This is a sketch of a project I am working on, and of a paper I gave at the Popular Culture Association conference in April. Part 1 is here. Part 3 to come.
I. In Part 1 I argued that ethical criticism is not about rating books for how well they provide moral education. That view, known as instrumentalism, reduces the role of art to handmaiden of morality. As a reaction to instrumentalism, aestheticism claims that there is no connection between art and morality. Oscar Wilde’s comment that “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” is the classic example of aestheticsm. It turns out that aestheticism has its own reductionist problems, which become clear once one considers how to keep morality out of an evaluation of any novel that attempts to deal seriously with moral matters.
So ethical criticism tries to steer clear of the faults of both instrumentalism (aka moralism) and aestheticism (aka autonomism). Different ethical critics have cashed out the relationship in different ways. Here are a couple of contenders:
a. Noel Carroll: “clarificationism” : The idea here is that don’t gain new moral knowledge, especially not in the form of propositional knowledge, but rather that art works have to engage their audience, and to do this they have to “fit” them. The audience has to mobilize its knowledge, including moral knowledge, and its emotions, in order to experience the work. This is especially true with respect to mass art, which has to be accessible.
Narrative art deepens our moral understanding by encouraging us to apply our moral understanding to specific cases. It forces us to move from knowledge to understanding (ability to application). When we read fiction, we connect different parts of our “moral knowledge stock”. Fiction thus exercises and enlarges our moral understanding.
Just understanding the narrative often requires exercising our moral powers. So reading a novel just is a continuous process of moral judgment. This is not a “consequence” or “result” of reading. It is reading. It is not going outside the work. It is of the work.
b. Martha Nussbaum: “virtue ethics”: Martha Nussbaum has argued that engagement with fiction can cultivate certain highly cognitive moral abilities related to attention, attunement, and discernment, including the ability to notice morally relevant details, empathy, and the ability to better understand complicated moral issues. In discussing James’ The Golden Bowl, she writes:
[T]his novel calls upon and also develops our ability to confront mystery with the cognitive engagement of both thought and feeling. To work through these sentences and these chapters is to become involved in an activity of exploration and unraveling that uses abilities, especially abilities of emotion and imagination, rarely tapped by philosophical texts. (Nussbaum 1990, 143)
Nussbaum has certain goals in mind that have more to do with moral philosophy than art criticism. Her arguments about the moral importance of literature have a lot to do with her development of a neo-Aristotelian ethic. She thinks that morality is less about universal principles and more about human flourishing and the capacities needed to do so. In making that kind of claim, she situates herself as part of a later twentieth century philosophical take on morality that emerged as a critique (some would say antidote) to the abstract formalism that had dominated moral philosophy for a long time. My own views on moral philosophy have been shaped mostly by this tradition.
Nussbaum actually says that fiction itself can be moral philosophy, and can be better moral philosophy than what you find in philosophy journals. This is because fiction captures the elements of moral life that an Aristotelian sees as most important, like character, emotion, and visions of the good, while traditional ethics essays remain at a level of abstraction – even their example of ethical dilemmas tend to be schematic and far fetched — that bears no resemblance to how moral deliberation actually works.
Nussbaum has interesting things to say about the inseparability of form and content. James isn’t just Aristotle dressed up with pretty images that you can remove like ornaments on a Christmas tree and have the essence left over. You can’t summarize or paraphrase any passage in fiction and hope to keep the same meaning, the way you can with a philosophical argument.
There are a number of other takes on ethical criticism, of course. I just give these as examples of kinds of ethical criticism that are more intelligent and compelling than those that seek to glean nuggets of moral lessons from books and throw out every thing else.
Note that for ethical critics, active reading is assumed. Carroll in particular emphasizes the way readers must fill in gaps in the narrative with their own stock of knowledge. Narrative also calls for us to feel certain emotions. If we don’t, we simply cannot understand the text.
II. What exactly do ethical critics evaluate?
This seems obvious: the book. But what is that?
Here’s my view (not unique to me. It’s from arguments found in Alexander Nehamas for example, and others, like Seymour Chatman)
I don’t know how to read a novel other than as someone trying to tell me a story. It is natural to posit a rational agent when we read a book. We assume the text is organized in a certain way for certain reasons. We realize we can find all of these words elsewhere but they are here, together, in a specific purposeful arrangement. More, the text is for us, the readers. We are engaging with someone who is deliberately engaging with us, aesthetically, morally, politically, cognitively. I think that positing an author is just part of what reading is. It is not some extra psychological effort readers may or may not undertake. The idea of a purpose leads naturally to the idea of an agent. But who is that? It isn’t the narrator or the protagonist, because the first can be unreliable, and the second is limited in understanding (her point of view may not be the only one we get).
The writer is the individual person who writes the book. But that’s not who I am thinking about when I review a book or do ethical criticism. You can tell because I make claims about the text and not about the flesh and blood writer. (Wayne Booth has a set of terms for this, as do others. Booth calls it the “implied author”. For Nehamas is it just the “author”. ). There are probably lots of things that go into the writing from the writer’s standpoint that, in caring deeply about the text, I do not care about — like that she needed to finish this book to make a mortgage payment or that the name of the protagonist came from the name of her best friend in first grade.
So the “author” (or “implied author” or “posited author”) is a fiction, with one main function: to allow us to read the text as purposive.
It follows that in ethical criticism, moral judgments are made about the literary work, i.e. about the author, not about the writer. In my experience on this blog, this can be a challenging distinction for some authors to grasp. And in some ways I don’t blame them: it is a very tight circle indeed. (The reader constructs the author, but the author constructed the narrator, so does the reader construct the narrator, and thus the text, too? Something has gone awry.) Are we just adding agents when we would do well to stick with 2 — the narrator and the writer? Luckily, I don’t have to solve this problem to get to my main point. I just wanted to let you know I know it exists.
For my purposes, all we need is some conceptual space between the flesh and blood writer and the posited or implied author, enough so that when we make moral judgments about the text, we are not seen as making, mutatis mutandis, moral judgments about the flesh and blood writer.
Why am I spending time on this? I think it is because I am coming at this as a reader of genre fiction, and genre fiction is different from literary fiction in the closeness of its readers, who may aptly be called “fans”, to the authors. The question of the relationship between writers and readers is there in literary criticism, but it has special resonance for genre readers because of the relative closeness of genre writers to their readers in comparison to literary writers.
III. The relation of the moderate moralists’ theories to genre fiction.
I teach a course in philosophy and fiction, particularly ethics and fiction. I have read a lot of ethical criticism. And most of it –almost all of it, really — is criticism of “literature”, and not just literature but the “classics”. (And not just the classics, but a mini-canon of works, as I explain below). Here I am mainly referring to philosophers who write about ethical criticism. (Also, I am using the terms “literature” and “genre fiction” in their loose and popular senses. I am not, in doing so, necessarily buying in to invidious distinctions between them, least of all to an invidious distinction between their relative literary merits.)
So we are finally at the central motivating question of the paper: What is the relationship of our best known philosophical champions of ethical criticism to genre fiction? And is that relationship contingent or necessary (that is, do they just pick the classics because that’s what they happen to read or like, or do they not pick genre fictionspecifically because they believe that ethical criticism of genre fiction doesn’t merit ethical criticism in some sense?)
a. Nussbaum, like most philosophers who engage with literature, focuses exclusively on the classics, especially Henry James. She does not engage with genre fiction at all.
b. Booth – As an aside, I will say that I have problems with his theory overall, as it comes very close to moralism — not moderate moralism — about literature. But the moralism is most noticeable when he is talking (which he rarely does) about genre fiction. For example, Booth worries about “what [Stephen] King’s 300 million sold copies have taught the world’s unsophisticated readers”, and when challenged on whether he has actually read even one of King’s books, he says in a footnote: “I’ve tried to.”
This is a very common tendency: to use literary classics are exemplars of salutary moral effects and genre fiction as exemplars of potentially corrosive moral effects. It’s quite amazing, really. I mean, would you take your lessons on father/daughter relations from The Golden Bowl, as Nussbaum suggests? Squicks me right the heck out.
But Booth — unlike most others in this group — at least tackles head on the question of what kind of books work best for ethical criticism. And here’s what he says:
i. Using Sheldon Sacks’s typology of authorial invitation – satire, apologue (idea novels) and action novels, in which category Booth includes “novels like those of Jane Austen or Cormac McCarthy or, moving down the line in quality, Agatha Christie or Louis L’Amour”. He notes that that writers of action novels get “furious” when ethical critics focus on their work, because “for them, it is the beautifully formed action, conveyed in beautiful or witty or original style” that counts. “Consign the ethicists to hell, where they belong” so the authors of action novels are purported to say. My own view is that such authors are probably sick unto death of critics using genre fiction as an ethical punching bag.
But it is not just the authors’ faults: Booth claims without argument that action stories do not openly demand ethical criticism. This is very interesting to me, since actions — and the people who take them — are the natural subjects of moral judgment.
For Booth, the most important literary kind for ethical criticism “has no label” –”it engages us in serious thought about ethical matters, based on the reinforcement of certain ethical positions as admirable and others as questionable or indefensible, but also hooks us into plots of conflict that are inseparable from that thinking” (note that he implies action stories do not do this). His example of such writing? Henry James. (From “Why Ethical Criticism Can Never Be Simple”, Style, 1998).
ii. In his earlier (1988) book, The Company We Keep, Booth offered a list of passages written by…
God
Ford Maddox Ford
DH Lawrence,
Barbara Cartland
Penthouse
I am guessing the order of this list tells us in no uncertain terms what he thinks of the ethics of romance novels. Booth allows that all of these texts claim to offer the reader something (his model is of the implied author as a friend, a friend who is always offering the reader something via the text). He writes:
The simple and obvious question, for example, ‘Do you, my would be friend, wish ME well, or will you be the only one to profit if I join you?’ can make the implied creators of the Cartland romance and the Penthouse garbage writhe with embarrassment.
When he says, in a footnote, that “almost any of the literary classics could for most readers be said to provide the kind of friendship we are celebrating”, he is at his clearest.
c. Carroll, who has done important work on horror, comedy, film, and on mass art in general (The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart, New York, Routledge, 1990, A Philosophy of Mass Art, New York, Oxford University Press, 1998), is, not surprisingly, an important counterexample. He is explicit that Harlequin romances (despite being a “more mundane example”, contrasted with a “special case” like Citizen Kane) “can engage our imaginative and reflective powers.”
Yet, even someone like Carroll, who defends the potential of ethical criticism of mass art, tends, in his examples of morally significant narratives, to rely on literary fiction. And his examples of morally obfuscating fiction tend to be from genre works – for example, when he singles out Silence of the Lambs and Pulp Fiction, both of which “encourage us to forge an emotive link” between gayness and horror. I am not claiming he is wrong about those films — he makes a persuasive case, actually – just noticing where the chips tend to fall when philosophers are mining for examples of ethically bad art.
IV. Textbooks
You can tell a lot about the commitments of a field of study by looking at textbooks.
There are a few popular ethics textbooks that use literature as a source of examples. (I would never use them. I don’t like making literature the handmaiden of philosophy.) These focus heavily on the classics. So, for example, in The Moral of the Story: An Anthology of Ethics Through Literature, the chapter on “Love and Marriage” has selections from:
Jane Austen (PP)
Leo Tolstoy (AK),
Shakespeare (R&J)
George Bernard Shaw
Daniel Defoe (Moll Flanders)
Guy de Maupassant (“The Model”)
John Cleland (Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure).
When it comes to ethical dilemmas in love and sex, wouldn’t you think contemporary romance is the obvious place to start? But there is very little genre fiction among dozens of selection in the entire textbook.
ii. Ethics, Literature, and Theory. This is the book I used in Ethics and Fiction, and it is very good, but it makes use of all the usual suspects. At this point there is a mini-canon in ethical criticism of Huckleberry Finn, Beloved, To Kill a Mockingbird, anything by Henry James, Frankenstein, anything by Joyce or Flaubert, etc. We can’t explain this by pointing out that philosophers chose them because they can ssume audience familiarity, because can’t they also assume audience familiarity with Harry Potter, or The Godfather, or Gone with the Wind, or Miss Marple? Not insignifiantly, in this collection, genre fiction gets the most attention in a section on writers’ responsibilities.
iii. There is one popular intro to ethics textbook, The Moral of the Story: An introduction to ethics through literature, which is a bit misleadingly titled, as the majority of its narratives are actually popular film narratives. But when it uses fiction, it tends to be literary fiction.
Summing up this section, ethical critics tend to focus almost exclusively on literary fiction. I think we should turn at least some of our ethical attention to genre fiction, especially romance. In the next part I will say more about why we should, about why that idea may not be enthusaistically embraced by all genre writers, and also about the difference genre makes in ethical criticism.
ethical critics tend to focus almost exclusively on literary fiction
*sigh*
Jessica,
A thought that recurs to me as I review your argument from PCA:
In teaching the novels of Jane Austen, I have found that one of the most fruitful ways to open analysis of the characters and plots is through Austen’s deployment of the virtues. Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues by Sarah Baxter Emsley is my source for this discussion thread.
I do not know that in exploring the virtue of fortitude, to name just one virtue, my students become more courageous. But their exploration sounds like the “highly cognitive moral abilities” that Nussbaum identifies as importantly at work in reading.
Austen’s courtship narratives (and all six of the novels are courtship narratives) differ in degree, but not in kind, from the works of Barbara Cartland, to choose the least respected of the scorned. Every work of fiction, every narrative, I would venture to say, invokes this sort of attention from a follower of that narrative.
The evolutionary psychologial argument of William Flesch in Comeuppance (2007) may support this claim. I don’t understand his argument very well, but he tries to account for the indisputable fact that we are the sort of creatures who exhibit “absorbed and anxious interest in what happens to non-existent beings”–beings in works of fiction.
Both Austen (and every other canonical author you can name) and Cartland (and every other genre author you can name) wrote works of fiction. I do realize that their novels are quite different, but would argue that they are importantly the same in certain basic responses that they evoke in readers.
Pam Regis
(It’s so welcome to have a philosopher working on romance!)
I’m trying to pull my brain together because you have quite a bit to say on the subject. Genre fiction is, for the most part, ignored by literary and ethical critics…probably because it’s too obvious, too black and white, too good vs. evil, or just plain old beneath their notice. If you look at the romance genre, the theme is pretty universal, a triumph of true love, truth and the good. Yes, occasionally, say in a series, evil will appear to triumph or get the upper hand at least for a time, but in the end, usually good will out.
Ethical criticism presumes that the author intends a lesson. Any lesson is subjective and any lesson learned is dependent upon the quality of the writing.
This is fascinating stuff. I’m especially interested in your comments on reading as an ethical process, and how the moral lesson of a novel isn’t something that can be removed and analysed on it’s own, it’s too interwoven with the text.
The concept of the author as a construct of the reader’s experience as opposed to the person who actually wrote the book is also interesting. I think this dichotomy explains why so many writers have such a strong reaction to the “Dear Author” site, which addresses each review to the author, but is really written for readers. Are the Ja(y)nes addressing this author construct they’ve created while reading? They’re clearly not writing a letter to the real author.
Also, I agree with a lot of what Julia (comment #3) said, but I think that the moral tone of genre fiction isn’t as clear, especially if you look at the way society and women are depicted. I think analysis of the role of society and the position of women in romance novels is fascinating (see many of Candy’s old posts on the SBTB blog). A lot of readers seem to be more open to moral complexity in their fiction with the surge in Urban Fantasy, and with the ambiguous morality in some straight romances. Sherry Thomas is a good example where her characters make some dubious moral choices and don’t always act in a way that’s “good” per se.
Thank you for the post! I’m looking forward to Part 3.
Wonderful! I had to hold up until after work so I could read more thoroughly. I’m always enamored of how you deconstruct and qualify your focus.
Your break down of the role of the implied author was very clear and concise. Perhaps it’s not so much assumed that the author intends a lesson as much as the author intends a message. It seems like splitting hairs maybe. Characters and storylines reach decision points and a choice is made based on author message – direction one way or another. The author definitely intended to provoke and evoke something with his/her writing, I’d assume. Perhaps the moral tone is not clearly good or bad, but that doesn’t necessarily speak to fuzziness of message…does it?
I liked what you discussed at PCA about not just examining decision points, but going on to follow up on consequences down the road. (At least this is from my fuzzy recollection.) Very intrigued to read up on the next part!
I’m really enjoying these posts and am looking forward to Part 3. Having begun my professional life as a Victorianist, I’m cool with authors who think there’s a moral purpose to reading fiction (George Eliot has some lovely passages on the ways that realist fiction teaches us sympathy for our ordinary, unheroic neighbors, for instance).
There’s quite a difference, though, between that and the sort of “moral contract” that some romance readers seem to feel they have with authors. I’m thinking of, for instance, the way people say they were “betrayed” by certain authors and their “cruel” plot twists (e.g. Suzanne Brockmann, Karin Slaughter) and will never read that author again. As if a friend or lover has broken their trust. I’m not sure if that is because readers feel closer to the author in some way, as you say, or because they feel the rules of the genre have been broken. But it’s interesting how often people use “ethical” language to discuss this rule breaking.
This kind of response extends to characters in ways I find odd as well. Maybe because, as you said in the Jane Eyre discussion, we expect to “root for” romance characters or expect emotional justice (I think that’s Jennifer Crusie’s term) for them. Here I’m thinking of the periodic discussions of what behavior readers can/cannot “forgive” (e.g. can you forgive a hero/heroine who cheats). I think a cheating hero hasn’t wronged ME, so it isn’t my place to forgive. (Though if the heroine forgives him, I want the author to make me believe in and respect her choice). But many readers seem to feel differently: they DO feel somehow wronged by a cheating hero.
It’s not that readers don’t judge, and aren’t invited by the text to judge, characters in literary fiction. I think we do and often are. But the discussion about romance characters often seems more intensely personal. I’m not sure why, exactly. Maybe again because of genre expectations: these aren’t just “main characters” but HEROES and HEROINES. So I’ll be curious to see what you have to say in Part 3 about what difference genre fiction makes.
@Liz: “But the discussion about romance characters often seems more intensely personal. I’m not sure why, exactly.”
My theory on this is that romance deals with a spectacularly personal subject (falling in love), a personal subject that’s happy. Because of that, readers may identify more thoroughly or allow themselves to be swept up by the book more completely than they otherwise would.
I don’t identify with the hero or heroine while reading, but I definitely allow myself to become more emotionally involved in romance novels than I do with other fiction. I usually hold a part of myself back from literary fiction, and critique the text while reading. I don’t expect to always have a positive emotional reaction to what I’m reading. I’m interested in the characterization, but I don’t really care what happens to the characters.
On the other hand, I don’t keep that level of remove when reading romances because I expect to close the book and feel emotionally at peace with where the author left the characters. That kind of trust in the author allows a genre reader to stay immersed in a novel when he or she might otherwise recoil, but it also means that readers will be extremely angry if that trust is broken at the end of the book (by a failure to provide emotional justice? by having an unhappy ending? by having a main character cheat? I think the line is different for different people).
@Victoria Janssen: It’s no suprise, of course, but I thought it wise to document it and identify it!
@Pam Regis: Pam, thanks for your comment. I had not heard of the Emsley, but will acquire it. She was inspired by Alistair McIntyre, a crucial exponent of the philosophical tradition I mention in the post, who claimed, in After Virtue, that Austen was the last great representative of the virtue tradition. McIntyre never did much to substantiate this claim, so I am glad someone has taken it up.
There is a whole literature in philosophy on the irrationality of our emotional responses to fictional people. We call it “the paradox of fiction” and Carroll is one person who has written a lot on it. I had not heard of Comeuppance, so thank you — I will follow up.
I think the lack of attention to genre fiction is rooted mainly in the idea that it is bad fiction, and that bad fiction just doesn’t repay ethical criticism. Not only that, but bad fiction may do us harm in some way, perhaps by making it harder for us to appreciate or enjoy good fiction.
I think that goes wrong on all counts, but especially the idea that genre fiction is bad fiction (and that fiction with literary aspirations, or even canonical fiction) is good). I disagree also with the idea that bad fiction doesn’t merit ethical criticism. The last claim might have some merit, but is not a good enough reason to argue against reading genre fiction unless you smuggle in the first two claims.
@Julia Rachel Barrett: Yes, I think you’ve identified some of the reasons critics eschew genre fiction. And lots of genre fiction is formulaic and black and white. But a lot of it isn’t. I tend to be drawn to the writers who let the gray in myself, although I am not sure it is moral ambiguity per se that I am attracted to, or just writing that reflects how complicated actual human moral life really is.
But I don’t think ethical criticism presumes that author intends a lesson. I think it assumes that if you are telling a story about human beings (or human like beings) that works on any level, it will contain certain commitments to a vision of the good life, to what counts as a virtue or a vice, a good person or a bad one. etc.. In other words, a writer cannot create a recognizably human like world without also creating a moral one.
@Jocelyn Z.: Thank you for that point about urban fantasy. I had mentioned the moral ambiguity in Carolyn Crane’s UF Mind Games in my review of it, but it did not occur to me but it did not occur to me to think about the ethical influence of UF on romance in the context of this project.
@Jeannie Lin: Oh, thank you. Thanks for reading.
No, I don’t think so, because the message may be that moral life is fuzzy. That can be a clear message.
I will get to your last point in the 3rd part. I think the fact that romance is written primarily by women and for women must be acknowledged in this discussion.
@Liz: I am also fascinated by all of those varieties of reader response to romance, and the challenge for me is how to engage them (or whether I should) in this project.
I think ethical critics need to do more to incorporate these elements (although Booth did a lot of work here), and genre critics need to pay attention to the specific modes of author engagement unique to each genre.
That problem you point out and don’t solve is just like the problem in Terminator! John Connor sent his friend back in time to protect his mother, and his friend had sex with her, and the resulting baby….was John Connor!
I enjoyed this post. Honestly, I didn’t realize there was this whole field of thought and it’s fun to read about it, especially in relation to genre work like this. With those examples, at first I was like, Oscar Wilde, yeah! But then, I see where that view wouldn’t entirely work out. (After it being pointed out to me, of course.) This bit about the construct of the author is totally interesting. When I reflect on it, it does feel true, especially when I read multiple books by an author, and it sort of adds to an author person in my mind. The idea that author is a construct of the reader would be a nice thing to keep in mind, in the case of personal attack, which luckily I haven’t ever experienced, but I sure see it. It’s just so interesting. Even if you reach through to the writer end of things, in my mind, the writer Carolyn Crane is just a facet of the person Carolyn Crane.
Your point about how the relationship between writers and readers is intensified in genre literature is something that had certainly never occurred to me. Are we going to hear more about that? I so wonder why that would be.
I do agree that a book lacking an inherent morality…let me figure out how to phrase this…a story that takes no stand, either for the good or the bad or even the gray area in between, but rather attempts to remain neutral from the perspective of both the characters and the narrative, does not work for me. Yes, I suppose I can layer my own sense of right and wrong or like and dislike on top of a story – but if there’s no inherent meaning in the story, why should I even bother? Maybe the message I’m missing is that there is no message.
In any case, I’ve read several works of fiction this past year that seem to be cut from the same cloth – as if the authors deliberately tried to remove all meaning from the narrative. Why?
So many ideas in this post, but I’ll restrict myself to commenting on the posited author, which is useful way of thinking about the author lens issue I keep coming up against in romances where I detect (or think I detect) things about the author’s views and this affects how I read the text, relate the characters and even how I view the specific events in the story.
Have you read Margaret Atwood’s collection of essays on writing, Negotiating with the Dead?
This is really good. Obviously I came to it through standard narcissistic google alerts, and I am glad I did. I happen to have been thinking about genre fiction, esp. Cartland, recently (I do try to talk about some of this in Comeuppance, and I admire Noel Carroll’s work). One very important insight (from evolutionary biology) I put to use is the potentially positive ethical attitude that spitemight manifest (as altruistic punishment) but also the difficulty of preventing vindication (justice for the wronged) from degenerating into vindictiveness (the costs in reputation the spiteful are willing to pay because they’re so bitter).
I think (in genre romance without an apparent villain) that the reader is in a kind of ethical debate with the naive narratee (whom I regard as a fictional being). The narratee thinks that things won’t work out, that the author won’t do the right thing by the characters. The reader has more faith than the narratee. I’ve been thinking about these things in terms of Newcomb’s problem recently: the engaged and anxious reader trying through a kind of genuine moral commitment to wanting the right ending strongly enough to spin or nuance a story already fixed.
I do think it’s something like a moral commitment to a good outcome for well-judged (approved-of) others, attempting to influence that outcome; this partly depends on my denial (shared with Carroll) of the explanatory force of so-called identification with a character.
Sorry to be so gnomic. But I am happy to go on and on if you’re interested.
Anyhow I thought this was great and look forward to reading more of your work.
Carolyn wrote, “Your point about how the relationship between writers and readers is intensified in genre literature is something that had certainly never occurred to me. Are we going to hear more about that? I so wonder why that would be.”
I think so, but I am armchairing that, so I may be wrong.
Julia wrote, “I’ve read several works of fiction this past year that seem to be cut from the same cloth – as if the authors deliberately tried to remove all meaning from the narrative. Why?”
I don’t know. Maybe they aren’t really writers in some important sense, but are just trying to earn a buck and their insincerity comes through.
Tumperkin wrote, “Have you read Margaret Atwood’s collection of essays on writing, Negotiating with the Dead?”
No, but I love Atwood so I just bought it. Thanks!
William Flesch, thank you for stopping by, and for your kind words, and for sharing some of your thoughts. I really appreciate it.
In regards to the Newcomb’s problem, you may have have seen Carroll’s work on the paradox presented by genre fiction, but your comment brought it to my mind. The paradox is that people read junk fiction for the story, for the “page turning” aspect. But these readers know antecedently how the story will turn out. (I talk about it a bit here: http://www.readreactreview.com/2010/02/07/monday-morning-stepback-is-there-a-paradox-of-junk-fiction/).
And there is the paradox of fiction, per se, the idea that it is irrational to feel emotions for fictional characters. But I am sure you deal with that in your book.
As far as identification with characters, romance readers are extremely wary of that for our own reasons: we are tired of being told that we read to escape our dreary lives, and that identification provides a means for doing that.
I tend to be critical of both game theory and evolutionary biology but I am very interested in any new account of our commitment to narrative, so I will be reading your book for sure.