Here is a question for you guys...

Here is a question for you guys, it is a general question but we'll constrain it to literature for the purposes of easier discussion.

Do people avoid literary fiction because it's complex, or abstract, not conducive to immediate gratification, etc, or do they avoid it because the content it deals with is perceived as boring, mundane, nonspectacular,etc?

Here is a rabble-rousing quotation that will hopefully jerk knees from some fool woman time has forgot that Bourdieu once used in an essay to make his position look a little more aloof and considerate.

'In the past, the masses did not have access to art; music, painting, and even books, were pleasures reserved for the rich. It might have been supposed that the poor, the "common people", would have enjoyed them equally, if they had had the chance. But now that everyone can read, go to museums, listen to great music, at least on the radio [lel], the judgment of the masses about things has become a reality and through this it has become clear that great art is not a direct sensuous pleasure. Otherwise, like cookies or cocktails, it would flatter uneducated taste as much as cultured taste.' - Suzanne Langer

Now more than ever we live in a world where one can savour the fruits of the greatest artistic achievement of every epoch, and yet most people content themselves with Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, The Hunger Games, etc. And most of these people are by no means entirely ignorant, they know how to budget, they've been to college and done some piece of shit degree in business administration or computer science that at least demonstrates they are capable of developing their thought in a specific conceptual field. Is it really as simple as saying that literary fiction lies above the majority of these people's abilities? Is it the fault of education and of teachers who have no real passion for the subject for not instilling in young people enough of a lasting impression of great works of literature? Is the content of literary fiction itself an aesthetic dead end, an antiquarian exercise in abstraction now long past its prime?

literature and 'real art' are hard
requires effort and time
the modern working man has none.

The most obvious answer is that most people just see it as BORING. Perhaps it is too complex for them, but the feeling when they read it is not "wow, this is so above my intellectual capabilities, I better go with something easier" but rather "wow, this is a whole bunch of nothing". Literary fiction often gives people the impression they are hardly reading a story but rather mundane, repetitive sentences that don't flow from one to the next.

It's kind of like those high-brow movies where the majority of the screentime is metaphors which are meant to show a character's inner emotions and psychosis...They may not get it, but overall they feel like nothing significant is actually happening.

Is that Benidorm?

You should read Bourdieu.

Literary fiction is, like everything, great on paper, terrible in practice.

It's all sheltered, boring MFA students, fueled by this completely unsubstantiated sense of the "importance" (by whatever the fuck metric they're using) of literature.

>Literary fiction is, like everything, great on paper, terrible in practice.

Well... great paradox, lad.

people see it as boring and not worth their time. What "value" does literature bring to the average man's life? He doesn't wrestle with questions of existential import, so literature isn't necessary for him. He views life as something to be made as comfortable and easy as possible. Literature, I've found, is an antidote, and some people just don't have the disease. the disease of thinking. Also, bonita chica

toca de aca gallego boludo y la desempleada concha de tu madre

>Is it really as simple as saying that literary fiction lies above the majority of these people's abilities?
Yes.

It's just negative stigma. Same reason people avoid going to the gym or traveling, there's a stigma around the activity that makes it seem more inaccessible than it actually is.
I used to avoid Dostoyevsky like the plague, was intimidated by Camus, and considered Hemingway to be highbrow. Looking back I find that all to be a bit silly because they're all so accessible, but you recc their work to someone that doesn't read and they think you're being a pretentious intellectual because the stigma that comes with classic literature

>touch of the galician jerk and the unemployed shell of your mother

I dont speak espanol, and I dont appreciate this insult

>I used to avoid Dostoyevsky like the plague, was intimidated by Camus, and considered Hemingway to be highbrow.

That's not a stigma, m8.

Andate a la concha de tu hermana, indio bobo.

People are too busy with instant gratification, we are animals like that. You have to understand culture to appreciate art or else a painting will be merely a 2D composition of colours resembling something or sometimes nothing discernible. A book will just be a narrative. Movies will just be a story mediated by a screen and so on. Their only appreciation is the immediate sensual stimulation.

TL;DR Cultural understanding and enjoyment is only for the initiated.

Let's not pretend that other media don't have an effect on reading. People still, to this day, in 2014, watch hours of television a day. Then there's the internet. I know it's a boring answer, but come on. There's only so much time in a day and if you're spending so much of it with other media, you aren't going to be cut out for the kind of focused reading that classical literature demands.

>go to the shell of your sister, silly indian

I ain't no damned injun, and my sister definitely ain't got-ta shell

Give us an example of this literary fiction so we know what to avoid.

Bullshit nigga. I just went out to the field for two weeks working 24 hours straight and read multiple books.

>the content it deals with is perceived as boring, mundane, nonspectacular,etc?

This kept me away from literary fiction for a long time. Why read about boring people having pointless affairs when I could read adventure stories in interesting or exotic settings? Why spend my limited free time reading about someone living in mundane, crushing poverty when I could be exploring entirely new worlds?

Literature is a mental investment. It takes energy. You must engage with it, bring something to it, it's fun but like all intellectual pursuits it's also work.

Consider that everyone has a limited amount of mental energy and an infinite number of things to potentially spend it upon. You choose to read literature. Do you study musical composition, art, painting, do you practice carpentry, play a sport, play chess, play go, collect music, follow politics, bird-watch, bug-catch, garden, program, brew, cook, fix autos? Maybe you do some of these things but surely not all of them.

Non-enjoyment of literature does not suggest a defect on someone's part, certainly not on literature's part, it merely suggests these people choose to dedicate the surplus of the mental energy to other pursuits.

You look at the common interests of people and see nothing but crassness and coarseness but that's because the common pursuits are necessarily the easiest and the most diverting, therefore the most universal, they're the "cookies and cocktails" of the mind. Hobbies, the things people find true passion in, are as infinitely diverse as the varieties of the human minds that pursue them.

The honest truth is that metaphor and abstraction are not very interesting, most of the time.

I used to read for leisure, when I was in high school, until I realized it was a waste a time. Now I only read non fiction and scientific journals as they are useful and may be of importance in my career progression.

Oh yeh, I dabbled in philosophical works when I was plagued by existential angst but I'm ok now so feel no particular need to indulge in those either. Essentially I feel like people read according to their needs, and most people don't particularly have thoughts about big unimportant questions t b h

Literature is an elite activity. Most of these uppity plebs would have been starving illiterate peasants in pretty much every other age. Just ignore them.

You can find metaphors in daily speech all the time. How is that not interesting?

No one has mentioned a single book of this category ITT, there are no examples or proof to verify what is being said. This is like selling ocean front property on the moon, it's the ramblings of a lunatic, nothing more. Come back when you have something to show. Protip: You can't, because literary fiction does not exist. Literary fiction is as flat as the earth. It is a fable to frighten small children and motivate them to football practice. You'd sooner get cucked by St. Nicholas than encounter a single one of the species.

You're such a badass. Can I hang out with you in the lunch time?

No, it's largely the same shit that people pretend holds great insight. Even going so far as to analyse it in such a way that amounts to just making up simplistic shit that masquerades as complex and deep, and assigning it to parts of the work, almost at random. I personally enjoy much of so-called "literary fiction" but there is no real difference between it and some generic, fantasy adventure story for teens. I think it is largely a ploy for certain people to segregate themselves, to feel special and superior. Probably originating from so-called intellectuals, to disparage public and normal interest in such things as shallow and separate from their superior deepness. On the other hand, this might initially have been born for economic reasons. To render a work or styles of works popular, as to be successful as authors and publishers. We've just inherited these things from the past.

As to supposed popular "genre fiction" being somehow below, I don't really see it. The focus is different, more on narrative and setting as opposed to "insight". But that's just the foreground swapping, there is no difference between them.

Literature can be overwhelming. There are ways to express yourself without constantly using abstract words that are only used by people with a very high intellect. With that being said, it's possible to blend basic words with more complex words in a way that doesn't come off as pretentious or like the writer is an abstract walking dictionary.

/thread

I don't think people really know it exists. They don't know they're missing anything. People who only read genre fiction just think that what they read has the same sort of artistic merit that a lit classic has, and they have no reason to believe otherwise. They get tired of cliche plots and bad writing just like everyone, and they crave good art, but they don't know that there's a deeper level to the whole thing.

And it's what you're saying, that basically literary fiction is inaccessible and hard to get into, even the entry level stuff. That's obviously not a hurdle everyone can overcome, but if we're talking about educated, generally intelligent people, people with business degrees and comp sci degrees, they could and would put in the effort necessary if only they had any clue what was out there.

I think the real problem is that, at least in America, people grow up thinking either that all art is equal or that there is good and bad art but it's completely subjective. There is no common idea that a person's taste should "evolve" because art is all seen as equal in the first place. The thing is that the way you enjoy literary fiction vs. the way you enjoy genre fiction is typologically different. It's not a difference in quality, it's a difference in type, in the way a work is meant to be enjoyed. It's meaning, ideas, and aesthetic vs. plot. People think all art is equal and they never learn that some art is meant to be enjoyed in a different way. University helps some people learn this idea, and it fails most others. The university strategy is to make the student do so many essays that the understanding and enjoyment comes intuitively, but I think we both recognize this has a pretty high failure rate. The Veeky Forums strategy is to call people plebs until they ascend. I imagine that for every poster this works on, a dozen others react negatively, some of whom might even rebound and go in the other direction, calling anything outside of their comfort zone pretentious.

>Now more than ever we live in a world where one can savour the fruits of the greatest artistic achievement of every epoch, and yet most people content themselves with Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, The Hunger Games, etc. And most of these people are by no means entirely ignorant, they know how to budget, they've been to college and done some piece of shit degree in business administration or computer science that at least demonstrates they are capable of developing their thought in a specific conceptual field. Is it really as simple as saying that literary fiction lies above the majority of these people's abilities?

I wonder if people say this about me with regards to pseudo-science (science) and pleb tier sudoku puzzles (math). I suck at this shit, maybe some people just have low aptitude and no time for lit fic. I get its important but hey maybe they have thuper calculation probababilitieth to tholve.

Personality in my Veeky Forums, I'm cracking up

what eventually made you come around?

how do I get into "literary fiction"?