quote:

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Originally posted by Circus [bodyguard]:

Yeah, but what do all the books they make you read in school have in common, aside from the fact that you're forced to read them?

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I guess it has to do with whatever academia selects. Like I said: fickle.

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Originally posted by Grand:
To me, art is so fickle it's silly to do all of this categorization.

"Literature" is too broad a term. What may be literarture for one person may not be for another.

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It makes shopping for books a lot easier. Really, I think that's the only reason why they separate "fiction" and "literature."

That being said, I still find it depressing to find Harold Robbins next to Tom Robbins on the shelf.

Tangentially related, and too good to not share:

Margeret Atwood explains the differences between fantasy, science fiction, and speculative fiction

<giggling helplessly>

I'm SO glad Locus points out these things. How would I ever know the mysteries of the universe explained if not for Locus?

I swear I read that in high school. Great essay, though.

__________
AJGraeme

hi there. i've been ambling around this forum for all of ten minutes, and thought i might introduce myself and throw in my two cent's worth (although i'm gonna need that back, otherwise i can't afford the busfare home). for what it's worth (and i don't think it's worth a great deal to engage in the endless and fruitless debate about the definitions of genre) the best delineation of literary and popular fiction can been seen like this: that literary fictions attempts to challenge the status quo, questions the accepted social norms etc, while popular fiction is reassuringly predictable, follows time-honoured plot conventions and always delivers the happy ending. it reaffirms the status quo, lets us know that all's right with the world, symbolically solves our problems. i'm not convinced that this theory holds a great deal of water, but like i said...it's a fruitless debate. all genre does really is set up a framework of expectations in the mind of the reader. yeah, okay, i'll stop now. that's quite enough for a first post.

curiouser and curiouser...

Bookstores' distinctions between fiction and literature have seemed arbitrary to me, too. They don't even do a good job following their own convention of seperating popular and genre fiction from others. Four example, I first picked up Interview with the Vampire in the horror section. Ten years later, B&N has Anne Rice in the Fiction and Literature section. Nothing has changed except the writer's popularity, the large part of which has to do with Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, not of any "serious" literary concern. If Anne Rice is Fiction and Literature, why not Laurell K. Hamilton? If everything by James Morrow is science fiction/fantasy, why not Brave New World?

"Lestat? I knew Lestat. Tom Cruise, you're no Lestat."

(I just seem to keep tripping over these...)

On Teresa Nielsen Hayden's blog Making Light, a (typically) cogent discussion of Harry Potter and genre marketing and categorization: http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/002858.html#002858

(Be sure to continue on and read the comments, too--Teresa's readers are also Folks Who Know Stuff, and some of the best discussion happens down there.)

I was thinking about this the other day.

Here Chapters has a section which is labelled
'ficiton and literature'
but it is distinct from
Science Fiction
Fantasy
Horror
Romance
Humour

and, oddly enough
Classics

Being a reader, hopeful writer and part time academic the distiction between what is literature and what is not is very interesting.
As has been stated before it is a judgement/class thing.
If you like it and think that it has value (and are a critic/editor/academic) you call it literature.

Funnily enough the term literature is often applied to pamphlets and propaganda.
Hell the instructions to the new dishwasher we got have 'Literature' stamped on them.


There's a reason that Margaret Atwood stays as far away from the term Science Fiction as she does ( i may not happen to agree with her however)

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"That's cold Obi-wan" Charles Barkley

i remember reading an essay in highschool giving some high brow distinction between fiction and literature. i hated it.

its all a matter of time. Look at Lovecraft, I highly doubt what he was writing was considered 'literature' at the time...and now he's in penguuin classics. go figure.

hopefully though, and this is the one time that i will give credit to post-modernism, other stuff other than 'literature' is being studied in universities. so called 'low culture' literature is actually (not surprisingly) giving rather harsh critiques of modern society etc.

I've always thought of Literary as Style. It signifies "good book" (whether this is or is not the case varies) or else "award winner." Or else it is considered part of the Barnes and Noble canon (not the Barnes and Noble imprint, which is just reissuing public domain books).

Fiction is just not genre and not good enough to be considered literature.

Anne Rice is not considered Literature. Bookmaster, the Barnes and Noble inventory system, catalogues her first as fiction. Other authors, Fitzgerald and Salinger, are classified as Literature.

Susanna Clarke's "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell" is also called fiction, despite the fact that its fantasy. But I don't think that it would have sold nearly as well if it were shut away in the SF/Fantasy section. Genre tends to be the ghetto of bookstores.

Davey, do you think that the book industry as a whole is getting more conservative with what they are putting out and how they are marketing books? I ask because at BnN there are more displays of new released books author's backlists than of new, or lesser known (for lack of a better word), titles.

Well hmm. I work at a major bookstore (not B&N) and am in charge of the display stuff, for the most part. I don't know if this holds true for other companies, but I have quite a bit of play between what is "required" to be displayed and what actually gets put out on display. This also can vary widely from store to store within a company. For instance, I love me some David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs, so every chance I get they get displayed (I know, it's shameless). I however, am not such a fan of the romance stuff, so if it's a choice of displaying a romance novel and something else, it's gonna be the else 90% of the time. So you probably just have a someone in charge of merchandising there that really likes to display back titles.
As to the literature/fiction discussion, I think that quality of writing has a lot to do with it, as well as subject matter. Something having to do with social issues is probably a bit more likely than Bridget Jones Diary to be considered serious writing, i.e. literature. In my particular store there is no seperate section for either, in fact memoirs are mixed in with the fiction. So thankfully, I don't ever have to have this conversation with anyone at work

I am something of a supporter of distinctions between "high" and "low." However, I think the general opinion on what is "high" excludes some very important books because of genre affiliations: Stanislaw Lem's Solaris is a good example. I'll be damned if that book isn't a masterpiece by any standards.

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Originally posted by Grand:
Stanislaw Lem's Solaris is a good example. I'll be damned if that book isn't a masterpiece by any standards.

I found it boring as hell. I love his other books though, like the Cyberiad

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Originally posted by silly punk:
its all a matter of time. Look at Lovecraft, I highly doubt what he was writing was considered 'literature' at the time...and now he's in penguuin classics. go figure.

Lovecraft wasn't famous until one of his friends set up a publishing company to print all his work. That's when it caught on.
Before hand, he was publishing in pulp magazines like Amazing Stories, and the like. Generally considered "low-brow". However his stuff is better than the critics had the opportunity to know. There were no magazines trailing Amazing Stories to rate, rank, and criticise its tales. Shame really. I try to keep an open mind on everything I read, though I honestly haven't read much.
I don't think that a novel being "literary" means that it's good. You'd have to be pretty snotty to just read "literature".

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Originally posted by Dweller in Darkness:
The usual distinction, at least in regards to how the layouts of the stores are labelled, is between "literary" and "popular" fiction. For the most part, "popular" fiction, in the modern vernacular, is genre-based. This unfortunately means that Octavia Butler gets shelved next to the schlocky sci-fi writers, while Jean Aeul gets put in the literature section.

My local book store has some octavia butler in african american literature, and some in sci fi. just FYI

Well, I did write that five years ago.

Good God, five years ago? Seriously?

Anyway, at the time, Borders, where I used to work, shelved that way. The sections have cross-pollinated considerably more since then, though.

I find it odd that Christopher Moore and Jasper Fforde are in the Fiction section (at Borders/the local mall) and Neil Gaiman is in Science Fiction. It just seems to me that Fforde's notion of jumping in and out of books and traveling/policing time should be science-fictiony things.

I swear Neil said something about this recently (although I may have been following a link) something about just having all the books listed alphabetically, by author.

That makes sense to me. Years ago while looking for Coraline, it wasn't in SF/Fantasy, it was in YA - at the time I really had no idea that it was for young adults, I just knew that Neil Gaiman published a book called Coraline.

I do think that having a kid's section makes sense for the physical store - having a place where the books are a bit sturdier and where the chairs are smaller is simply a kindness to families, but YA is a mess. Lowry's The Giver is in YA or sci-fi at Borders depending on the cover on the book.

I worked as an assistant inventory manager for a while there and had some interaction with the people who decide where things are going to be shelved. The kindest thing I can say about them is that their thoughts aren't entirely random. Once they decided that Kenyon's books on kayaking belonged in the metaphysical section, every one of them was supposed to be shelved there. We, of course, ignored what the stickers said and put them where it made sense, but it was a known problem for the year I worked there and never got resolved.

personally, I hang out in the literature section just because I know that what's there isn't going to categorically suck, y'know? whether or not I like it, enough people have read it and kept reading it that the book's been vetted. I think of it as indicative of quality that's been proven over a longer period of time rather than a genre classification.

however, I think the idea of skipping the genre classifications (even lit) and just alphabetizing fiction by author's last name would be nice. the whole concept of genre is bogus and unnecessarily limiting besides being a somewhat modern literary phenomenon.