Could you explain literacy fiction? I come from scifi/fantasy land and am confused.
There’s this definition that feels like “genre fiction has some recognizable theme/trope/rule/setting/whatever. Literary fiction is just the stuff that doesn’t fit easily.” I guess that’s a fine definition. Useful! Though I think my library just calls that “fiction” or “general fiction”.
But there’s this other “literature makes you think” definition. That’s the definition I feel like people mean when they say the word with reverence. There’s some “genre is popcorn and literature is vegetables” there too. Genre is of plot driven literature character driver. Literature examines the human condition and has complex story structure.
So, like, Use of Weapons and Chasm City are just about the most scifi books to ever scifi. I’m not as into war fiction, but Catch 22 counts, right? They use they’re complex narrative structure to make you feel a way. In service of their examination of war/time/identity. I dunno. Slaughterhouse Five leans on scifi to process war.
Never Let Me Go uses it’s simple structure and scifi tropes to examine a very complex theme. That book is not candy.
Ender’s Game taught me more about empathy than religion ever managed to.
There is certainly plot driven scifi with not great characters that’s super duper scifi. Three Body Problem, 2001, Childhood’s End. I don’t tend to like those as much. But they sure have things to say about the human condition.
We’re living in some terrible mashup of Snowcrash, The Diamond Age, Neuromancer, and The Fifth Season. And they wrote those books because they saw it coming. Or wanted to explain that I was already here. Hell, there’s even the classic “we built the torment nexus from the classic book don’t build the torment nexus” meme.
I’m just… What even is literature?
In my experience (and I freely admit this is purely subjective), the term “literary fiction” is used as an academic bludgeon by people who sneer at certain styles of fiction, in particular SF, fantasy, and horror (but not only those). There is, however, no coherent definition of the term I’ve ever seen.
For instance one definition you’ll see includes “based on real-life”. Yet Naguib Mahfouz is regarded as a “literary fiction” writer, despite half his oeuvre consisting of obvious fantasy (Children of the Alley and Arabian Nights and Days for starters). Iain Banks (as opposed to Iain M. Banks, who is the same person but the “M.” means he’s wearing his SF author hat) is also a “literary fiction” writer … yet his works are full of fabulism.
One could argue that “literary fiction” is more a set of descriptive priorities (character, theme, style, psychology, the “human condition”) etc. than it is an identifying checklist and as such genre works could be literary, and non-genre works could fail as literature as well.
I don’t know if there’s a universal agreed-upon definition, but I’ve always considered lit fic to be character-driven stories that portray complex themes/topics about the human condition. Essentially explorations of characters, emotions, life, humanity, relationships, and society through a lens of fiction that is (usually) based in the real world!
I would add that this “exploration” doesn’t need to be (and often is not) explicit.
In a store/library/browser I interpret it as the misc category. The other, perhaps outdated or simply prejudiced, aspects (artistic, high culture, etc.) make more sense with the context that at some point the fiction world started to use genres to market fiction to target audiences.
So people could imply that a genre fiction that easily falls into such a genre must be simplistic, commercial and uses the benefit of a readership that is already familiar with the genre. Vice versa, a literary fiction that doesn’t fit these popular genres, can be regarded as unique, complex and a work of art that doesn’t bend to the masses.
