(no subject)
Now I'm interested in the connection between genre and popularity.
A recurrent theme in my data is that fantasy is more accessible to readers than science fiction, therefore it is more popular (in the sense of "more people like it"). There are various variations of this theme, e.g. saying that in science fiction, the "science" element acts as a "threshold" which not everyone is able to pass, therefore SF lingers somewhere between critically acclaimed "exemplary" literature (read: stuff you have to read at school and stuff you normally encounter in literary anthologies and journals) and "popular" literature, which includes both paraliterature such as fantasy and mainstream stuff such as "campus literature" (YA romance).
I find it interesting, because SF is by no means a homogenous body, and my data of course recognizes this as well. Some people, actually, tend to dismiss the ascription of this or that piece of literature / film / art to SF on the basis of what it seems the same accessibility, "threshold" issue: say, Transformers ain't true SF, it's just robots and a love story. For it to be SF, it has to be something more.
Maybe we could say fantasy is more polysemic, then. Harry Potter, as one of my informants say, can be understood and enjoyed by anyone at any age. But really, I take Star Wars for SF, for example, and is it any more difficult to understand than HP? Personally, I don't see an unbreakable connection between the text being polysemic and the genre of the text. I find Neuromancer inaccessible, but not because of its generic density and my lack of specialist knowledge, but because of the way it is written. Also, is reading pleasure necessarily based on understanding the text entirely?
And of course popularity also hinges on many other things, such as xuanchuan, which is usually rendered as "propaganda", but in Chinese it doesn't have the same negative tint, it may also simply mean "promotion". Fantasy has more promotion in China than SF: tons of fantasy on TV, cinema screens, online games. Not so much for SF. But again, why? Does fantasy sell well because cunning people xuanchuan it well, or does it sell well because of some inherent generic qualities? Probably a mixture of the two. Yet where is the balance... (I leave this as a question)
A recurrent theme in my data is that fantasy is more accessible to readers than science fiction, therefore it is more popular (in the sense of "more people like it"). There are various variations of this theme, e.g. saying that in science fiction, the "science" element acts as a "threshold" which not everyone is able to pass, therefore SF lingers somewhere between critically acclaimed "exemplary" literature (read: stuff you have to read at school and stuff you normally encounter in literary anthologies and journals) and "popular" literature, which includes both paraliterature such as fantasy and mainstream stuff such as "campus literature" (YA romance).
I find it interesting, because SF is by no means a homogenous body, and my data of course recognizes this as well. Some people, actually, tend to dismiss the ascription of this or that piece of literature / film / art to SF on the basis of what it seems the same accessibility, "threshold" issue: say, Transformers ain't true SF, it's just robots and a love story. For it to be SF, it has to be something more.
Maybe we could say fantasy is more polysemic, then. Harry Potter, as one of my informants say, can be understood and enjoyed by anyone at any age. But really, I take Star Wars for SF, for example, and is it any more difficult to understand than HP? Personally, I don't see an unbreakable connection between the text being polysemic and the genre of the text. I find Neuromancer inaccessible, but not because of its generic density and my lack of specialist knowledge, but because of the way it is written. Also, is reading pleasure necessarily based on understanding the text entirely?
And of course popularity also hinges on many other things, such as xuanchuan, which is usually rendered as "propaganda", but in Chinese it doesn't have the same negative tint, it may also simply mean "promotion". Fantasy has more promotion in China than SF: tons of fantasy on TV, cinema screens, online games. Not so much for SF. But again, why? Does fantasy sell well because cunning people xuanchuan it well, or does it sell well because of some inherent generic qualities? Probably a mixture of the two. Yet where is the balance... (I leave this as a question)