Equally worthy for WHO specifically?
For anyone who can read...?
I find many stories sound uninteresting to me and I do not read them. (Granted, I have a lower bar than most, but I am only one brain with so much time.) Others I find sound interesting and so I do read them. I like to read a lot of fantasy fiction. I find a lot of it very worthy. There are other people who don't find fantasy interesting at all and they don't read it, no matter how wonderful and well written others tell them it is.
How is this relevant? Are we operating on the assumption that your reading practice as an individual is analogous to the reading practices of all individuals? Are we discounting the empirically verifiable fact that your behaviour as an individual is normally distributed on a spectrum of behaviours that are culturally reinforced?
More to the point, Walter's article attempted to parse out different groups of people who supposedly found different things worthy, although ultimately he really just stated what he found worthy and interesting and dismissed what he didn't.
That's
your conclusion.
I didn't see any of that in the article. I saw Walter describe some content-level and construct-level literary approaches prevalent, from his perspective, in modern science fiction. I didn't come to anything like the conclusion you're presenting here.
This may have had a bit of humor to it, but it was condescending malarky.
Condescending? I didn't feel talked down to or preached at in any way. Nor did I find it meaningless. Are you sure you're not interjecting your point of view for the universal?
And the sexism in it was not endearing.
Uh... what?
I'm approaching this article on its own statements at the moment. I've never read anything ever written by this person before, so I have no idea what else he may have said to deserve this accusation, but I didn't see anything in there particularly sexist.
...
Which country, demographics, category interests, thematic interests (the last two NOT being the same thing)?
Does that matter? Are we critiquing a phd thesis or a blog post?
The real audiences or the ones that people like Walter make up in their heads out of out-dated stereotypes?
Technically, stereotypes cannot be outdated. "Perpetuated without change" is sort of essential to its definition. If you want to be pedantic.
For instance, we have booksellers with little interest in SFF who insist that the audience for the books is mainly white American men who are deeply bigoted, which does affect publishers unfortunately. This has been severely limiting in the field,
Limiting how? Limiting in what way? How are these limits defined? Are we talking economically, about SFF's share of the overall fiction publishing market place? Are we talking esteem in the cultural zeitgeist?
Some data from 2014:
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/...5387-the-hot-and-cold-categories-of-2014.html
Are these feelings about SFF the main force "limiting" sales in some genres but not others?
And while we're at it, what do booksellers have to do with his points at all? In the opening of the post Walter states that he is making a point about apparent camps within SF irrespective of market considerations. So, we're looking at content and social construction of meaning/semiotics, not at the economics of the matter.
In other words, Walter is having a discussion about genre, not market category. This is top-down, not bottom-up.
So should we let without criticism Walter, even if his heart is in the right place, lie about the audiences with out-dated stereotypes that declare SFF to be mainly bigoted white men with horny women for what he thinks mistakenly are romance books? Surely we should be critiquing categorization that is badly and inaccurately done.
Again... blog post? phd thesis?
Of course we should delve into the parameters of his assertions. But as far as an entirely under-justified "noticing" of large scale, highly generalized trends goes, I wouldn't say this blog post is too far off the mark. It is not a systematized review of the entirety of modern SF using SFL genre analysis in a post-structuralism, post-formalist, post-theory whatever-the-bleep nonsense gibberish uber thought blah blah blah...
The post is basically unsubstantiated and quite obviously something in the thread of a larger thought, and one frankly not far off the mark of modern genre studies within Speculative Fiction.
No, marketing approaches evolve, adapt and come up with new speciation to market things.
What does marketing have to do with it? (Not a thing, is the answer to that one.)
If you remove marketing from the consideration and you look at a body of texts and group them based on different parameters, what groupings do you come up with? That's the question at issue here. We're talking about the world
after the market.
If market approaches and categorizations fluctuate or change their focus/buzzwords, it is largely
because of this conversation occurring in culture(s).
In particular those techniques have worked with some SFF readers who like to view themselves as a special tribe, who have a whole media and convention culture that provides discussion of those types of stories, and who then like to split themselves into ever more tribes, never mind how imaginary. The books remain exactly as they have been. A military thriller gets called a techno-thriller to gain media attention and sell books as "fresh".
Maybe at the publishing level that's the reality, but on the consumption side of the equation and in terms of genre studies, the marketing aspect has only a little to do with it. It also has pretty well nothing to do with what was said in the blog post.
Books do actually change, in whole variety of ways including content, construct, techniques, language patterns, and other things. Look at
Norrell and Strange -- that book wouldn't work the way it does if it didn't actively invoke categorical patterns prevalent in 19th century literature, including the fact that the audience is as aware of the existence of that pattern and can detect it in the text. It's a different beast than the references it invokes, and is itself representative of a wider "movement" that exists in literature overall of its time and place. It is also part of a self-conscious metafictive tradition within its genre and sub-genre more generally, as well as contemporaneously associated with other authors self-consciously doing very similar things in other genres. Does it get a market category shelf? Of course not -- this is a separate consideration to marketing.
So, no. Books do not just remain exactly as they are. Yes, terminology and categorizations shift above them as well, though, and those things reflect changes in values held by different audiences in different places and times.
It's not a competitive prospect with marketing -- it's more like a sort of social marketing, but one in which the currency is identity politics.
Consider this:
http://www.fastcompany.com/3059450/netflix-knows-which-pictures-youll-click-on-and-why
Particularly interesting is the bit on the images associated with Sense8 and that there's cultural specificity in preference of image types. From a theory perspective, this is a clear example of the unconscious or a semiotic function. There's this huge, more-or-less invisible system of cultural values and reinforcements operating in determining localizing behaviours around tastes. The marketing seeks to take advantage of these differences -- it does not, by itself,
create these differences.
New items for the market are born into an existing system with existing categories and existing values. The market is not recreated every time something new is introduced -- but, the total system has to incorporate the new thing into it, which creates change. Some things are written to match what is already in the system, some are written to purposefully contravene it, and others are written without the system in mind at all. Regardless, cultural references reinforce traditions and conventions in the production of the work, and in the process of the consumption of those works.
The way that they are packaged and marketed is certainly part of culture, but it's also often fake culture that ignores factual cultural data it finds inconvenient for selling images. It's also culture that can reflect prejudices and ignorance about its own audiences (particularly notions of how you should sell to women readers.)
Yes, but why is this a problem for Walter's points? The prejudices in the system are more complex than the role of the book market alone. If there is an unconscious or conscious bias in his categorization scheme, then it has been reinforced by an awful lot more than just the books or even the other authors working in the field. Romance remains one of the largest genres in book sales, and women make up 80%-90% of the audience (
https://www.rwa.org/p/cm/ld/fid=582). This behaviour may be socially reinforced within the publishing market, but that market alone is not responsible for the entirety of this division in sex-based consumption.
Is this fact itself sexist? Is it representative of latent sexism in the book-world culture or just culture generally? Or, given the extreme difference in interest in the Romance genre by the two "normative" sexes, is there something more significant going on here?
And in the interim, while we figure this disparity out, is it fundamentally sexist to use this data as a point underlying an argument that there clearly are sex-based differences in tastes generally?
In your counter-argument, are you not putting a cultural ideal ahead of cultural fact?
(And by which you can, as Walter does, declare one type of reader inferior and another superior, which is what the marketing often does.)
I didn't see this in the article as explicit or even all that problematic. The pretensions that exist in both the publishing world and the reading audience's world are extreme enough to make the LitFic point one worth considering, IMO.
It is more convenient to create a label and shove people under it, creating an inaccurate but cool sounding culture, than it is to actually analyze what is in books and to accept that people have vastly different reasons for being drawn to them -- the actual culture.
Of course. Though, no offence, I'm sure that even if I were to offer forth just such a well researched system you'd still argue against it -- that's kinda your thing.
They turn marketing into a cultural system.
It's not? What the heck is it then?
That does provide a feedback loop to the marketing, which adapts to use the cultural system to further market.
So you're championing the chicken over the egg, then. Even though there's a mutually reinforcing loop in a capitalist free market economy, one side of the loop dominates the other...?
I won't deny the power of marketing, but per the Netflix article, above, the evidence from Big Data increasingly argues against your position. Marketing plays a role, yes, but its nature in that transaction is far more complex and nuanced than assumed by theories from the ages before Big Data. There's too much competitive noise in the marketing world to assert that marketing's impact is as uniformly significant as you present it to be here.
That book-selling techniques, including shelving, affect perceptions of books is ignored in favor of declaring the book-selling techniques to be the substance of the fiction works themselves.
You can't ignore the fact that you have to have the raw material to put on the shelves in the first place, though. The content does serve to inform the category, as do audience expectations. Before SF existed, where was Frankenstein shelved? It's not until the genre develops, through a process of cultural reinforcement, that there is even anything to shelve.
You're also talking at cross purposes here. Market considerations looks forward, and genre considerations look backwards. While a techno-thriller may just be MilSF under a different category moniker, it works for selling stuff and to some extent informs ones perspective of genre. But genres are aggregates of patterns that develop over time. Genre repeatedly undermines the market categorization system to point out that actually that techno-thriller was just MilSF under a different category marker. (Your argument is actually relying on the genre function, BTW.) But more complex than that, the techno-thriller buzz category doesn't just slot entirely into this or that genre category -- it actually ends up being subdivided and reallocated entirely, often into multiple genres -- some of which collapse, disappear, and are likewise eaten up by the backwards looking aggregating process of genre.
but you have to deal with people wanting to push marketing slogans over actual culture and having very blinkered, edited views of cultural history.
But from where I'm sitting, that's exactly what you're doing, too. This is more or less inescapable. Find me an example of an unedited view of cultural history and I'll eat my hat, your hat, and a bunch of other hats.
Wow! What's the textual evidence from the article for this bold claim?
You characterize his post as some vitriolic, women-hating, prejudiced work of an asinine pseudo-intellectual, I'm beginning to suspect your beef is with the author, not the point he's trying to make.
to go into anything but a few labels that he threw two thirds of market sub-categories together across three category genres and four book markets to create the vague plebian readers who like whatever I think commercial storytelling is category.
Wait up. You're now using the same point to argue opposite things. Earlier, you claimed that the market categories are just for selling stuff in bright shiny new packages and don't really mean anything because the books don't change and the content doesn't really matter, and now you're saying that it matters because it's unfair to lump the kind of stories inside all of these categories together.
If the market categories don't really matter, what does it matter if he lumps things in from different categories into yet another category?
Fantasy came first, so no.
Nope, not so.
That conclusion relies on applying a modern perspective to literary tradition. To make this assertion you have to use cultural beliefs common today to validate the claim -- exactly what you're saying Walter shouldn't be doing because it's bogus. You're using the modern delineation of the genre types to determine the origin.
Beside that, you said earlier genres didn't evolve, only market categories. A very capitalist perspective, to be sure.
In general, Walter's article seems to be viewed as a very poor attempt but a conversation starter, which is probably all that he was going for. But such very tired and out-dated conversational references.
He can and has done better.
Maybe he has, but I'm not aware of any of that. On its own merits, this post was a curiosity and not entirely without merit, IMO.
