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KharBevNor:
Please describe that difference? I wasn't aware that there were standards. Is this like how an academic journal requires a certain system of referencing? Who are we excluding from the realm of the literary exactly? I am interested to see how you can formulate a set of rules for dividing the 'literary' and 'non-literary' (unless you are simply talking about fiction and non-fiction) which does not end up excluding important parts of even the accepted canon, let alone all the other things thought to be worthy of consideration but not generally included in that illustrious company.

As for sci-fi recommendations, I've been doing a lot of bus-riding the last few months, so I've been returning a bit (when I don't have academic reading to do, which is admittedly rarely) to short story collections. Some of the best sci-fi writing is in short story or novella form. We had a sort of thread about the subject last year. I posted a list of great sci-fi shorts in there, which I could expand upon endlessly, with particular ommissions I note at this juncture being:

Ray Bradbury - Dark They Were, and Golden Eyed
David Brin - Piecework
Octavia Butler - Speech Sounds
C.J. Cherryh - Pots
Harlan Ellison - Repent Harlequin, Said the Ticktockman and I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream
William Gibson & Michael Swanwick - Dogfight
Robert Heinlein - "All You Zombies-"
Ursula K. LeGuin - The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas
George R.R. Martin - Sandkings
Robert Silverberg - Passengers

All in anthologies I read recently.

Inlander:

--- Quote from: KharBevNor on 29 Jan 2011, 08:29 ---Please describe that difference? I wasn't aware that there were standards.

--- End quote ---

It's got nothing to do with standards and everything to do with what the writer is trying to achieve. I define a "non-literary" piece of writing as something that has no more aspirations than simply entertaining the reader. There's nothing wrong with that and I read my share of such books, but they don't linger long in the mind. As far as I'm concerned "literary" writing aspires to actually tell us something about the world in which we live, to make some incisive comment or to drive the reader to ask questions about their surroundings or see those surroundings anew.

For an example I'll offer Matter, the most recent Culture novel by Iain M. Banks. I've read all the Culture novels and enjoyed them a good deal (otherwise I wouldn't keep reading them!) but ultimately in the majority of cases they don't say anything to me of greater significance than "Here, read this, it'll be fun". By contrast the Iliad, while just as action-packed and gruesome as any of Banks's novels, offered me all sorts of insights into war and humanity.

This is not a comment on quality. It's got nothing to do with style. There are plenty of books which aspire to be purely literary and are boring or badly written. There are plenty of genre books which use crime, or science fiction, or what have you, to make genuinely incisive observations about the world. And there are plenty of genre books which try to do so and fail miseraly, such as Stieg Larsson's "Millennium" trilogy. But to say that there's no difference between "literary" and "non-literary" books is some postmodern relativist nonsense that I can't support.

scarred:
I'm about 200 pages into A Game of Thrones and I must say, I've gotten pretty sucked in.

Inlander:
I'm probably going down a rabbit-hole here but I don't for a minute want to suggest that all "literary" writing is better than all "non-literary" writing. There's long been a trend in crime fiction in particular for what we might call "literary crime writing" - George Pelecanos is an obvious example. I would place Stieg Larsson in that particular sub-genre - but at the lowest, least impressive end of it. However ham-fistedly, he was clearly trying to say something meaningful about identity politics, and about the role of the outsider in society, and about control of society by the authorities, etc.

So really I suppose I'm suggesting two levels of classification: "literary" and "non-literary", and "good" and "bad". They're both pretty subjective I guess but neither should be confused with the other and each is almost entirely independent of the other. There are good and bad "literary" books and good and bad "non-literary" books, and the best of the "non-literary" books are better than the worst of the "literary" books. As I've maintained since the start:


--- Quote from: Inlander on 28 Jan 2011, 16:42 ---literature can encompass any genre

--- End quote ---

And by extension, works in any genre can be "literary".

Also you're right, Surface Detail is the book I was thinking of but Matter was the title that came to mind.

KharBevNor:

--- Quote from: Inlander on 29 Jan 2011, 14:05 ---It's got nothing to do with standards and everything to do with what the writer is trying to achieve.

--- End quote ---

Hey now now. Ever read any Roland Barthes...death of the author, etc.? The intent of the author is seperate from the content of the text which is seperate from the reading reached by the reader. This is like, post-modern literary criticism 101, and it makes eminent sense. We can only really claim to have an idea of what the author intends the messave of their work to be through cultural, linguistic and metatextual clues outside of the text itself; where these clues do not exist, how are we to evaluate the text? As critics, we are readers. Any text must be considered from the point of view of how it is read; anything else is really insupportable. And it seems plain that any text can communicate the arbitrarily defined 'meaningful' messages you claim seperate the literary from the non-literary to a specific person. Some people may draw meaningful meditations on the human condition from Iain M. Banks, or from the back of a cereal packet. But of course, the very idea that there are certain aspirations a writer must have is woefully subjective in the first place.

And what about the sections of Shakespeares plays written entirely to amuse the cheap seats. What of the endless words Dickens churned out mostly to meet publishers deadlines.

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