JËAN WOLFE

Love to see Saidiya Hartman in your library

Love a solid rant. I believe it was Steven Erikson who said he's been to lots of different kinds conventions to speak and interestingly fantasy authors love to read all genres where as lit fic authors can kind of be snobby about other genres. I wonder if the self pub explosion in fantasy is happening in other genres as well.

many thoughts head full!!!

Thank you for the video. I don't disagree with your conclusion that genre readers and literary fiction readers should be open to read more books outside of their comfort zones. However, I think that you are somewhat confusing and mixing different concepts and ideas that do not quite work. For example, you seem to make the distinction between literary fiction and genre fiction based on whether the text has "realist" or "fantastical" elements. I don't think that that is a useful or accurate way if understanding literature since it equates "literary realism", as an artistic movement within literature, with "literary fiction" as a whole. This is a mistake. "Realism" corresponds to a movement within the arts, it is not the same as literary fiction as an art form. This is why you can have authors like Borges, Pynchon, and Kafka, who have "fantastical" elements within their writing and still be considered as literary fiction authors. For me, the distinction lies in the fact that genre fiction tends to rely on common formulas or elements that fit into the specific genre. This is not to say that there aren't genre authors that also explore tropes or elements of other genres. I think that this is an essential distinction since otherwise it could lead you to some really faulty conclusions (magical realism being a fancy word for fantasy). Salman Rushide, Murakami, and Garcia Marques are as close to fatlntasy genre fiction as Earth is to the black hole at the centre of our galaxy. I think that the real relevant distinction for your analysis should have been the difference between "commercial" vs "artistical" fiction, the latter understood as fiction that's primarily concerned with artistic expression and not book sales. Most people tend to think of Fantasy, SciFi, or Horror as commercial fiction, while diminishing the value of genre autors that are doing something more than simply cranking out books for sale. Authors like Wolfe, Erikson, Le Guinn, Dick, Herbert, etc. are clearly operating at a different level than the common commercial writer. On the other hand, as you mentioned in the video, there are commercial authors that are deemed to be "literary" simply because they do not neatly fall within a genre or have some artistic level in their writting (e.g. Sally Rooney or Chricton).