Well, once you get Fung started, if a post is missed, good luck catching up! And Eddie and Ranke are almost as bad.
But let me try to summarize what I had. First off, Fung's point about medieval sacred/secular -- yeah, again, it's called the we're the educated nobles preserving the good stuff (sacred) and the masses doing the secular, business, not very important stuff. The nobles and the peasants -- it's been going on for awhile as an idea, even though many societies changed and rejected the idea for what it is -- a construct meant to maintain inequality and power structures.
Back to what I had -- here's what I remember, possibly with some additions. Originality is a bugaboo of SFF writers, particularly secondary world fantasy writers, but has very little to do with academia. Originality is not usually how academics assess artistic value in works of fiction and is not of particular concern to them. (We certainly would have fewer "literary" novels about college professors cheating with their students and coming-of-age stories if it were.) Originality is seen as a function largely of plot, and plot is usually dead last in assessments of literary skill. This is one of the main reasons genre fiction is seen as non-literary because its plot is considered to be its main asset and focus.
Literary worth is commonly assessed according to the writer's skills with language, metaphor and narrative structures. Then comes theme and how that is explored and character development. In academia, there's less interest in ranking bad literature and who beats who, and more about analyzing texts and assessing what they offer. This analysis is then discussed and debated, with no final resolution. Academia is often called upon by others to make statements of who's best, and academics have preferences that do not always agree with one another, but it is not their chief concern. (Unless they are trying to create a "cannon" and then the debate does get heated.)
It is
media critics, however, who most focus on ranking fiction authors as if they were tennis players. Bestsellers are easy to measure -- objective sales data produces the list. There is demand on critics to attempt to do the same with subjective assessment of literary worth -- best of the year lists and whatnot. These assessments can be very valuable in getting the word out about various titles, but they aren't in agreement and often depend on publishers' marketing packages.
The literary/commercial division is largely a function of media criticism and the publishing industry. In the early half of the twentieth century, you had two distinct industries -- the publishers who put hardcovers in bookstores (for an audience of mainly educated upperclasses,) and different publishers who put comics, magazines and cheap paperbacks in drugstores and other outlets (for both upper and lowerclasses, therefore the masses.) But with World War II, there was a culmination of drastic social change in the West, and this occurred in the publishing industry also, with the period of the 1950's-1970's being particularly tumultuous. The different publishers merged and the paperbacks came into the bookstores. More people went to college on the G.I. bill, and so on.
Publishers kept the distinction, however, because they still had the three formats -- hardcover, trade paperback and mass market paperback. Hardcovers got reviewed, mass market didn't, so it was easy for media to keep them apart also. How you wrote didn't necessarily determine your first publishing format. Potboilers were published in hardcover, a black writer might be published in trade paper instead of hardcover, a university professor writing a mystery might get published in mass market paperback.
Making a literary/commercial distinction has also been useful for publishers in marketing to booksellers and to media and readers. There are channels of marketing that are reserved for literary-termed fiction -- and which have made "literary" fiction big business, especially over the last twenty years.
But there is, factually, no actual literary fiction sub-genre or category. There is no central authority that determines what is literary and how it will be defined. There are no content requirements for a literary designation. Literary is a term that can be applied by anyone for anything. It is used by publishers for contemporary fiction, historical fiction, genre fiction and children's fiction. The terms literary and commercial are fluid and changeable in how they are used. An author like Jodi Picoult, for instance, is considered literary, especially thematically, by some groups and media, and commercial soap hackery by others.
Right now, we have numerous artists doing music, writing, etc. in many different channels and with no particular attention to whether what they are doing is considered commercial or literary. They are not doing these things in opposition to these terms; they just don't care. The majority of readers don't read reviews and don't care about the distinction, whatever their education. And academia has for the last fifty years been steadily undermining the idea of a literary/commercial divide, because academics and students have asserted opinions that some works called literary have wide commercial appeal (backed often by sales figures,) and that some works and formats called commercial have considerable worth as literature, and then debating it with their colleagues. It is largely because of academia that SFF has earned a measure of literary respect, though it wasn't easy. Dystopian SF is popular, but many of the authors most loved in academia are not necessarily dystopian -- Ursula LeGuin and Ray Bradbury for instance are not really seen as dystopian writers.
Fans, however, coming into the SFF community, get taught that academics don't debate such things, don't study SFF works and are a united enemy against the genres. So when I come across something from academia in the general or Web press, that talks about SFF and the debates over SFF, I do try to point it out.
What I said in the earlier post was that I don't think we should throw out the term "literary." I think it can serve a useful function as a descriptor of authors who play with language and use it in metaphor and symbolism to explore big questions. It helps authors with sales, awards, etc., and is part of our experience and assessment as art. But commercial, a term that comes from the business sector, is synonymous for trash, and usually has a very negative effect on authors' careers. It's supposed to mean something that has mass appeal, but there is no clear definition for it or agreement about it and it's used as a perjorative. The literary/commercial divide is a social construct, it doesn't fit human society or the realities of book publishing, is random, and is more likely to discourage readers from many books than encourage them -- if they pay attention to it at all.
I haven't had time to go through Ranke's New York rant, what with reconstructing this post, but I'll try to take a look at everything later.
