Ursula K. Le Guin On Literature Versus Genre

Ursula K. Le Guin

What is the difference between genre and literature? Here's what Ursula K. Le Guin has to say about it:

I keep telling myself that I’m done writing about Literature vs Genre, that that vampire is buried at the crossroads with a stake in its heart and garlic in its coffin. And then it pops up again, undead. Its latest revival is a cheery one in an entertaining article, “Easy Writers,” in the May 28 New Yorker by Arthur Krystal, who discusses the literature/genre divide and while seeming to make light of it does a pretty thorough job of perpetuating it.

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If we thought of all fictional genres as literature, we’d be done with the time-wasting, ill-natured diatribes and sneers against popular novelists who don’t write by the rules of realism, the banning of imaginative writing from MFA writing courses, the failure of so many English teachers to teach what people actually read, and the endless, silly apologising for actually reading it.

If critics and teachers gave up insisting that one kind of literature is the only one worth reading, it would free up a lot of time for them to think about the different things novels do and how they do it, and above all, to consider why certain individual books in every genre are, have been for centuries, and will continue to be more worth reading than most of the others.

You can read the rest of her excellent article here: Le Guin’s Hypothesis. Thanks to the Passive Voice Blog for bringing Ms. Le Guin's post to my attention.

This is completely off topic, but Ursula K. Le Guin was born in 1929 which, by my calculations, makes her 84 this year. She is one amazing lady. I think I need to re-read her book The Left Hand Of Darkness.