If only people would treat litfic as a genre with subgenres
Was reading Ursula Le Guin letting her peeves off the leash on the topic of genre in Words Are My Matter, and how literary realist fiction is considered literature and all one wonderful thing.
Whereas, I thought, in fact litfic is a genre and I think it has - or certain types of litfic do - actual generic conventions.
And thinking about what Le Guin says in the essay about litfic writers who decide they will write sff but don't realise the generic conventions and the tired ol' tropes they are playing with, it occurred to me that if you don't know you're writing genre, you're not thinking about the generic conventions and you're not playing with them or twisting them or subverting them.
So while someone may be writing space opera or noir thrillers or whatever and have a sense of what not to do so as not be plonkingly obvious/boring been there and done that, I suspect that people who are writing sensitive coming of age or male midlife crisis novels, or wistful evocations of adultery in upmarket suburbs or city districts do not think that that they are part of a genre with a tradition.
And therefore, they're probably not doing anything very interesting with the tropes.
And, paging Mr Mybug, for this is Dept of Urgent Phallusy: The 20 Funniest Books Ever Written. I think one is probably meant to give them props for having 1 lady writer, and is it not a delightful ironic twist that it is, indeed, Stella Gibbons with a book that takes a seafull of codfish to Big Male Writers? but when I look at some of the listed books, I am, well, Not Amused at quite queenly levels of unamusement. This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2512795.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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