And for what it’s worth, I knew Sir Art personally–he was in my ward. He was a pompous windbag who was always asking the bishop to let him speak so he could harangue the Americans on our misuse of English vocabulary. It doesn’t surprise me that he didn’t have enough imagination or complexity to realize that literature extended beyond a misogynist Brit.

Some people don’t care for complications. I’ve been fascinated, following their discussions.

The standards one is much more of a difficulty — the recent hornet’s nest posts at LDS Publisher are good examples of that.

Good heavens! I had no idea this was all going on. I’m completely fascinated on about seventeen different levels.

my perception is that the divide is only there between the “literary” and the “genre” because the persons who identify as literary identify as ARTISTES

Oh, sure, but I don’t perceive this is a big issue for Mormon writers and readers because most of them, in my experience, don’t worry about that divide — in fact that’s well-reflected by Zarahemla’s roster of books published/announced so far — we have a horror novel, a literary fiction novel (with some romance elements), a collection of literary fiction short stories (plus a novella that includes some spec-fic elements), an autobiographical memoir that’s somewhat literary, a memoir that’s literary, a horror/fantasy novel, and later this year a classic literary fiction novel.

For many (most?) Mormons who read/write, genre is a valid — even more valid — way to be able to explore Mormon themes in ways that literary fiction (or at least salable lit) might not allow. Both Orson Scott Card and David Farland turned from literary fiction to genre fiction. Many of the AML crowd write (or have written) both “literary” and “genre” work.

I get where you are coming from, MoJo, but I don’t think that it’s as much of an issue in Mormon culture as it is with the American culture. The standards one is much more of a difficulty — the recent hornet’s nest posts at LDS Publisher are good examples of that.

that the divide is only there between the “literary” and the “genre” because the persons who identify as literary identify as ARTISTES and therefore make value judgments on the art/craft/work of those who do not–or those whose work they deem not to rise to some nebulous level of art/skill/craft whatever–and those who write anything else are “less worthy,” “unclean,” “impure” or otherwise from the wrong side of the tracks.

I don’t think that’s the case at all.

I had a friend in my last ward who told me that she liked to read. She was home a lot with debilitating headaches, so I thought I’d bring her some books every once in a while to keep her entertained. She told me she mostly liked historical fiction, so I looked through what I had to see what she might enjoy. Most of my collection is pretty far out there. I settled on C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces. because I thought it was pretty accessible.

She really didn’t like it. She told me she appreciated my generosity but it was just “too weird” and she preferred reading things that weren’t so philosophical.

I think there are definite tastes that separate genre fiction from literary fiction. There are a lot of people who don’t particularly enjoy reading deeply symbolic or philosophical writing, and it’s not snobbery on our part that makes it so.

I think my comments earlier in this discussion comparing Stephenie Meyer to J.K. Rowling illustrate the fact that I don’t consider myself an “artiste” and I’m not just looking down on the books because I find them literarily “impure.”

Add in the “Mormon” and “Mormon standards” and “moral” qualifiers and, well…

There have been a whole series of anecdotal evidences that Mormon women (both young and older, married and unmarried) have had their perceptions of male-female romantic relations changed by the Twilight books.

And: genre audiences ARE (or can be — there is, of course, overlap) different from literary audiences. I’m not entirely sure about what that really means in terms of how various readers read various titles.

It really all gets back to concerns about reading fiction (way back), about the effects of film (not as far back), and about the effects of video games (fairly recent).

I’m not fond of the hand-wringing and hysterical moralizing. On the other hand, I think the “it’s just entertainment” line doesn’t work either. If, for example, Hollywood execs think that their works don’t have any influence whatsoever on behavior then why do they also buy advertising?