official-kircheis: centrally-unplanned: the-queen-of-bithynia:centrally-unplanned: dagny-hashtaggart
official-kircheis: centrally-unplanned: the-queen-of-bithynia:centrally-unplanned: dagny-hashtaggart:centrally-unplanned:st-just:It’s me I’m the boyfriend. Me, the publisher: draws up ‘genres’ for marketing purposes to sort books into different demos to maximize sales via market segmentationAlso me: “why don’t men buy the women books??”I would have liked a good article on the subject but alas this article was extremely far from delivering that. I particularly liked the part (not in the above quotation but it’s there if you search for it) where the article can’t quite decide if it’s complaining about litfic being full of boring dead white men or contemporary presumably living men (race unspecified) being unwilling to read litfic. Oh yeah, the way it seemed to square that circle was to commit to “men sucked in the past, and they suck now, but in different ways?” which prop for trying I guess? My personal fav (as this writing tic always is) was the way it constantly jumped between “men” and “straight white men” - apparently non white, non straight men do read lit fic! According to [ERROR DATABASE NOT FOUND] Seems like a pretty standard case of men like things, women like people. We need a “why don’t white women read SciFi and non-fiction” culture war piece in the same woke sneering tone I definitely agree with that, the author certainly doesn’t regard the idea of men have statistically different tastes as being a valid concept not worthy of disdain. But its also reductive as the author confuses the marketing genre of lit fic with the actual content of “internal exploration”.Because I can think of some media properties! That do internal psychological exploration! And are popular with guys! Maybe they aren’t genre-tagged as lit fic and *maybe* they have giant mechas or oodles of CRT monitors, but they very much are chatty inner world pieces!Kindof think that, perhaps, for the author, what defines the lit fic genre is maybe not the content itself…but the aesthetics? Its only therapy if it happens in Parisian coffee shops and the bedroom of a summer home in Bourdeaux, otherwise its just sparkling dudebro philosophizing? evangelion is lit fic masquerading as mecha change my mind maybe that’s slightly too hot a take, but yeah. as the previous poster points out, it’s probably useful to distinguish the æsthetics and genre norms of literary fiction from the quality of Doing Literature, of which internal psychological exploration can be a part, but also things like social commentary and intertextuality (depending on the other texts). there are lots of good examples, but it’s particularly obvious in China Mountain Zhang, which is barely more than a change of setting away from being pure and straightforward litfic (I mean, it’s about loss, depression, gay sex, and community, plus their interaction with imperialism/colonialism. except it’s China doing it to the US so maybe a bit of a discourse magnet today). anyway that’s how I usually think about itextending straightforwardly to general (narrative) media, it’s possible to make a litfic æsthetic/Doing Literature compass in principle, with e.g. Eva, Blade Runner, Neuromancer in the top-left quadrant -- source link