Eric's Writing Blog

Moving back to LiveJournal

ericrosenfield — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 00:49:20 +0000

I’m officially moving my writing blog back to my livejournal. WordPress was an interesting experiment, but ultimately I think the social aspects of LiveJournal and the significant number of writers and book people on it make it a better platform for this kind of thing. Please update bookmarks, rss feeds, whatever you may have.

Literary Fiction as Anti-Definitional

ericrosenfield — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 21:30:37 +0000

I’m starting to think of literary fiction as a genre defined by absences. It encompasses books that can’t be too sexy, have too much plot, be too funny or zany, that cannot, in other words, be too fun.

Youxia

ericrosenfield — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 15:02:01 +0000

One book translated the ancient Chinese term “youxia” as “knights errant”. Another book translated the word as “gangster”.

Somewhat different perspectives on who these people were.

Alternate realities are here on Earth

ericrosenfield — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 14:36:39 +0000

Alternate realities exist here on Earth, and they’re very easy to find. Right here in my own country, I can travel to Burning Man, the Gathering of the Juggalos or a Tea Party rally and be in a completely different world from the one I usually inhabit, one where people have completely different cultural backgrounds and preconceptions and live in a completely different reality. Lord knows Glenn Beck lives in a different reality from me, one where the way government works and the nature of the constitution are totally unlike my world. Same goes for anyone who believes Raiki is effective, or thinks that that George Bush planned 9/11. These are radically different realities.

Tagged: alternate realities, politics, worldview

On Scott Pilgrim

ericrosenfield — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 16:13:19 +0000

(An excerpt from a longer piece I’m writing…)

Scott Pilgrim (both the comic and movie) mixes tropes of teen drama with the storytelling conventions of videogames to alarming effect, giving us a startling new perspective on the very old tropes of love, jealousy, dealing with your past, etc. However this is also an example of how one has to find something recognizable in the conventions in order for reinventing those conventions to have any meaning. Scott Pilgrim is necessarily generationally polarizing; older people who did not grow up with videogames do not understand it because the conventions of videogames have no meaning for them, and so mucking around with them has no resonance. For those of us who did grow up with videogames, however, Scott Pilgrim is pure, delirious joy, Barthes’ orgasmic jouissance.

Reading “Writing Degree Zero” by Roland Barthes

ericrosenfield — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 16:11:09 +0000

Writing, free in its beginnings, is finally the bond which links the writer to a History which is itself in chains: society stamps upon him the unmistakable signs of art so as to draw him along the more inescapably in its own process of alienation.

…

The conception of style as craftsmanship has produced a mode of sub-writing, derived from Flaubert, but adapted to the aims of the Naturalist school. This writing, which is that of Maupassant, Zola and Daudet and which could be called the realist mode of writing, is a combination of the formal signs of Literature (preterite, indirect speech, the rhythm of the written language) and of the no less formal signs of realism (incongruous snippets of popular speech, strong language or dialect words, etc.), so that no mode of writing was more artificial than that which set out to give the most accurate description of Nature. This is no mere stylistic failure but one of theory as well: there is, in the Naturalist aesthetic, a convention of the real, just as there is a fabrication in its writing.

Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero

Mainstream, Medium and Genre

ericrosenfield — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 11:18:06 +0000

The definition of “mainstream” changes from medium to medium. For example, in film “mainstream” refers to popular hollywood fare, and is dominated by genres like science fiction-fantasy-action/adventure (“tentpole” blockbusters), romance, comedy and so on. In comic books, mainstream refers to superheroes, and the strangeness of this one, odd little genre having so dominated an entire medium has been commented on in many quarters. In prose fiction, mainstream refers to literary fiction. Indeed, no other medium I can think of is so preoccupied with the status of “literary”-ness than prose fiction (though there have been some attempts in other media– for example, the critics who try to separate “film” from “movies”). This has, of course, everything to do with prose fiction’s particular history and audience, but it doesn’t make the attempt to separate “literature” from not-”literature” any less pernicious, causing, as it does, great work in “genre” fiction to often be sidelined by both large portions of the reading public and the academy (and thus often future generations as well as the present ones). The notion that the particular set of conventions that we call “literary” is somehow inherently better than those we call “genre” is absurd on the face of it, but it is so intricately wrapped up in signifiers of class and social status that we have trouble making out the absurdity. In fact, the very act of reading itself is a signifier of class and social status, and many people come to reading fiction for pleasure, often at an early age (when most of their peers are only reading what’s assigned to them), specifically because they want to see themselves as more refined and sophisticated than other people–in other words, of a higher status. I will be the first to admit that I am as guilty of this as anyone else, and one can see it in the derrogations of genre–a lashing out and defensiveness borne of my own guilt in enjoying the stuff–that made up many of the posts in the early years of this blog. I can’t think of any other whole medium so wound up in ideas of status.

Tagged: genre, medium

SF is the Other

ericrosenfield — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 19:42:06 +0000

To lit fic, sf is the Other: the weird jungle tribe regarded as primitive, suspected of cannibalism and in some cases exploited. (When Margaret Atwood takes the tropes of SF and claims she doesn’t write science fiction, SF people feel exploited– ie that they’ve had something taken from them without just compensation, in this case, credit.)

Which isn’t to say every literary fiction author is conventional and every genre fiction author is radical–far from it–but it is to say that the whole concept of a “literary” fiction vs. a non-”literary” fiction is wound up tightly and inescapably in concepts of bourgeois status, and maybe it’s just better to be in the jungle with the wild ones.

Tagged: criticism, genre, theory

Literature with a capital-L

ericrosenfield — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 18:33:07 +0000

Most definitions of Literature vs. non-Literature are necessarily vague and unsatisfying. The desire to draw a line between Literature and non-Literature is a bourgeois desire for status rather than any legitimate aesthetic analysis. Which isn’t to say that all fiction is equal or that aesthetic judgements can’t be made, only that the concept of Literature with a capital-L is not a useful or meaningful term.

EDIT: Or as Sartre put it: “Aesthetic purism was a brilliant maneuver of the bourgeois of the last century who preferred to see themselves denounced as philistines rather than as exploiters.” — from “What is Literature?”

Thinking about Marx

ericrosenfield — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 02:19:34 +0000

Marx talks about how the culture of the bourgeois is a culture designed to transform you into a machine — that is, a production machine. A revolutionary culture would then challenge bourgeois social norms.

John Clute remarked at ReaderCon that great literature should be dangerous (not original to him, I realize, but it got me thinking about it). Obviously one of the ways to be dangerous is to challenge social norms (and this observation is not original to me, I also realize). Marxism gives you a way to look at stories and ask if they are reinforcing social norms (be they capitalist, bourgeois, conservative or otherwise) or challenging them, and then ask if they are challenging them, are they doing it in an interesting way. In other words, what is this narrative saying in respect to social norms, in respect to societal values. Marxists dissected the Byronic hero of the 19th century as a symbol of bourguois decadence (and with good reason), but I think an equally interesting analysis could be made of the typical “underdog” style hero of today’s action-adventure-comedy-whathaveyou stories.

Just thinking out loud…