Arts & Entertainment
Submitted by Greg on Sat, 03/29/2008 - 02:24.
No, I'm not talking about the A&E Channel. If you habitually watch A&E, I'm sorry.
In class today, we discussed interactive literature, hypertext media, and tried to understand why it never really "took off." It's hard to read a book that wants you to do more than read. I know that sounds silly, but a historical look can only confirm this.
The novel has not changed very much since the times of Jane Austen, Dickens, or Poe. Popular literature is very straightforward, there are a few twists, the characters are round, and the main character undergoes some sort of change by way of overcoming a conflict. The rules are not that hard to follow.
There is literature that attempts to do things otherwise, such as the short stories of Donald Barthelme, Italo Calvino--books that really change the way a person reads. But they are not popular in the least, and frankly, they do not sell. Why do you think there is an ever-shrinking "Fiction - Literature" section at Barnes & Noble? Genre fiction is what sells.
I hate to say this, but middle-aged women are the prime demographic for readership. Getting a book in Oprah's Book Club, for instance, guarantees a bestseller. Modernism in literary senses (Joyce, Elliot, Woolf) was an experiment, just like the work of Beat generation writers (Kerouac, Ginsberg), and other Postmodern works (Beckett, Vonnegut).
Today, you won't find many books written in stream of consciousness, or lacking grammar because it was "too constrictive," or books that are abstract because they don't need realistic pretenses. Those books don't sell. Artistic experiments, avant-garde projects, don't get through to popular culture. Harry Potter does.
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You have a good point
And in every medium of entertainment, including music, film and games, there's always going to be a steady mainstream that attracts the widest readership. You're right about Oprah's Book Club, by the way. If Oprah talks about it, it's going to sell--but I'm not sure that everything that's selling is mainstream genre-fiction. Tony Morrison's book appear at least once a year, it seems. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "Hundred Years of Solitude" is on there too, and so's Anna Karenina, Love in the Time of Cholera and Cry the Beloved Country.
Genre fiction is a lot more common that academic literature, but upon close scrutiny, sometimes the only key difference between genre fiction and "literature" is that genre fiction exists within pre-concieved notions of a setting or formula. Science-fiction, for example. Bradbury may have written science fiction, but his work is still considered literary. The same applies for J.R.R Tolkien and Asimov, whose works are still considered immensely popular today without necessarily being "cheapened" by a tag of genre fiction. And then there are more contemporary authors, whose works may or may not be considered literary depending on which critic you talk to, but are still considered respectable authors with real talent, like Neil Gaiman.
You're totally right about experimental works rarely making it into mainstream. Part of this might have something to do with an experimental author's contempt for the mainstream (Ezra Pound) and unapproachable complexity (Gravity's Rainbow). With regards to poetry, it's a very small aisle in the bookstore these days. Robert Frost and Rumi remain popular. "The Wasteland" does not. Again, I think it has to do with a sense of comfort (or lack thereof, in the case of Wasteland) that the reader feels.