Can fiction be considered literary fiction just by virtue of having excellent prose...

Can fiction be considered literary fiction just by virtue of having excellent prose? Or does it have to have le sophisticated narrative and le complex hemes?

Focus on character development rather than plot. Not writing in an established universe like a fantasy or scifi setting.

Probably. It's not a rigidly defined concept.

Fiction is considered literary if it is considered a form of art. Naturally, there is some measure of subjectivity in this. Nevertheless, academia and critics are for the most part in agreement on which works from hundreds of years ago are worth reading because of their literary merit.

Excellent prose is also fairly subjective, ultimately it is one tool in a writer's repertoire to convey their feelings, others being themes, characters, choice of imagery. Ultimately, as with all art, time will tell which works are literary and which are mere genre fiction or popular garbage.

No. As soon as you follow the set pattern and schema of a certain genre nothing can save you.

Do something to change things a bit. See what Auster does in City of Glass, for example: he takes a typical detective novel and adds an interesting twist to it by making the mystery a metaphysical issue instead of a simple whodunit issue.

Experiment a bit with the convention if you don't want to be labeled a genre author.

Do you mean to say that genre fiction cannot be literary? What a lot of myopic rubbish.

Good prose (evocative, fluid, felicitous, mellifluous) is an element of style and a literary device in itself.

I am saying fancy prose is not enough to make a genre story literary. You need more.

Would Harry Potter hold any more literary merit if it had fancy prose? No, it would still be utter shit. Would The Name of the Wind hold any more literary merit if it had fancy prose? No, it would still be utter shit. And so on and so on.

Harry Potter would have more literary merit with better prose. You can shine a turd of a plot with good writing. Is plot even that important?

The flight from cliche is the biggest cliche, faggot

You know what I think would happen if Harry Potter had good prose? It would be considered a pretentious piece of try-hard YA crap written in purple prose to hide the lack of depth in characterisation, themes, or innovation, originality etc. That, or an aesthetic experiment of the author. And mind you, the author would have to make it clear that it is merely an experiment, if it even got published, to avoid being labeled as pretentious. The way we have it now, it's a normal children/YA lit.

Style does help, but if you apply let's say Joycean style to something as vapid as a John Green novel you get nothing but an art or art's sake stylistic exercise, because there's nothing under the prose. This is what pleb Coelho thinks is the case with Ulysses, but he obviously hasn't even read the novel.

IMO It would actually be better for the genre author to work on doing something like the thing I explained here instead of being just flowery. It would add more depth to the work. They can work on language and lyricism later.

That's how I see it, at least. And I say all this as someone who values good prose style.

>subversion and innovation are a flight from the cliche

You just called people like Fowles or Pynchon, for example, cliche.

Way to out yourself, pleb.

Originality for the sake of originality is what occupies that thoughts of middle-class teenagers. Pynchon and Fowles were actually, you know, *good*

>Pynchon and Fowles were actually, you know, *good*
>unnecessary italics
cringe

>cringe
are you a woman?

no
>inb4 then you must be a numale I'm so clever and funny

alright so I get the sense that this user is barely holding it together

And they were good because the did something of refreshing quality with what they had instead of parroting things, you moron. They discussed important things by means of subversion and originality. That's why I am saying.

>fancy prose
>necessarily good or literary

They aren't good *because* they were original, though

I had a freshman hallmate that wrote gibberish poetry. That's original and it sucks

Have you read a thing that I said in this thread? I don't think so, because I never said fancy prose alone makes anything literary. I said there are many more important things.

You know, when I say what I say I also imply that their skill, talent, hard work and knowledge enabled them to do what they did. I should not have to state that explicitly.

Also, don't be sexist, user.

t.

Genre fiction is formulaic.

no, bad fiction is formulaic. it's just that a lot of genre fiction is bad.

This.
Genre fiction is formulaic. That's why everyone shits on it. It's generic, liner, repetitive, provokes no thought and has nothing to offer to literature besides endless regurgitation of a well defined pattern.

You can read genre all you want, just don't try and sell it to me as something literary because it's got fancy words.

Epics are formulaic. Well the ones that were orally composed anyway.

Except epics are also: deep thought provoking; offering insight into history; offering insight into the tradition of the cultures that produced them; touching upon universal themes of our nature etc.

Not to mention that the vast, vast majority of artistic and philosophical achievements to this day draw inspiration and influence from those epics.

Anything genre that did anything remotely similar to that is LotR, and even its influence is nothing compared to the influence of an epic such as Beowulf or the Eddas or Homer or Kalevala (without all of which LotR wouldn't even be what it is and thus the entire genre would be even vapid than it is now).

your argument is generic, liner, repetitive, provokes no thought and has nothing to offer to literature besides endless regurgitation of a well defined pattern.