Leave it to me to wander back to good ol' SFFWorld and stumble into another thread like this
Hello you!
True enough. If we are assessing the underlying logic of the graphic, then the inquiry would focus on where that "feeling" came from, or why that matters to the designation.
It's not really a logic. They like and admire the writing. There are implicit biases in their assessments that come from different experiences and preferences, as well as other subjective assessment. (Which is how we ended up with a lot of white guys writing about white college professors who sleep with their students and the frequent preference that historical stories are more serious.) Publishing people are not academics indulging in critical theory. And the range of what they push as literary is, as you know, quite broad, and thankfully getting broader. The marketing people are often the ones making the designation and the reasons for it are not always due to the content or style of the book itself, although in general they relate to them feeling that the writing is strong and the material deep, both subjectively determined.
In fear of opening this particular battle again... it's not purely subjective. Any professional with an ounce of credibility -- or indeed, a high school education obtained within the past hundred years -- has been well trained in formalist analysis, which seeks to understand the text as an object comprised of devices that are objectively identifiable. The assessment of their "merit" is both a question of applying an analytical methodology to those objectively verifiable devices, and one of subjective "reaction."
Well you know, it's funny, but I had a high school education at a good school and a fancy English lit major university education and worked in publishing in several different jobs and remarkably no, formalist analysis was not going on. More to the point, devices in a text do not by sheer existence form an objective framework of quality, although there are theories that argue this idea. But we do not have either objective fact nor consensus on what is good high quality imagery and poor quality imagery, what is poetic and not poetic, etc., and we certainly don't have them in the retail book market. Again, you tend to have an exalted view of book editors as ivy tower professionals. The "shared objective qualities" idea is one you often float Fung, you just don't make very convincing arguments for it against practical realities. Literary is a perception of value and perceptions are subjective.
Like it or not, there is typically a normalized trend in such criticism and review, and aggregate review websites have been excellent statistical tools in that sense to demonstrate how these "subjective" reactions tend to share perspectives (despite the outliers).
No, there really isn't a normalized trend in book reviews. There are screaming rows in book reviews and a lot of bias problems in book reviews. Book reviewers aren't running to academics to make sure the books are following one literature theory or another, and they are quite often easily swayed by packaging. Also, books aren't movies. There are a few websites attempting to be the Rotten Tomatoes of books but no one's paying much attention to them, nor are people gathering data from them for statistics. (And I always love the "outliers" don't count arguments as you know.) Especially as the number of media doing book reviews (not counting the general Internet,) has been rapidly decreasing for the past twenty-five years and covers very little of any part of the market.
Except for the pesky origin of the concept of "literary," which everyone was taught in high school.
Technically, the term literary existed before the universities, but I have no problem with the notion of literary as a word being related to academia. But as we've discussed before -- and you've agreed with before -- literary used in the retail book market to present current titles as literary, and the whole literary versus genre issue about that market has to do with media and booksellers and publishers -- not universities. Universities do not run the publishing industry or book reviews in the New York Times or the Guardian. They don't sit around deciding whether the current month's book releases are academically literary or not. Publishers don't call academics and ask if they can call a book literary or not in going to the retail market with it. They do sometimes serve on award juries, and can influence people's perceptions in the general market in the ways I already mentioned. So they largely, as I said, aren't involved but are sometimes referenced, as I said.
In terms of
literature -- the idea that a work is a classic work of art from the past or of interest studying academically in the present --- that is something that gets argued at universities for and against subjectively as part of the discussion of works. But that is not involved in the marketing of the works to and through booksellers and to the commercial media, and that's where the word "literary" gets bandied about for types of fiction. As you again have agreed before.
So, the marketing is relying on an existing sense of what is and is not literary, which is taught to the audience in their mandatory education years, and then the market might adjust that category based on whether or not a book gets picked up by those who educate the consumer in their mandatory education years. But, you know... academia has not much to do with it
So you are saying that in high school, we all got taught the same set of objective quality assessments -- not simply about the concepts of themes, symbolism, characters and plot -- because all works have themes, symbolism, characters and plot -- but the correct quality assessment of doing the right, valuable theme, symbolism, characters and plot as opposed to non-valuable ones, and so we're all in agreement about exactly what those are and can then from that assessment, further assess the degree to which the author accomplished the correct, valuable theme, symbolism, characters and plot. Is that it? Because that's not how I experienced it in high school and certainly not university. You're trying to lay an under-lying framework for quality assessment of some sort, and I don't see it working and nor do many academics for that matter. We have a lot of academic discussions of value -- which are valuable -- but you're not going to turn artistic valuation into science, and it certainly isn't mass consensus.
It's pretty hard to get published in the New Yorker if your piece doesn't already fit the definition of literary as you offered above.
I didn't offer a definition of what was "literary" writing. I said publishers who think that a work is literary for them, that it has good writing, etc.
for them -- subjective -- use the designation as part of their marketing of the work. And you're saying that they are all using the same framework to assess that writing as good for them. That is not something that I would claim or do claim because that's not what happens.
As for getting published in The New Yorker, whoever is running The New Yorker at the time has their subjective assessment of what is good writing for them. (And there are inherent issues in that, in terms of cultural issues, as you know, and also reacting to changes in that cultural milieu.) People also have a subjective assessment of The New Yorker as a purveyor of intellectual quality. Other equally learned people think The New Yorker is a stagnant purveyor of poor quality crap. But certainly, if you want to try and market a work that you think might appeal to the subjective tastes of the readers of The New Yorker, in terms of book reviews or pieces in the magazine about authors' work, especially the white middle class and upper class guys, then The New Yorker is very useful as a marketing device in hopes of then getting word of mouth in some areas. Its circulation has dropped, but it maintains a reputation to some people as being good assessors. And this reputation becomes self-circulating -- it was given the reputation -- subjectively -- and so some people see it as being good, which allows it to maintain the reputation, etc. The New Yorker is not the authority and definer of what is literary (cause there is none.) It is a publication that marketed itself as high quality for upper class readers, some of whom have subjectively agreed that it is such. This is not to knock The New Yorker; they often have interesting stuff for my views. And awful stuff for my views. Which is pretty much normal for people. And they have presented many writers to the world that many consider valuable and high quality, which has further supported their reputation to those who agree with it. And this is again a media-bookselling thing, rather than an academic thing. Universities are not looking to The New Yorker to tell them what to study.
Hence the importance of the professional publishing world in acting as gate-keeper, versus the self-pub model. And most in publishing can probably be classed as bibliophiles with high levels of academic education in literature, wherein the probably acquired the sense of what "literary" means!
Again, you have a very exalted view of publishing people as supplementary academics, which they are not. They are in general book lovers but they aren't think tanks of high levels of academic education in literature, even in editorial. They pick what they like and what they think will sell, which is a full subjective, very cultural, and subject to business factors at times endeavor. Publishers aren't gate-keepers of literary tradition or of the market, and things in the self-pub market are just as likely to be viewed by some people as literary as those that are put out by publishers. There is no one sense, no agreement of what books are literary and what are not. Literary is good writing -- what is good writing? One set of academics or people might say this is good writing, another group of academics or people might say that it is not. It's in that discussion of meaning, emotion and thought that we experience art, but it does not come to a conclusion -- it's an ongoing dialogue.
Per the OP, while I find some of the presented titles for the graphic surprising choices, I can see that in general the "literary" basket contains mostly works that are quite clearly produced by well-read expert writers who are focused on craft and quite aware of how they are using or defying genre conventions. The authors represented, by and large, are trying to do their own thing in an evidently self-conscious way.
The graph is a mess. The literary part does contain books that many people in the market have regarded as literary. So does the part that is labelled non-literary, and vice versa. In that sense, since it is all subjective, it's as fine to put out there for judgement as anyone else's graph. But what we've been talking about is that there is no clear indication of what set of (subjective) criteria the graph maker is using. As well as talking about how literary is used as a term in book publishing. (Which is not the same as academia, as again, you've agreed before.)
Though this is not at all how I mean it, I will say it in a flippant, generalized, elitist kind of way: Literary authors know their influences and know how to use them; non-literary authors don't even know they are using their influences.
Which is why Farrar, Straus & Giroux published the work of a guy who dropped out of school in the eighth grade, etc.
I don't think it's going to work to say that only (mainly white, male) people with college and MFA degrees can write works that will universally be considered literary, first because no one is considered universally literary, and second because authors who don't have that background have written works that are considered literary by many, and many authors who do have that background have been rejected as literary by many. Plus you said we learned everything we need to know to be literary back in high school.
hscope said:
Yes, an argument often used by elitists,
Fung isn't really an elitist. He's an academic. He sees academics as studying and curating works of art and knowledge. And I don't disagree with that -- that's their job -- to study and to preserve, data for knowledge such as in the sciences and history and then works of art they find interesting and/or valuable and present them to others as material for consideration, including for historical purposes. It's a very valuable job. Where Fung and I differ is that we approach from two different schools of academic theory of literature. We differ on the notion of what curating means when it comes to the arts rather than scientific topics. I have the sort of hippie Unitarian view of arts and arts study while Fung has a more formal Catholic view. For him, the curators pick the best stuff, arguing about it and changing things along the way as needed, and present it as what people should see as the best stuff, which makes it half objectively the best stuff. For Fung, art is a rare, valuable quality because otherwise why is anything worth anything, and the job of scholars is to instruct, at least instruct in the basics of the proper way to do analysis of meaning.
For me, this is attempting to turn the arts into scientific data, which doesn't work because artistic worth, value -- quality and meaning -- are subjective and emotional, not universal. Curating is scholars looking at works of creative expression, looking at culture surrounding the creation of the works for study, finding what they feel is interesting, valuable, and why they feel it is so, and presenting the work (and their thoughts on it depending the circumstances,) to others as an experience, subjective to each person, an exploration and personal discovery in which people draw their own subjective assessments of meaning and value. In that shared discussion of our experiences, we find beauty, art, culture, values, etc., and much of the curating that scholars do is of that discussion rather than simply the creative works themselves, for historic purposes. For me, art is broad, expressive and subjective and that is an essential part of human experience and why we make, receive and share creative expression continually.
So because we have different views on approaches, we frequently debate this stuff -- and sometimes don't follow each other's line of argument well and talk past each other when we actually agree on various points -- and people either find this amusing and get popcorn or avoid it like the plague.
You can also join in, as well, obviously.
