NP : Was " genres are literature too" thread

[Paul Mackin]

Question:  Cannot all or most of the literary theories, that have been 
used and may still be used today, be applied just a well (maybe better)  
to genre fiction as to literary fiction?  Is this perhaps an important 
unifying feature of all fiction regardless of how high or low?

Maybe related, the last chapter of Terry Eagleton's latest--The Event of 
Literature--takes up the question of what do literary theories all have 
in common?  His candidate for the honor is the Unconscious.  All but one 
theory by his lights consider what is written as a Strategy for dealing 
with the Unconscious or the otherwise hidden.  He talks a lot about 
Freud's ideas on repression, etc. So literature--in theory--is the 
repressed, acceptable version of what's somehow down deep and hidden.  
This is a very inadequate paraphrase, but it might serve the purpose of 
suggesting that possibly  literary and genre fiction are sisters under 
the skin.

The colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady are sisters under the skin--Kipling

P



On 10/14/2012 12:05 PM, alice wellintown wrote:
> And the abstract unifying agent in GR works because, though
> implausible, it is convincing. So, Wood has no serious objection to
> Pynchon's talking dogs or clocks, but to his rhetorical faliure, that
> is, P fails not because verisimilitude is essential or even prefered,
> but because P fails to convince us that all these characters and plots
> are plausible under the unifying agent. The abstraction pulls the
> characters on and off the stages like a puppet parade in a space
> opera.
>