I would like to preface this commentary post by stating, I enjoy popular fiction; I unabashedly devour popular fiction or pulp fiction, with a particular taste for prose about outsiders overcoming societal pressures and finding acceptance. But what is pulp fiction?
No, not the 1994 Quentin Tarantino film about gangsters and the mob, but pulp fiction in a literary sense. Pulp fiction or popular fiction can be described as a field of study, wherein there exists the Popular Fiction field and the Literary Fiction field, reciprocal in their relationship, with each designated by their own conventions. Ken Gelder mentions that “Literature and popular fiction exist in a constant state of mutual repulsion and repudiation”. This idea that literature and popular fiction and culture are mutually exclusive is not new; this links to the age-old debate of “what is literature?” which we shall leave for another day – for there is not enough space or time in the blogosphere to enter that debate for now –
– but I digress. The ever elusive point – assumptions about popular fiction are based on beliefs about what popular culture is worth within society. Popular fiction has connotations of being ‘inferior’ to ‘true literature’, with some conversations about popular fiction often dripping with distain – “You read what? Why?” – Others feel a need to ‘legitimise’ popular fiction as ‘art’, but why? How have these views come about?
It is near impossible to discuss attitudes towards popular culture without mentioning husband and wife Frank Raymond Leavis and Queenie Dorothy Leavis, and the ‘Great Tradition’ in literary criticism. They suggested that it was only the minority of the educated few who were capable of appreciating art and literature – and the lowly, inferior majority needed to be told what they should read, watch or see, claiming that anything that was ‘popular’ was by that very characteristic, ‘inferior’ by default. This, quite frankly, elitist and snobbish attitude, sadly at least in part, endures today, with modern critiques of popular culture claiming it makes its audience ‘stupid’. Enter case and point –
The ad nauseam and ad infinitum need to apply a critical attitude when approaching popular fiction has occurred because of this categorisation of the Popular and Literary Fiction fields, with popular fiction unjustly critiqued against the Literary Fiction conventions, instead of their own. To add insult to injury, genre fiction has become synonymous with popular fiction, with terms such as ‘formulaic’ and ‘stereotypical’ thrown about, but what does this really mean, especially when Robert Briggs contends that “the very idea of genre is also accorded an ambivalent status”? ‘Genre’ basically is a term used to categorise the different “species”, as Briggs puts it, of literature, specifically the “different literary patterns or moods, such as comedy, tragedy, satire and romance”. But just because some popular fiction may follow a ‘formula’ in their structure, does this mean that all popular fiction does? Does this also mean that ‘Literature’, distinct from popular fiction, does not follow these formulas in structure? Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” is by most critics’ accounts, ‘Literature’, yet does it not also fit into the ‘Romance’ genre? Just something to think about.
For further information about the works referenced:
Gelder, Ken (2004) "Popular Fiction: The Opposite of Literature?" Popular Fiction: The Logics and Practices of a Literary Field Hoboken: Routledge pp. 11-39.
Briggs, Robert (2003) "Don't Fence Me In: Reading Beyond Genre" Senses of Cinema July 25, "http://sensesofcinema.com/2003/feature-articles/beyond_genre/".
Briggs, Robert
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