Taking Sides: Never Reading Genre Fiction vs Only Reading Genre Fiction?

Er, sure!! Ulysses?

Which is because it's true! He said bull-headedly. What's non-genre about Ulysses? It's an epic tale! ;-)

if a novel kicks off a genre - eg lord of the rings - is it IN the genre or the experimental work which birthed the genre?

should you read a novel with or against the grain of its genre?

Joyce, Pynchon, Eco, etc. make up their own little genre.

(wait, are there cowboys in ulysses?) (cz if not it sucks my theory may have to be refined)

nor "mystery" nor
"gothic" nor "horror" nor "noir"?
I would disagree.

sure it's bad to be
boxed in anywhere, but can't
fiction have subsets?

Mark (and I know you will wheedle out of this accusation) Lord Of The Rings did not start Fnatasy per se, but invented VERY VERY BIG BOOKS. Not so much a genre as a publishing phenom.

Hey Pete -- were our readin' boots separated at birth? Wanna see my litfic essay? I can E-mail it to yiz.

I'd say it's "in" the genre, as there must have been books that came before. In its way (for example), Dubliners were part of the Irish culture genre, though others might say it just followed after Ulysses.

should you read a novel with or against the grain of its genre?

Depends on your mood: if the author's previous novel was good and you want to continue, you should. Otherwise, scrap it for something new.

Does anyone know any big readers who didn't start in something that might be termed a genre? I'm sort of interested in how what you start reading by reading effects how you read EVERYTHING ELSE, or what the actual difference between having read nothing but Austen and Gaskell up to age 12 and having read nothing but Tolkien and Lewis up to age 12 is.

Not really, not in the same way that Chandler, Hammett, Cain, whatever make a genre. Genre is an aspect of the publishing industry. You can lump Joyce and Pynchon together, because they have techniques in common, but that doesn't make them a genre, any more than Eisenstein, Godard and Marker make a genre (there are links but not in the same industrial way as Ford Hawks Aldrich etc)

is "modernist" a genre or just a basically meaningless grab-bag covering books which happen to have been written during a certain era...

Not a genre, but neither is it a meaningless grab-bag cos often modernists stick together in leninist style groups, issuing manifestos etc, like - oh, you know, the lefty poets of england inthe 30s, Boll and Grass [and them others] in postwar Germany or the nouveau roman lot, or the oulipo lot, y'know? TS: object language vs metalanguage.

Feel free to send me anything Ann, I like to read (I think somewhere along the lines it will teach me how to spell).

Fair enough Tom, but I don't think you can act like there is no genre fiction, that would be ignoring the way books are marketed which as we all know is at least 30% of the whole reading experience. An author is a genre in himself, can you read without comparing - and if you are comparing then you are going to make connections yourself which may divvy down genre lines. (You may however make much more interesting connections too.)

And yet, they look the same!!!

(This kind of thing Alan?)

I like a lot of genre fiction too - I suppose literary fiction makes up most of what I read, but crime is a substantial minority and I read quite a bit of SF too. I think genre has its uses: finding a book in a shop, knowing a fair bit about what you might expect from the ones in this section; but on the other hand it often acts as a straitjacket for authors, as some sort of dull template that they follow (Tolkien's influence on (or creation of) the biggest part of the fantasy genre is the most horrible example of this). I don't really get why someone would only want to read romance or crime or whatever - I'd get a bit bored.

My biggest problem with genre is something I addressed on the Brown Wedge in what might have even been my first Freaky Trigger post. I think that while respect for genres is common now in literary circles, it doesn't go deep, it's still lip service to a fair degree. A writer like Lawrence Block gets far less hype than he deserves because he is a crime writer: give it a few decades, especially if he dies in that time, or if he writes a mainstream novel or two (cf Ballard), and he'll be about as respected as Chandler or Hammett, say. Humour (in books and films) suffers badly from this too. I still have trouble convincing people that, for instance, Jack Kirby's mid-period FF comics really belong among the great artistic peaks of comics.

(ie in genre, even at the dawn of it, what's really important is the distinctions, what does x do that y doesn't) (eg sayers vs chesterton vs conan doyle, a bit down the page)

inevatibly nowadays the template will be central on the first reading - the sugar coating, even? - but just drops away in later rereads (this fact is pretty basic in my whole pop aesthetic, i think... that there are always elements in pop which operate like Duchampian readymades, in that on one hand you are being asked to look at the elegance/sexiness/excellence/whatever of something shared and commonplace you never looked at much or considered "artful", but on the other hand it then kind of falls away or gets temporarily shelved while you engage w.some OTHER artistic project, tactically conjoined but strategically distinct... for Duchamp = "what is the dge of art, tell me that, mr cleverboots?", for Tolk = "can't we re-establish the craft of "fairy"storytelling as a central adult-artistic concern?")

(ans to tolk q = yes btw, and to prove it there is also eg martin's beloved comixworld or buffy or _______, ie tolk's specific solution NEEDN'T form the template at all)

I don't think the term "genre fiction" is useful outside of a historical context (the publishing industry of a half-century ago that Enrique is talking about). As far as I can tell, modern sci-fi novels are not genre fiction in that sense. (Modern superhero comics, though, probably still are.)