Genre Bashing Dumbassery

[jimhines]

The Wall Street Journal published an article criticizing YA fiction last week that pissed a lot of people off. I’m not going to respond to the arguments made in that article, in part because smarter people than I have already done so.

Instead, I’d like to take this opportunity to introduce the Genre Bashing Dumbassery Scale (patent pending).

When

Comments

[dawtheminstrel]

Oh thank you! The only reason I can see to engage in genre bashing is to make the basher feel superior. 10s all the way around!

[jimhines]

Sometimes somebody will get just a tiny sampling of a genre and assume the whole thing is like that. "Oh, I don't read science fiction because I once read Space Mutant Wars of X'Fdl'Prthwp, and it's all just ridiculously incomprehensible technobabble and silly space battles." I'd blame that one on ignorance and foolish assumptions, but not necessarily trying to feel superior.

[dawtheminstrel]

OK. True enough.

I get hot about how people value different kinds of writing, I guess. I used to teach in an English Dept and one of the things you see there is that the status of the faculty depends on the status of the writing they study. The Shakespeare scholar outranks the modern lit scholar, and the people who teach freshman comp really get dissed.

[elialshadowpine]

"Sometimes somebody will get just a tiny sampling of a genre and assume the whole thing is like that."

Uh-huh. Not SF, but with romance, I've run across so many people who read some rapetastic POS from the 80s and thought the genre was like that. It took me ages to convince my hubby to read romance. O'course, now he reads more of it than I do. *lol*

[cissa]

Yep. Although even by the 80s a significant subset of romance was more progressive than normal popular culture; there were more regressive styles (like bodice-rippers), and more progressive ones (many contemporaries, and an increasing amount of Regencies; also the whole time-travel, though that may have been a bit later).

It has REALLY annoyed me when feminist writers, especially- having read 1 romance a decade or 3 ago- dis the whole genre as regressive. Um, no (though you can find that if it's what you want). The romances i read are considerably more progressive than current romantic movies!