Reading literary fiction helps you understand other people

[Kramodlog]

Take that Stephen King!

Castano says that is due in large part to the fact that literary novelists tend to make readers work harder to understand characters. "The writer doesn't give you a coherent, complete, easily understandable 'stereotype' account of that person — quite the opposite," he says. A book like Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice or Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment "gives you contradictory information. It shows the person behaving in ways that are not easily interpretable, or at least interpretable in many different ways. By doing so, and not giving you the whole picture, it forces you as a reader to contribute your own interpretations, to reconstruct the mind of the character."

 

[Rune]

Those of us with English Lit degrees already know this. It's really the only thing they're good for.

 

[Kramodlog]

Still more useful than psychology.

 

[delericho]

Eh. Replace "literary" with "good", and they might be on to something. But the only reason older books seem better than the new ones is that the vast majority have disappeared without a trace - only the very very good and the hilariously bad survive.

Charlotte Bronte detested Austen's works. And Dumas was the Robert Jordan of his day - his early work was exceptional, but then his Musketeer series bloats out of all control (probably because he was paid by the word).

 

[Kramodlog]

Eh. Replace "literary" with "good", and they might be on to something. But the only reason older books seem better than the new ones is that the vast majority have disappeared without a trace - only the very very good and the hilariously bad survive.

Charlotte Bronte detested Austen's works. And Dumas was the Robert Jordan of his day - his early work was exceptional, but then his Musketeer series bloats out of all control (probably because he was paid by the word).

Whoa there, cowboy. No one said that older books are better.

 

[delericho]

Whoa there, cowboy. No one said that older books are better.

The article draws a distinction between "literary" and "popular or commercial" fiction, and holds up Austen as an example of the former. But Austen was the popular, commercial fiction of her time. (And Dickens, and Dumas, even moreso.)

But that creates a problem for the article, because then what's the distinction? It can't be simply a literary/commercial distinction, because what we term literature now was commercial fiction. It can't simply be genre, because there are good and bad examples of many (if not all) genres. It can't even be quality, since as I noted no less a figure than Charlotte Bronte dismissed Austen's work (and, actually, even Austen herself wasn't always complimentary about it either - though that could of course have simply been modest self-deprecation).

(Mostly, though, you're right. This is one of my hot-button topics, after one too many conversations with my grandfather in which he outright dismissed anything written after 1900 as not being worth reading. He's a smart guy, my grandfather, but when he gets something wrong he tends to get it very wrong. So, I apologise for coming out all guns blazing. )

 

[Kramodlog]

The article draws a distinction between "literary" and "popular or commercial" fiction,

Yes.

and holds up Austen as an example of the former.

Yes.

But Austen was the popular, commercial fiction of her time. (And Dickens, and Dumas, even moreso.)

End?

But that creates a problem for the article,

Not really. Cause You still need to be a quality book. You are ignoring the implicite quality critieria.

 

[delericho]

Yes.
Yes.
End?

The distinction the article draws doesn't work. Austen is a bad example for distinguishing "literary" from "popular or commercial" fiction because Austen was "popular or commercial" fiction.

Not really. Cause You still need to be a quality book. You are ignoring the implicite quality critieria.

Read my first post again:

Replace "literary" with "good", and they might be on to something.

The article says nothing about quality. It merely picks two classic novels, and declares them to contain more character ambiguities than some unnamed popular (and, incidentally, modern) fiction.

(Incidentally, it's also factually wrong. Virtually every novel in the 'mystery' genre must provide contradictory information and ambiguous characters. Otherwise, there's no mystery. Sure, our protagonist might be a "tough guy with a heart of gold", but is that really so different from "Emma", a spoiled, foolish girl who spends almost the entire novel doing spoiled, foolish things?)

 

[Kramodlog]

Meh, if you want to pretend there is no distinction between what R.A. Salvator writes and what Michel Houellebecq writes, I can't do anything about it.

 

[Nellisir]

The problem with this study is that I. Don't. Care.

I've read "literary" fiction. I've read genre fiction (though it seems to me that literary ought to be a genre). I consistently enjoy genre more than I enjoy literary fiction. Maybe the lesson here is that genre fiction can stand to make more nuanced characters.

And I understand and mostly agree with Delericho's point, though I think it's mostly a flaw in the article. Old stuff is better and stronger because the stuff that wasn't better and stronger became trash.