Categorizations by genre vs "literature" should be, at most, categorization to help you find what you're looking for. In theory, people should be looking for a good story (defined as they choose to define it at a given moment); in practice, most people have some preferences in the setting and style of story which make it easier to look in the Detective / Mystery section, because they want to read a mystery, or they're looking for a particular author who usually writes mysteries, or both. Ditto for Romance, or Humor, or SF / Fantasy, or whatever. Categories should be useful, not judgmental.
As it turns out, though, they are judgmental. Part of this is marketing — not just marketing to get someone to find a book they want to buy, but marketing to make a book or author seem more important and worthy and therefore worth seeking out both for what they write and for the personal egoboo of being seen reading (or heard talking about reading) "the latest by X".
Which feeds further into the part of it that is the litcrit self-appointed priesthood of What Is Literary (And Therefore Good), whose scripture is the New York Times Review of Books and the like. For them, as with all art, what's important is not just whether something is arguably "good," but the right kind of "good," defined as that which has gotten admission into the club.
Which isn't to say there isn't "good" literature in the Literature section of B&N, by any means, just that there is "good" literature in the Science Fiction and Mystery sections, too — especially as one discusses what the nature of "good" lit is. The problem is when you short-circuit that conversation by dictating that what is "good" can only be found in the Literature section, and that what is not in that section is therefore a second-class literary citizen.
Reshared post from +Angela Craft
The term [literary fiction] sneaks back into the past in a strangely anachronistic way, so that, for example, Jane Austen's works are described as literary fiction. This is nonsense. Can anyone think for a moment that were she writing today she'd be published as lit fic? No, and not because she'd end up under romance or chick lit, but because she writes comedy, and lit fic, with a few rare exceptions, does not include comedy within its remit.
The genre debate: ‘Literary fiction’ is just clever marketing
In the third of our series on literary definitions, Elizabeth Edmondson argues that Jane Austen never imagined she was writing Literature. Posterity made that decision for her • Gaynor Arnold: We don’t think of Dickens as a historical novelist • Juliet McKenna: Science fiction travels farther than literary fiction
"Literary Fiction" has always been just another genre, as defined by genre tropes as any other.
All genres are equal, but some genres are more equal than others?
Everyone knows that SF is the best genre 🙂
A quick peek at the entries for "literary" and "literature" in my Merriam-Webster dictionary informs me that "literary fiction" would be fiction that is "considered to be very good and to have lasting importance."
Any genre, then, can have literary fiction. Much Golden Age SF is of lasting importance. More is not (cf. Sturgeon's Law). Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Agatha Christie had works whose importance is undeniable.
Hence, I must agree with Dave's statement that making literary fiction its own genre is a false dichotomy (or -chotomy of some sort, at any rate).
Oh, and +Tim Hall, the best sub-genre is hard SF. None of that namby-pamby New Wave stuff for me!
😉
It has to read like a cross between an engineering textbook and a libertarian tract. Otherwise it's not proper SF….