones' Diary establishes its own context and every text takes something as a given. The amount to which even highly innovative books rely on conventional context may surprise you.
saliotthomas
11-Jul-2008, 15:02
Dostoievsky hit me full in the face with the Possessed when i was in ly 20's,i read the rest and hated the world for it's basseness,and crude fellings.I didn't read before but all my familly did,i was surronded by books.
I started reading shit much later and enjoyed it throughfully,for even ten good pages can make a book memorable.
I
Mirabell
11-Jul-2008, 15:07
they can, can't they.
books are such a wonder.
Sybarite
11-Jul-2008, 15:31
Thanks for the replies, folks: a great discussion. :)
We had loads of books in the home, but mostly light fiction. My parents encouraged reading – to a degree. As I grew up, my mother operated a great deal of censorship over what I read (I could read about war in an Alistair Maclean and about murder in a Agatha Christie, but heaven help if I picked up a book that she thought might feature S.E.X.). I liked reading, but was very restricted in what I read.
Home was also very repressive intellectually – as Martin Luther put it: "Reason is the devil's whore". In other words, for the religious, 'don't think too much'. I didn't get over that until about 10 years ago, after which, I started branching out more, trying new books – having read little literature since school. I'd read erratically over the years, mostly things such as Stephen King. Then a German friend suggested Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks. I enjoyed it and, on the back of that, ordered a collection of short stories culminating in the novella, Death in Venice. The stories were good. Death in Venice blew my mind (sorry Mirabell;) ). I could hardly read or write anything for about three months; words seemed to seize up in my mind. And then it was like a damn broke. My vocabulary effectively doubled almost overnight – words I knew, but would never have used either on paper or in conversation. I actually remember exactly where I was when it happened – on a beach on the north coast of Ireland: it was that specific a moment.
Since then, I've read increasingly widely, deliberately trying to broaden my horizons and knowledge. And like Stewart, I find it increasingly difficult to return to the sort of books that I used to read.
Funnily enough, I was reading Mann's Dr Faustus when visiting my parents one day. My mother's eyes nearly popped out on stalks when she saw it: it was just too 'heavy' for her to even contemplate and she was stunned that I was reading such work.
For me, Death in Venice still sums literary fiction up – it makes me use my mind, challenges me to think, throws ideas in my direction and encourages me to come up with more of my own, as well as moving me and keeping me gripped with the story.
Examples of genre fiction can do that too for me – sci-fi has produced some very good examples – and I wouldn't exclude genre fiction from any description of 'literature'.
Mirabell
11-Jul-2008, 21:01
Death in Venice is a ripoff of von Platen, in tone, vocabulary, syntax, topic, just less poetical. It's IMO Mann's worst book and he has many. I do like the buddenbrooks and some stories quite a lot. I may come round to liking the Joseph epic.
Which von Platen and which von Platen book? Do you mean the gay blade, August, Graf von Platen, the anti-Semite who quarrelled with Heine? If so, are you implying that Tod in Venedig is a Kopisch of Platen's work, or merely uses the same themes?
I'm not familar with him or his writings. I thought the Mann novella, with the Polish adolescent, sea vistas, bath chairs, the elegant, sweaty and heavy breathing, the dyed hair, and the dolefully manic stare of Dirk Bogarde in the film, was rather good really. I am biased, because I first did indeed see it as the Visconti film, then later read it in English, then in German. Mann had problems with Klaus in this area, I believe. And he was definitely familiar with this side of sexuality, as you will see if you read Tonio Kr?ger, as well.
Let me quote:
August Platen, or von Platen as he was known officially since his fiftieth birthday...
I know someone on Big Readers who actually read the Joseph epic. I have not yet ventured in that direction. But I am by no means as dismissive of Mann as is Mirabell, who would only salvage Buddenbrooks and some stories.
Mirabell
12-Jul-2008, 12:26
Do you mean the gay blade, August, Graf von Platen, the anti-Semite who quarrelled with Heine? If so, are you implying that Tod in Venedig is a Kopisch of Platen's work, or merely uses the same themes?
Kopisch?
Dabbler
12-Jul-2008, 14:14
When did I start to read?
I remember very clearly when I "started to read."
I wasn't young; my family was not literary; there were very few books around the house.
I was a young male teen.
But one day I took down a book from the shelf in the breakfront -- "The Wings of the Morning" by Louis Tracy. It was, of all things, a romance, probably my mother's, published in 1903, and quite possibly of no particular literary merit. But it had a single stunningly beautiful scene that I still remember, and that was the first time I realized what an amazing window on a different world a book could provide. From that day on, I looked forward to the books for required reading in school and have been reading ever since.
I tend to read anything that interests me, about evenly split between fiction and non-fiction, and my tastes have changed considerably over the years, of course. But still, I read what I enjoy, whether it be "classic" or "literary" or more popular fare. Bloom was mentioned above. I'll offer a thought of his I just saw.
Why do we read?
"We read, frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own."
My dad read to me, Jack London, some Farley Mowat and some other Canadian nature/wilderness type novels. From there I read a little bit of young adult mystery then I dropped it for a while and picked up a skateboard. Not a reason to stop reading it's just what happened. Then I started into adult genre fiction. A little Fantasy, some Sci-Fi and a lot of Dean Koontz and Stephen King. I'm not sure exactly why or where it started but there was an interest in the classics, possibly from my early exposure to London? But I had the inkling in my head that I wanted to read Dickens, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. I didn't then but in highschool I dabbled with Hemingway and read A Clockwork Orange. From those readings I could see there was a different type of adult reading that wasn't mass market paperback, the idea of literary fiction wasn't in my head yet, I thought there were classics and the now. After highschool it was mostly genre fiction when I read but I still had that itch to read but it wasn't being fulfilled by the books I was aware of and for whatever reason I did not yet venture into the classics I wanted to read.
Then came the boy who didn't die. Harry Potter. I got something from those books I had not gotten from reading in ages and it rekindled my fire to read. It was during that time that I was up into the wee hours on night and Biography did a show on Tolstoy. It completely changed the way I looked at life. It was the Fall so I made a Christmas list, it was all books. One of the books I received was Crime and Punishment. It was easily the best thing I had ever read and much that experience haunts me. I remember being huddled up under my bedroom window at 3AM. It was -30?C outside and my window wouldn't completely close because it was frozen open just a touch. Instead of curling up under a duvet I had to know what was going to happen to Raskolnikov! Had to. That was 4 years ago I guess. Now I'm back in school pursuing an English degree.
Woohoo for you ions! What a great path for teaching or writing. Let's see, my mother steered me towards what she called ''the good stuff'' in the public library when I was a young teen. I would occasionally bring home volumes that my parents wouldn't let me read, but for the most part I read American classics, Twain, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Fitzgerald. In high school, I read Crime and Punishment and fell in love with Russian literature. Also, Sartre and Camus and a little bit of Beckett. I knew that the world at large produced much more than I had access to, but, without a conduit, I read somewhat passively for many years. I'd just pick up what was in the library browsing section, relying on a little bit of direction that I gained in college as an English minor. It's only been in the past few years that I've gained a wider awareness of all that is available. As for the literariness of choices, I just sort of veered towards literature and haven't read much popular fiction. Never read a King, for example. It just doesn't interest.
Mirabell #22: do I have to explain all my bad puns? Kopisch was one of von Platen's boyfriends. Punned with the common English word "copy" / "copies".
Beth #25: I've not bothered with popular, romantic, sci-fi and all those genres, because there's enough serious literature available in English, let alone other languages, to last me a lifetime or three.
Heteronym
19-Jul-2008, 13:07
Up until my teens I didn't read much prose, although I devoured comics, especially American superheroes and Disney comics: Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge, Mickey Mouse, such great stuff for the imagination. I can't say I got a lot of support at home, although my mother is also a voracious reader and introduced me to Jos? Saramago. But my dad still looks at me sideways when I read.
My first novels were thrillers, horror and sci-fi novels: I used to be in love with Jules Verne, H.G. Wells; I also tried Stephen King and Thomas Harris (The Silence of the Lambs is one of the favorite movies) but I could never get into them. Even at an early, unexperienced age, I knew they weren't that well written. My interests in the fantastic and weird lead me to Edgar Allan Poe and Oscar Wilde, and from there Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez, whose One Hundred Years of Solitude marked my interest in great literature. Then came University and I continued to find great authors one after another and I've never stopped reading ever since.
Adding to #9, I was watching a programme repeat on the BBC about comics. I mentioned my childhood reading of Biggles, but totally forgot the comics which I read.
My parents had subscribed me to Eagle Comic and Look and Learn, the former more adventurous, the latter a worthy publication that gave me a taste for childrens' encyclop?dias.
But during rainy "playtimes" at school (C of E, Staincliffe, Batley, Yorks., UK) I would avidly read the Beano and the Dandy. I always avoided the long prose passages and went for the cartoon strips with the speech bubbles. This gradual approach to text is no doubt why nowadays I am a literary translator. I wasn't put off literature at an early age by an ocean of words.
Threetrees
18-Apr-2012, 18:17
I don't remember all of the books I read (or looked through) in my childhood. I remember genres and emotions they have brought. There were pictures in them - bright, funny, animalistic, colorful, attractive, mystic and lovable to me. Later, I remember my librarian woman, a very beautiful female I adored to be with and cast surreptitious looks at from behind the book-shelves. She always kept the best books for me. She probably knew what she was doing and wanted me to become a good man. Titles? They are not compulsory to mention. These were the best books, and heroes. There were many of them then and now it is one - me. There are no more such libraries and people there. That's a pity.
Starting to read literature is a long road that can wind on for the rest of your life. But as I said earlier, your parents and schoolteachers must encourage you. Especially nowadays, as there are so many computer games and other distractions, that many children may not develop the patience to read a book, yearning all the time for instant stimulation.
pigeonweather
23-Apr-2012, 17:18
[...] yearning all the time for instant stimulation.
instant - and constant - stimulation has become a common ingredient in popular fiction. If you look at something like 'The Hunger Games', there is hardly a chapter which doesn't contain some sort of cliffhanger, and people love it, both children and adults. I liken it to high fructose corn syrup. Computer games and television are often seen as the cause of this kind of adrenalin/attention-deficit/addiction, but aren't they also but reflections of an urbanized and highly accelerated culture? We're subjected to rapid stimulations from various sources, even from only the traffic outside of our windows. Literature of the slower variety is akin to a yoga retreat - we now have to plan and schedule and make room for some silence and stillness in the midst of our lives.
So you've changed your nom-de-plume yet again...
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