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let's talk about authorship y'all
Johnny C:
--- Quote from: Inlander on 28 Jan 2011, 16:42 ---
--- Quote from: KharBevNor on 28 Jan 2011, 08:49 ---Can we please, please, please stop describing literature and sci-fi as entirely separate things? thanks!
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Only as long as we continue to recognise that while literature can encompass any genre, there is a clear difference between "literary" and "non-literary" writing.
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--- Quote from: KharBevNor on 29 Jan 2011, 08:29 ---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.
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--- 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. 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.
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--- Quote from: Jeans on 29 Jan 2011, 16:19 ---If the only difference between the two are the 'aspirations' of the author, doesn't the separation blur to the point of invisibility when non-literary works can also fill the same role, and thus rendering the distinction pointless? You brought up Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy - there's no question in my mind that Larsson tried to (aspired to, as it were) make some sort of comment on misogyny. Poorly executed, sure, but it was certainly an attempt - so is it literary or non-literary? If you'd said Tom Clancy I might have agreed with you, but to my mind, Iain Banks and Stieg Larsson both attempt to comment or force us to think in the ways you described. The "pure entertainment"-factor might higher than in the Iliad, but if the line really is as clear as it seems to you, where is it drawn, and how do we distinguish the two kinds from one another?
Of course, I agree with you (and I suspect everyone else does too) that there is a clear difference between the aspirations of Homer and Stieg Larsson, but if the same distinction is to be drawn between the books of Iain Banks and Iain M. Banks (provided you agree that his non-scifi novels are literary works), the aspirations of the writer seems to be criteria too murky to use easily.
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--- Quote from: Inlander on 29 Jan 2011, 17:06 ---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
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And by extension, works in any genre can be "literary".
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--- Quote from: KharBevNor on 29 Jan 2011, 21:04 ---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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--- Quote from: Inlander on 29 Jan 2011, 23:57 ---I'm sorry but as a life-long reader this strikes me as manifestly untrue. Reading is a skill like any other and those who are practiced in it - as everyone participating in this thread surely is - should be able to identify what point (if any) an author is trying to make in his or her writing with relative ease. Of course we're free to add our own intepretations and doing so will even enhance our experience of the text but the idea that the author is simply a vessel through which the words pour is ridiculous. Perhaps I'm occupying an unusual position in that I've written many tens of thousands of words of fiction over the last decade or more and I spend a large amount of time thinking very seriously and in great depth about the craft as well as the art of writing, but if a writer is unable to convey their intentions clearly to the reader then the writer has failed in their chosen field of endeavour.
--- Quote from: KharBevNor on 29 Jan 2011, 21:04 ---And what about the sections of Shakespeares plays written entirely to amuse the cheap seats.
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What about them? They're sections, as you say, not the whole. Surely you're not suggesting that we start isolating particular excerpts from a piece of writing and start considering them as if they were a whole and complete text?
--- Quote from: KharBevNor on 29 Jan 2011, 21:04 ---What of the endless words Dickens churned out mostly to meet publishers deadlines.
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Maybe they're not "literary" by my definition. That doesn't mean that Dickens isn't a "literary" writer. Graham Greene famously divided his novels into "novels" and "entertainments".
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--- Quote from: KharBevNor on 30 Jan 2011, 08:12 ---I think this is a very narrow idea indeed. Surely this is a difference between fiction and non-fiction. Much art arises out of a failure to be able to clearly communicate. Furthermore, I think you're fundamentally wrong; the text itself cannot reliably communicate the authors intentions. Even the most straightforward text can be interpreted in a huge number of ways: as a code, as an allegory, using a marxist reading or a feminist reading. Winnie the Pooh can be about the class system or spiritual enlightenment or whatever, depending on how the reader chooses to see it. The intention of the author is a fact that is extrinsic to the text itself; even if it is stated in the text we do not actually know the authors intention, we only know the authors stated intention. It becomes clear, in fact, that the stated or presented intention is all the intention we can ever know, if we know the intention at all. Thus, plainly the idea of intention is meaningless; it is the relationship between the reader and the text that is important, as it is the only one that we, as the critic/reader, actually understand, at least in the single special case of our own relationship with a text. An author can call his works whatever the hell he wants, but if a reader can read a book that has been called mere 'entertainment' and comes away enlightened, and if a reader can read a book that is supposed to be full of some deep, considered meaning and is merely entertained, or bored shitless, then we can see the idea is completely false. It relies on an insupportable intellectual premise.
EDIT:
--- Quote from: Inlander on 29 Jan 2011, 23:57 ---What about them? They're sections, as you say, not the whole. Surely you're not suggesting that we start isolating particular excerpts from a piece of writing and start considering them as if they were a whole and complete text?
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Not exactly. It raises another enormous flaw in your argument though. How do you judge the overall quality of a work which contains supposedly 'literary' and 'non-literary' segments? If a novel contains 10 chapters of 'non-literature' and one chapter of 'literature' is the overall result 'literature' or does the 'literature' content have to be over a certain level. Bringing up things like this exposes the terrible weakness of the definition you're trying to make.
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--- Quote from: pwhodges on 30 Jan 2011, 08:39 ---Although I am happy with the idea that we can choose to place our own interpretation on the text (and in many cases may have to), I really do not see any justification for the jump at the end of your statement in my quote. If the author tells you something, why is it then "plain" that what they tell you is meaningless?
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--- Quote from: KharBevNor on 30 Jan 2011, 08:59 ---Because we cannot assume the author is reliably stating his intention. I should probably have been a little clearer; it's not meaningless in terms of being without content, it's meaningless in terms of being an objective or reasonable standard by which to categorise work.
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--- Quote from: Johnny C on 24 Feb 2011, 21:30 ---
--- Quote from: Inlander on 01 Feb 2011, 06:12 ---Part of me really wants to continue this whole literature/non literature debate because it's endlessly fascinating but a greater part of me realises that it's got less and less to do with the thread at hand and it really only involves myself and Khar, and neither of us are going to change the other's mind.
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actually i hadnt read this but it owns that khar is a strict barthesian re: authorial theory it's too bad he's already been ethered like fifty years previous by sartre who posited that texts are ultimately a negotiation between writer and reader not reader and text and that the work of the two interested human parties in tandem is ultimately what generates the meeting so in fact Writers Do Matter i'm sorry to weigh in on this really glibly i should go home
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--- Quote from: KharBevNor on 25 Feb 2011, 03:53 ---Just because Sartre posits something doesn't mean it's true. I don't do much thinking about literature (such a restricted form of communication is beneath me), but you seem to be suggesting something similiar to the idea in aesthetics whereby a work of art is taken to be like a conversation and people find aesthetic value in the same sort of things they value in a conversation. Value/quality and meaning are not the same thing at all however, although the two things may have already been rather confused in the conversation above, but not in the same way. My argument, which I think is perfectly sound and pretty difficult to assail, is that the intent of the author is ultimately uncertain and thus cannot be used as a qualifier to sort works into two sets ('literature' and 'not literature'), because it makes the two sets meaningless, and thus the terms meaningless.
New thread?
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and here we are
Johnny C:
i mean one thing that should probably be said right off is that "literature" as a noun is nebulous but shouldn't and doesn't necessarily exclude genre fiction, and nobody arguing re: writers and intent would be on solid theoretical or practical ground arguing otherwise, i think.
continuing where we left off – in the same vein that Just Cause Sartre Said It, It Ain't Right (which like wasn't what i said but whatever), Just Cause Barthes Said It Ain't Make It True. i think barthes was arguing for the death of the author from a profoundly false premise, i.e. that the reader was somehow yet to be born, or that taking the author's statements on the text as an interpretation that has some authority behind it is some kind of political aberration.
but that leaves out a ton of considerations, first being that people are actually not stupid and don't need the author out of the picture in order to be able to lokat and read and interpret a work, the second being that someone actually had to write the goddamn thing in the first place, and while they might be some kind of literary savant it's a really absurd leap to consider the idea that every author by necessity is a savant.
worse still, the argument kind of shoots itself in the foot by presuming that an author of a text is not also a reader of it, which is like borderline absurd unless you're going to bring up Automatic Writing which is a fun and neat little experiment i guess but to suggest that there is somehow a distancing of the self from that kind of writing you are going to have to pull some serious psychospiritual acrobatics. the difference is that the author's reading manifests itself actually in the text. i don't think harry's necessarily arguing that you have to read a bunch of magazine articles to get to a text's point. he's arguing from sartre's standpoint (among several others, since the idea of authorship and meaning is really fragmented), which suggests that the author's deliberate ordering and construction of events and characters and setting &c&c&c is what ultimately makes up The Text and the reader works within that constructed framework to come to their own conclusions, conclusions drawn from that ordered and structured stuff.
what i guess i'm ultimately saying is twofold. first, i'm saying that to eliminate the author from the conversation is to withdraw another voice from a conversation surrounding a literary text, which when you get down to it is all texts are. they might spring from a failure to communicate (a specious observation at best, and by far too broad to with which to paint every extant text) but they are nevertheless a medium for communication, a locus for relationships to the world. (even "non-literary" texts accomplish this; clancy, for example, is able to reflect several strains of contemporary american nationalism and exceptionalism and other deep and complex stuff that his novels scratch the surface on without expanding but which any reader can theoretically parse in relation to said world).
and the second thing i'm saying is that texts are and always have been and will always be mediated, and the mediator - i.e. the person writing - won't necessarily share your agenda. to shove them off the thing so that you can plant your flag in a piece of literature is like supremely and deeply egotistical, in a way that nobody interested in the capacities of any art should really be. art is fundamentally, for creator and reader, an act of challenging solipsism, something to engage people and get them thinking outside of selfishness. to claim art for selfishness is like seriously ethically suspect.
as well and you'll have to pardon me for sounding elitist or whatever but i think the argument that Every Single Reading Is By Necessity Correct Cause The Reader Is King Shit Of Fuck Mountain is like a complete crock since what it rewards is not close reading and attention to the text as it is and attention to the relationships that can be generated from the text into the world but rather ultimately it rewards having theoretical axes to grind. more pointedly, just because you read something in a text doesn't make you right. try doing a feminist reading of an 18th century novel by a woman writer and you can probably argue with a ton of quotes and feminist reading methodology that the novel is in fact feminist. you'll also be missing like several facts, one of which is the glaring one that no text written prior to the codification of feminism can possibly be feminist in intent because the author literally would not have known what that is. this is an example but it's a risk you take in all readings of texts that fail to take the author into consideration, that risk being that in attempting to reclaim it for whatever theoretical vantage point you might want to yank people's heads towards you'll actually miss some of the stuff that's going on in the text. (see up above my arguments re: selfishness cause they apply here too)
i mean – i just read dfw's "joseph frank's dostoevsky", which like as far as i can tell in terms of arguing for the consideration of author is as important as anything barthes or sartre wrote on the subject, addressing everything from the Intentional Fallacy (for which he and i have the same reasons for thinking it's not really much of a fallacy and that the people calling it a fallacy are walking on thin theoretical ice, i.e. New Criticism and poststructuralist lit theory, both of which have this unnerving habit of being basically totally shitty towards fiction) to the various ways small-i ideology might function within a text and within literary criticism as well. other people than barthes have written on this, and by and large the only people still hewing close to the author-as-dead are like veterans of the mid-90s Theory Wars that overtook literature departments across the West. plus barthes said shit like "The reader is without history, biography, psychology" which is one of the dumbest things i've ever heard in my life since i'm pretty sure i have all three of those things
Joseph:
I'm going to come back and try and write out a reasonable contribution to this later, but in the meantime, would it really hurt you to capitalize here Johnny? I'm all for the way that the stylization of lower case plays in to your usual posts, but when you're writing a short essay on literature, all you're really accomplishing is making the text aggravating to read. Perhaps that's your intention, but really, it's more than a little annoying to be trying to pick apart what you're saying when you style it like that.
KvP:
--- Quote from: Johnny C on 25 Feb 2011, 14:17 ---try doing a feminist reading of an 18th century novel by a woman writer and you can probably argue with a ton of quotes and feminist reading methodology that the novel is in fact feminist. you'll also be missing like several facts, one of which is the glaring one that no text written prior to the codification of feminism can possibly be feminist in intent because the author literally would not have known what that is.
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Well, "feminism", yeah, as a movement, sure, but the farther afield you go in that big messy tent full of concepts I don't think it's such a stretch. Like it's obviously preposterous to argue that some 18th century writer was intentionally sowing the seeds of contemporary feminist theory in her work, but tracing a lineage back to it, I don't see the big deal. It's sort of like saying "Jesus Christ was a socialist", which is not even technically correct, but one could still find a definite counterpoint to individualistic capitalism in his teachings even when such a thing hadn't been formulated yet and wouldn't be for millennia.
I mean far be it from me to argue some "discovery of truth" as though feminism was like the atom or Uranus and existed when people had no conception of it, but you know what I'm saying.
David_Dovey:
I was under the impression that "literary" and "genre" fiction were fairly standardised distinctions?
Also: Another "what is art" conversation ITT
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