Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Faraer" data-source="post: 1919925" data-attributes="member: 6318">First, fantasy is absolutely the norm, historically and logically, and realist fiction or mimetic literature is the exception. Its difference is that it constructs a versisimilitudinous surface that we can easily imagine might exist in the world as we imagine it to be.But this difference is not deep enough, I think, to base a taxonomy on. It's superficial: all fiction is fundamentally imaginary, however 'realistic' it looks to the naive eye, and works by means of mythic chord progression -- the same fundamental unconscious dream stuff is going on or we wouldn't recognize it as fiction worth caring about at all, but mere fake-documentary recounting of events. In terms of authors' concerns, you can draw correlations with realist and non-realist works, but few hard lines: SF has sociological themes, but so does non-SF satire; the mimetic novel often imagines humans to be as defined by modern psychology, but so do some secondary-world fantasies. In general, the fantastic mode is towards the archetypal while the realist is towards the manifest, but it also uses poetic devices similar to those of fantasy.My only disagreement with smerwin29 and Nisarg's posts is that 'literary fiction' is no less or more genre-bound than any other genre. The readership of middlebrow realist novels is no more discriminating and demanding, on average, than the fantasy readership, and neither are publishers (speaking from first-hand knowledge, here) more or less discriminating. This despite the rhetoric fans of 'mainstream' fiction use to insinuate to the contrary. Which includes the very term 'mainstream' -- you only need to look at what the 30 all-time highest-grossing films are, however measured, to see what's mainstream in reality.SF written by non-SF authors is not filed as literary fiction because of 'higher literary standards' but because the author is socially and commercially not classified as an SF writer and their readership will look in the 'mainstream' shelves. SF written by non-SF writers is often just incompetent (and vice versa, of course).</blockquote>

Verification