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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Genre Classification in Fiction

  
 
Hydra vs Leviathan
20:29 / 25.05.06
I was thinking about starting a thread of this nature when i saw Toni Morrison's Beloved shelved in the "Ghost and Horror" section of my local library recently, and then decided i had to when i saw the same book on China Mieville's list of "Fifty Fantasy & Science Fiction Works That Socialists Should Read"...

(if anyone wants to critique that list itself more generally, feel free to start a "sibling" thread...)

What are people's thoughts on the standard/stereotypical categorisation of fiction into (firstly, usually) "literary" and "non-literary" (the latter often called just "genre") fiction, and then the subdivision of the latter into genres like "science fiction", "horror", "crime", "fantasy", etc?

There's often the assumption that the former is somehow "valid" as "high culture" (whatever that means), and the latter isn't, or conversely(?) certain works of the latter category being "elevated" into the former, and/or certain works from the former "canon" being "controversially" declared to be the latter (as Morrison by Mieville here)...

Do people consider themselves to be primarily "into" one genre of fiction, and if so is there any implied subtext of that genre's superiority over others? (i'm thinking of the sort of nasty arguments that can happen if, in certain circles, one casually (mis-)refers to, say, Tolkien as "sci-fi", or, say, John Wyndham as "horror"...) Or, if you read more than one genre of fiction (say, sci-fi and fantasy, or horror and "mainstream" literature), do you treat them differently (read them when in different moods, consider one more for edification and the other more for entertainment, critique them in your head using different terms or in different ways), or do you not discriminate and consider all fiction to be subject to the same terms of understanding, tools of analysis, etc?

Speaking personally, i used to be massively and almost exclusively into the sort of fiction that would be referred to by most as "sci-fi" and "fantasy", or more broadly "speculative fiction" (a category which is itself arguably an attempt at "rehabiliting" works of fiction from the percoeved "taint" of genre-labels like "sci-fi" and "fantasy"), then went through a long period when, through some confused mingling of misinterpreted Christianity and misinterpreted socialism leading me to condemn "middle-class escapism", and a teenage self-reinvention (necessary for me at the time) as "urban" and "reality"-focused, i looked down on sci-fi/fantasy/etc, and only read (what i saw as) "realistic" fiction, meaning that i've only in the last 3-4 years got back into works and authors categorised as the aforementioned genres... (I remember i had a rather vexed argument with a friend in my first year of uni over whether Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four" was "sci-fi"... tbh, altho "sci-fi" has been rehabilitated for me, and i'd now happily list authors such as Wells, Wyndham and le Guin in my "greatest works of fiction" list alongside Orwell, Steinbeck, Morrison etc, i'm still not sure whether or not i'd class Nineteen Eighty-Four as such...)

There's also the pragmatic side of genre-categorisation, with regard to shelves in libraries, bookshops, etc... my library has "normal" fiction, then a section called "Future Tense", which, despite its name, contains both fantasy and sci-fi (mixed, not segregated), the aforementioned "Ghost and Horror", then crime, romance, Westerns, children's fiction, teenage/"young adult" fiction, and a few display-ends of things like "Gay Fiction" (which tend to feature stuff picked pretty randomly from the other sections). I almost felt like plucking Beloved out of "Ghost and Horror" and returning it to its "rightful" place in the "literary" fiction, but then i thought, actually, isn't it good if it's in there and thus gets picked up by people who wouldn't otherwise have read it, and maybe open up stereotypical "horror readers" (whoever they are) to wider paradigms of fiction? But then, although it is, at least partially, a "ghost story", it still didn't quite feel "right" to see it filed among the likes of Stephen King, Poppy Z Brite, Poe, Lovecraft, etc... it's "magic realism", perhaps, but i'm not sure i'd agree with Mieville that it's "a fantasy" (although Mieville seems to be using genre terms quite loosely and fluidly... for that matter, is Mieville himself "fantasy" or "science fiction"?)

Hmmm, i've rambled on a bit there (it's late now, and i was interrupted mid-post), but i'd be interested in people's thoughts generally on fiction genres, what their boundaries are, how putting books in them affects perception of those books, whether all fictional works and authors can be genre-categorised or whether some "transcend" genre, whether they are "useful", etc...

(heated, but intellectual, debate to be hoped for...)
 
 
This Sunday
21:38 / 25.05.06
There is very little fiction that isn't genre-able.

If you're going to posit a 'ghosts and horror' section, then, yes, that's where 'Beloved' goes, and if you have an alternate-history/reality section, that's where Nabokov's 'Ada' and Dick's 'Man in the High Castle' are shelved.

If you have a 'literature' section, then Cthulu help you! That high/low breakdown is always personal preference and nothing more. Sometimes it's agreed personal preference, where several people have the same preference, but it's not objectively identifiable.

The only real shelving issue I have is when people shelf books in fiction that the author believed were nonfictional. 'Magick without Tears' goes on the nonfiction shelf. Until or unless it's disproved, nonfiction is where it goes.

Books that aren't supposed to be on a genre shelf because they're written by authors who wrote in many genres, or because they're just really good, is silly. And, it's insulting to anything, then, which is shelved on that genre shelf. 'Dhalgren' or 'The Soft Machine' may be superior to the latest novella ghosted into existence for the 'Resident Evil' universe, but they all three go on the speculative fiction shelf. And so do'Finnegans Wake' and 'So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish'.

Or, none of them do.

I keep my books vaguely alphabetized by author, unless they're clustered for some specific thing I'm working on and I need things on hand for citing. I'm not going to separate all the Brontes, the Burroughs and the other Burroughs, Clive Barker or whathaveyou, based on whether I feel they're literary or not. Whether they're old or not. They're all books that have authors, who have names starting with the same letter... and that's all I need to find them, when I go looking, so that's that.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
18:35 / 26.05.06
Having worked in a library, I wish there was some way of using flickr-style "tagging" in the real world- because so many books fit under so many different headings, and so what should be a useful classification system ("Show me books that have ghosts in them") actually becomes restricted (i.e. it has to go in the gohst section, and can't also be somewhere else unless you have many many copies/much more space than is realistic).

The boundary line might be there in terms of practicality but it should be more fluid, basically.

On my course I've noticed a lot of snobbery between genre vs. literature writing, where the defining characterisitc of both sides is that:

a) they haven't taken the bloody time to read the other, and

b) they're intent on promoting what is a largely false boundary designed to sell stuff to target demographics.

This is stupid. I'm fed up of people who cuddle up with Tolkein and refuse to even try to engage with Burroughs, and I'm fed up with people who won't give books a chance because of certain signifiers of genre (e.g. cheesy covers on sci-fi books) which are actually often only surface details (and can often have sod-all to do with the actual book).
 
 
This Sunday
22:30 / 26.05.06
One of my favorite examples of the wrongheadedness of marketing genre vs literary, is the Vintage version of Nabokov's 'Invitation to a Beheading', and it's back cover text. Where there would typically be a small summary of the basic set-up or some choice quotes to hype the author or text... they spell out the entire narrative, including details on every reveal contained in the text. 'Missing the point' doesn't even begin to cover this! If you're doing back-cover text for, say, 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' or 'Dracula', you can go pretty far into the plot without giving up anything that will totally decimate a reading of the work, but there are some spoilers people wouldn't even post unmarked, online. But, presumably because it's a blatantly fantastical piece - and according to the back-text, none of it's real anyway (and not just because it's fiction,apparently) - none of the twists, reveals, or intricacies need be discovered on their own, at the appropriate time, while actually reading the book!

To my mind, moreso than the cover of 'The Cat Who Walks Through Walls' with it's portrayal of the title character as white, more than those covers on early paperbacks of Laurell Hamilton books that make them look like something that should be shelved in the back of a third grade classroom (not to say they shouldn't, but it might cause a ruckus), there are these textual examples of pompous genre-ghettoization/disenfranchisement, which is where we get very obviously fantasy books, very obviously science fiction or horror or comedy, thriller, detective works defended as not being any part of those genres because they're literature... or, they're fucked even worse than books marketed under the genre label, since the people handling them, hold them in disdain, or ignore and discount them.

There are reasons I don't manage a bookstore, these days... and hopefully never will again.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
00:01 / 27.05.06
there are these textual examples of pompous genre-ghettoization/disenfranchisement, which is where we get very obviously fantasy books, very obviously science fiction or horror or comedy, thriller, detective works defended as not being any part of those genres because they're literature...

Then you've also got pompous idiots trying to compare LotR to the Iliad or the Hindu Epics- that is, trying to shoehorn these old epics into "fantasy". I mean, yeah, there's influence there, but bloody hell...
 
 
dtzeni
05:45 / 27.05.06
I would like to draw your attention to the process of writing and in particular the ongoing developmental of the Short Story which has changed from it's very beginnings and continues to 'evolve'. As such, it is (still)in the process of becoming.

I would like, also. to draw your attention to such forms of writing as the more recently emerging forms of Ficto-Criticism and Transgressive writing such as are evolving their own Subversive Sub-Cultural and Sub-Genre demarcations as boundaries blurr, deform, blend and merge thus making way for the increased attention of the writer as an evolving page upon which to transform ways of thinking and making meaning that go beyond traditional forms.

What does the writer INTEND?

The Best!
dtzeni
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
23:27 / 27.05.06
I'm not as familiar with those genres as I ought to be, dtzeni. Could you tell us about some of the generic features to be found, beyond the presence of Blurr, and perhaps some authors to look out for?
 
 
Crestmere
06:20 / 30.05.06
Great question.

I think that the idea of "literary" fiction is as much a genre as "science fiction" or "horror."

In terms of encouraging people to read, I think it can be helpful. But at the same time, it may not be a diverse variety of works.

Okay, well I'll write more on this later.
 
  
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