Up from the gutter-forms
I like this summation—grabbed real-time from a chat with Neil Gaiman over at the New Yorker:
Authors like Michael Chabon have been crusading for awhile to break down the barriers between so-called ‘literary fiction’ and ‘genre fiction’. Do you have any idea why literature remains so compartmentalized? Is there any end in sight?
Neil Gaiman: Honestly, I think the barriers are imaginary, the walls have already been breached and the key to literature in the early 21st century is one of confluence. There’s not much high and low culture any more: there’s just mingling streams of art and what matters is whether it’s good art or bad art. But then, I come from comics, and miss the days when it was a gutter art-form in which nobody was expected to make art; and think that SF was much more vibrant and relevant before they taught it in universities. Either way, Michael Chabon is a very wise man.
Mostly I like this part: “the key to literature in the early 21st century is one of confluence.”
[…] torn. On the one hand, you’ve got the Neal Gaiman quote Robin pulled: [T]he barriers [between so-called ‘literary fiction’ and ‘genre fiction’] are […]