What an amazingly snobby reply to an article about someone writing good fiction.
I'll leave a much better writer than me to do the arguing, Ursula K. LeGuin, although I realize you won't read either of these articles because you're too busy "working on [your] own things now," but I'll post them because they're great.
Ursula K. Le Guin talks to Michael Cunningham about genres, gender, and broadening fiction. [1]
> And that, of course, is the lingering problem: The maintenance of an arbitrary division between “literature” and “genre,” the refusal to admit that every piece of fiction belongs to a genre, or several of genres.
> Realism is of course a tremendous and wonderfully capacious literary genre, and it has dominated fiction since 1800 or before. But dominance isn’t the same thing as superiority. Fantasy is at least as immense as realism and much older — essentially coeval with literature itself. Yet fantasy was relegated for fifty years or sixty years to the nursery.
On Serious Literature. [2]
> But it [Genre fiction] was dead, dead! God damn that Chabon, dragging it out of the grave where she and the other serious writers had buried it to save serious literature from its polluting touch, the horror of its blank, pustular face, the lifeless, meaningless glare of its decaying eyes! What did the fool think he was doing?
I'll leave a much better writer than me to do the arguing, Ursula K. LeGuin, although I realize you won't read either of these articles because you're too busy "working on [your] own things now," but I'll post them because they're great.
Ursula K. Le Guin talks to Michael Cunningham about genres, gender, and broadening fiction. [1]
> And that, of course, is the lingering problem: The maintenance of an arbitrary division between “literature” and “genre,” the refusal to admit that every piece of fiction belongs to a genre, or several of genres.
> Realism is of course a tremendous and wonderfully capacious literary genre, and it has dominated fiction since 1800 or before. But dominance isn’t the same thing as superiority. Fantasy is at least as immense as realism and much older — essentially coeval with literature itself. Yet fantasy was relegated for fifty years or sixty years to the nursery.
On Serious Literature. [2]
> But it [Genre fiction] was dead, dead! God damn that Chabon, dragging it out of the grave where she and the other serious writers had buried it to save serious literature from its polluting touch, the horror of its blank, pustular face, the lifeless, meaningless glare of its decaying eyes! What did the fool think he was doing?
1. https://electricliterature.com/ursula-k-le-guin-talks-to-mic...
2. http://www.ursulakleguin.com/Note-ChabonAndGenre.html