Literature vs popular fiction

One is considered "high art", and the other part of lowly "popular culture", but what is the difference in content?

rape ass

Literature is just popular fiction. It's written first as popular fiction, to make money, to pay the apartment bills, to give the author some justification for their career, and to be read by other readers, only the author happens to be better at writing than most of the other popular fiction writers out there, so it happens that critics and snooty people years later call it literature.  You don't write something saying it's literature the same way you don't write something saying it's great.  You write it first, and then it gets judged by others over time, even if that judgment is subjective.  Twain just wanted to get paid for his magazine stories.  Shakespeare just wanted to make a bunch of dick and fart jokes in front of peasants without getting beheaded by the queen.  The novels you were made to read in school were just novels at one point, to be read casually like every other novel, and they just happened to be called better than 99% of all the other shit out there some years later.

I find that literature is something that has wonderful prose ,a great theme and philosophical. Popular fiction is a form of literature ,but their themes are clouded with a huge audience and their philosophy is twisted and amorphous.

>>3
Superior post to mine
>>4

>>3
You don't write something saying it's literature the same way you don't write something saying it's great.
Both of these actually not true in several cases.

There's definitely a difference between literature and popular fiction. It's hard to define the difference, but that doesn't mean one can say that there isn't a differnece.

There is no difference.  All fiction is literature.  At certain times critics of dubious credentials take it upon themselves to state that one specific book is better than others, and it is usually selected for political reasons independent of the quality of the story, characters, or prose.

>>4
A popular genre book can have a better prose than a "literary" novel, just as the philosophy of of "literary" noel can be more twisted than a popular one.  It's all subjective.

How can a books audience cloud it's theme?  If a lauded, literary novel gains a mass audience do it's themes become clouded?  Your statement just seems a little pretentious.

>>9

Yeah, novels that win the Booker Prize in the Commonwealth or the Akutagawa Prize in Japan get huge sales.

Someone once described the difference between an arthouse film and a "Hollywood" film as arthouse films are designed to get you to think, whereas mainstream films are designed to get you to feel. Or something to that effect.

I think it is the same with all artforms, especially books. Appealing to emotion is popular in mainstream fiction.

I also find that the books classified as "literature" in the bookstore are often not genre books. Not action or science-fiction in any mass entertainment sense, not fantasy, not crime thriller.

As Michael Chabon has pointed out, the literary community is guilty of pushing genre aside in favour of small dramatic stories or allegories, etc.

>>10
Personally I hate most art house movies I see, and I hate most Hollywood movies I see.  The difference is that Hollywood movies are honest about jut wanting to give you a few cheap thrills, whereas art house movies compensate for being dull and ponderous under the guise of being "intellectual". 

Most movies (arthouse or Hollywood) are crap, just like most books ("literary" or genre) are crap, let's say 95%.  The difference is that art house movies and "literary" books get judged for the 5% that are good while hollywood movies and genre books get judged for the 95% that are crap.  I don't even think the comparison is perfect, as I'd say there are plenty of genre books designed to make the reader think.

Still, what is deep or meaningful is all subjective.

"Maybe in true literary fiction there is not a story and the focus is entirely style. If this is the case then I am beginning to think that I don't like true literary fiction very much at all. Nothing happens. The characters spend the entire book smugly making clever jokes to themselves for the reader to admire from a distance. There is usually much evidence of literary knowledge, and this is paraded at every opportunity, so that readers with a similar education can smirk knowingly and feel included in some special smug club. I sometimes come across books like this, and after a few pages I throw them down - and once, after being particularly annoyed, threw one particular book right across the room. It landed cover side down and was completely undamaged. Now that, it occurs to me, is probably something you can't do with a Kindle."

http://keeperofthesnails.blogspot.com/2009/07/what-is-literary-fiction.html

>>9
It's all subjective.
Not really. Some people have much better judgment than others.

>>12
Thinks for linking to some shitty blog I don't care about and won't read.

>>13
This.

>>15
Your is probably terrible just fyi

>>13
>>15
And how exactly is this determined when it comes to matters of taste?

You can't "prove" that one work of art is better than another.

The "think and feel" approach seems to be the most logical. Most classics are very simple stories that don't show as much creativity or magic as popular fiction. Frankenstein has a person being made out of corpses but the rest of the cast is awful plain except for Victor. But Harry Potter has a ton more fantasy to it with a larger cast of more interesting characters. So what's the difference? Frankenstein is supposed to make you think.

It's also possible that back when the "classics" were published they were popular fiction just like a James Patterson or Stephen King book and a century later we assume it was written to be much more than it is. It's easy to give a story more meaning than what it intended.

There's also the sense of beauty and the audience. A book that tells a mentally riveting tale is often times considered beautiful and therefore a classic. But what if the audience is a bunch of stupid hicks?

It's possible one reason popular books today aren't considered a classic is that we can't imagine a book to be classical if so many common, un-scholarly people enjoy it. Classical books are usually introduced to us in school and college, not at a Barnes and Noble or Book's a Million. Back when titles such as Jane Erye or The Bell Jar were released I'm sure there were a bunch of unwashed masses who read it but we don't think about that now.
This might be highly unrealistic but I'm just throwing it out there as one of many reasons.

>>17
You can't "prove" that one work of art is better than another.
Not important. The critic still knows

The "think and feel" approach seems to be the most logical. Most classics are very simple stories that don't show as much creativity or magic as popular fiction. Frankenstein has a person being made out of corpses but the rest of the cast is awful plain except for Victor. But Harry Potter has a ton more fantasy to it with a larger cast of more interesting characters. So what's the difference? Frankenstein is supposed to make you think.

I'll throw in something else.  Not only does literature make you think, it makes you think about the world you live in.  Furthermore, it makes US think about the world the writers lived in; in effect, it acts as an artifact of the world it inhibits.  Harry Potter may have more interesting characters, but in the end, it's just another bildungsroman that reveals little to nothing about the world the author inhabits; what's more interesting about Harry Potter is that it was, for the target audience, a book you read because your friends read it, not because you really wanted to read it.

When Shelley wrote Frankenstein (or as the subtitle calls it, "The Modern Prometheus"), one of the big fears of the early 1800s was that Man was advancing in Industry and Science too quickly, stepping into the shoes of God, a theme that runs even to this day.  What makes the story so enduring is not, as the quoted poster said, the characters (only Victor and the creature are at all interesting), but the theme behind it.  It's not an original anxiety, but it's presented in a fairly original way that makes it more presentable to your average reader.

>>21
A nice specific example of what I said, very interesting. But I never said it was the characters just that there is a clear difference between the numbers of "interesting" characters in classics and popular fiction. How it makes you think and what it makes you think of is something we both agree on and you did a good job picking something specific and well thought out.

While Harry Potter may be a bildungsroman I do not believe that its failure to describe the author's world is a reason it is not considered a classic. When I read a book I hardly think about the author's world or how they were living, I think purely about the world of the story that they created. The problem is that HP is not a universal bildungsroman, most of the issues are caused by magic and solved with magic so how can the audience relate exactly to such fantastical situations?

I also agree that friends are a major reason to start reading a book but the book itself, especially if its part of a series, is what keeps the reader involved. If the first volume of a book was poor I surely would not pick up the second volume.

>>22

Of course, I also happen to like the Harry Potter series, so I'm going to backpedal on my previous statement.  I can find a lot of analyze about them, and maybe, like the books by Charles Dickens, they will become classics.  Even with something as fantastical as magic, one can approach it from an angle of ethics and morality.  Magic, after all, is merely another sort of power, so a lively reader would see how power is being used by the various characters in the series.  Rowling DOES make comments about the human condition in various places, I think, and makes those comments more complex as her characters age.

In this sense, even popular fiction like Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe can become high literature...given time.  I think one of the criteria is that the book has to be enjoyable long after its intended audience is long gone...or one whose intended audience never goes away.

However, I'm usually willing to give a series a go, even if the first book was poor: after all, writers improve, and it's a joy for the reader to see a writer improving at his or her craft.  For example, The Hobbit was no indicator of how far Tolkien would go into the world of Middle-Earth, and even Pratchett has said once or twice that people who're new to Discworld shouldn't start with The Colour of Magic.

Literature has themes open for discussion and analysis, popular fiction is strictly entertainment and there is no deeper meaning behind the text. Also, literature would show better use of language.

But popular fiction can become literature.  Just ask Dickens, Twain, and Stevenson.

>>25
Dickens most popular work was also his worst hahaahf

Literature: not commercial. Language is layered and beautiful, it is clear that the author has a vast vocabulary and goes through multiple drafts. Read by intellectuals who enjoy a challenging read. Exists first and foremost as art. Contains complex themes. Regularly contains one ambiguous element which opens the story to multiple interpretations. Regularly reminds you of the harshness of reality.

Pop fiction: commercial. Language is dumbed down to appeal to the lowest common denominator of readers (that's why children's books like Twilight and Harry Potter sell so well). Exists to make a quick buck. Contains no themes or very obvious themes such as "genocide is bad." Regularly formulaic. Nothing is ambiguous about the story or open to interpretation. Regularly provides escapism with an unrealistic and happy ending.

god damn, I'm never going back to /lit/, this place has real fucking discussions.

>>25
not every book that's popular is awful. Very rarely real literature does make it onto the New York Times best seller list.

Popular fiction can become literature, but once it does, it'll never be the same popular fiction as it was before. Expect new editions with little critic's explanations tucked into every page, holding your hand and spoon-feeding you unwanted details about the author's Freudian complexes and penis size.

Somehow sounds like getting syphilis. Dunno why. D:

Example: literature- Lem's works, popular fiction- the rest of sci-fi.

everything that language produces is a fiction.  even our senses only produce fiction.  when two people see, touch, hear, taste, or smell the same thing both of their experiences are different, to some degree.  we can never know reality or be sure what something, whether an object, event, or work of writing, means the same thing to us as it does to others.  there is no reality that we can ever be certain of.

>>36
that philosophy degree not working out for you?

>>37

philosophy runs through everything, though it is not the focus of my bs, ma, or in progress phd

>>38
philosophy doesn't run shit faggot

>>39
exposed