I’m actually surprised at the kind of books I write–sometimes more surprised than other, but always surprised.

Yet that said, they are what I’d like to read. Although I’d argue that every writer is writing books she’d like to read. Or at least I hope so.

I am definitely not saying that nobody in genre does prose (Ivory and Kinsale and Duran immediately come to mind) or that nobody in Lit Fic does great story (Shakespeare and Dumas Pere come to mind though I’m more a Jules Verne girl).

But eh, I just judged my batch of books for the Ritas recently–the one time of the year when I have to read random books and can’t set one aside as soon as I lose all interest–and consequently am not exactly brimming with confidence for the literary merits of the genre.

Roberts notes that the classics are mostly read in school and college. So yes, I think he is focusing on the academic environment. I found so many of his assertions not just false, but obviously false to anyone who hs given them a second thought. What makes that so odd is that the book also has a lot of really insightful stuff about genre.

@Ann Somerville: And you are pointing our another assertion that is very problematic. I agree.

@Sherry Thomas: That’s really interesting, about your reading habits. I am in the honeymoon period with the genre, and my delight in learning the cliches and tropes etc.is almost equal to my delight in reading the stories.

I think of you, now that I know this, as someone who is trying to write the books she would want to read! I think Pam Rosenthal and Lauren Willig give a similar attention to language.

I don’t know if I agree with the old saw that genre gives stories and literary fiction gives language, because of books lie yours and Pam;s and Lauren’s, and also because when I think of great story I think of Dickens and Tolstoy and Hardin, too.

Non-genre readers “won’t get it”

I find this idea really interesting. Because for a while now I have been a non-genre reader of romance, I think. (Or of any genre, probably.) I don’t want to read those books that a non-genre reader wouldn’t get. I don’t want the cliches and the shorthands and the whatnot–at least I don’t want them obvious and glaring.

My taste for prose is essentially literary. But most of literary fiction do not give me the stories I want, i.e., fairly straightforward, archetypal hero’s journeys, or the characters I want, people capable of dealing with life’s crap–and their own flaws–and rising above it.

I want what should be, rather than what is–all of genre fiction is what should be–and I want my what should be delivered by a poet who builds Taj Mahals with her words.

his definition of a “classic” assumes that such books are only read in a pedagogical / scholarly context?

He seems to presume that the intention for a book to be a Classic has to be part of the creation too. Which is crap! Lots of books are studied, not primarily because they are sublime works of art, but because they are important to the history or development of culture in a particular country or period – like ‘Pamela’ as the protonovel, ‘The Song of Roland’ and the work of Chrétien de Troyes as important for the development of literature not just in France but all through out Europe and so on. (Not saying these aren’t worth reading in their own right but their historic importance now far outweighs the intention in writing now.)

Roberts and his ilk are full of it

Roberts says that when reading books that are not “classics,” “We do not take notes, we do not review earlier evidence, we do not talk the problem over with friends. We read alertly, we even reread alertly, but we do not study.”

Does he really think that outside of the academy, readers take notes and review evidence? That they “study”?

Yes, serious religious readers will do that to the Bible (and comparable texts in other traditions). And writers may “study” other writers to steal tricks of the trade. But otherwise?

I know plenty of folks outside academia who read “classics,” for one reason or another, but they don’t study them. Does that mean that they’re reading the books in the wrong way? Or simply that his definition of a “classic” assumes that such books are only read in a pedagogical / scholarly context?

My own view is that this IS an important aspect of genre fiction, but it supplements rather than supplants the other normal type of criticism we do of it.

@Laura Vivanco: It is funny, isn’t it, that he’s doing the very thing he claims isn’t done with genre fiction? Maybe the REAL paradox is the self-referential one this poses for the author!

As for examining the genre as opposed to single books or oeuvres, I think this may be a sense in which this book is dated. In romance studies, I am seeing much less about the genre and much more about specific texts or authors.

and the thing about the unfinishable book — that’s another moment in his text where I cannot tell is Roberts’ is pointing to a mistaken idea that readers of canonical fiction have about paperbacks, or whether he is reporting on the habits of the tribe as an insider.

His positioning is wafty throughout the text.

@Moriah Jovan: It’s just hard for me to tell why he uses that term, when much of the book seems to deny any invidious distinction on the basis of worth.

@Tumperkin: I’m with you. He says a lot of interesting and true things, as only a reader of genre could do, but they are mixed up with some counterintuitive and obviously false claims.

@Ann Somerville: I totally agree. This is one of the reasons I called that table “dumb”. It’s ahistorical, and you can;t understand literature that way.

@Liz:

I wonder if any attempt at a Grand Unified Theory of anything is going to end up as this combination of insight and wrong-headedness. I wouldn’t want to undertake a project like this.

I have a special fondness for unifying theories, but I agree with you.

I just think he’s missing something here between Ulysses and Gone With the Wind.

Yes, exactly, as you point out, a big swath of something.

Also, I find the idea that there is ANY text doesn’t “repay study” ludicrous. I am reading a bunch of essays right now in which my students have found that car ads repay their study.

I agree completely, which is why I have this blog, and why I published an article on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But a lot of people still think is is just narcissistic slumming, i.e. smart people enjoying mentally unchallenging crap and trying to justify it by intellectualizing it.

Thanks for that link. I hear the echoes of dick’s voice in this book for sure!

That said, I think there is a big swath of fiction missing from his categorization, and that skews his argument. Joyce and Woolf are NOT contemporary! They are Modernists, and now Classics (taking Ann’s point about a classic being one only in retrospect). Also–Classics still interest “us”? “Us” as a culture, perhaps, in the sense that “we” still assign them in school or put on Shakespeare plays or mine Austen for film scripts, but the “us” who CHOOSES to read them is a pretty small group. What’s missing, then, is a wide range of contemporary literary fiction, much of which is far less “difficult” than Modernist “serious” fiction, and some of which draws on popular genres (A. S. Byatt’s Possession, Michael Chabon’s interest in comic books or detective fiction, there’s tons of examples). I just think he’s missing something here between Ulysses and Gone With the Wind.

Also, I find the idea that there is ANY text doesn’t “repay study” ludicrous. I am reading a bunch of essays right now in which my students have found that car ads repay their study. @Ann Somerville: I found that last point totally dick-ish too. I kept wondering if “dick” were Roberts, reading, enjoying, but also dismissing genre fiction. There is clearly a pattern of thought here. Personally I wonder how much of it has to do with shame (“I couldn’t possibly be reading this junk I read for fun IN THE SAME WAY I read the sacred texts valued by the academy where I work”).

Reminds me of that recent discussion with dick. It’s such a circular argument. If something is studied, then it becomes a Classic, and then is studied because it’s a classic. Dickens didn’t start out writing classics. He started out writing serial fiction for a mass market. So did Austen, in a slightly different way. We can’t *know* in advance what’s going to be a classic (and writing which aims to become a classic from the start is inevitably pretentious garbage), so how can that be a proper descriptor of any contemporary writing? And does that mean any writing which is studied – like fanfiction – is Classic?

My head hurts. This kind of literary elitism makes my blood boil, and yet I have no coherent arguments against it. I just know this doesn’t represent what I read, how I read, what I consider important to read.