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Abalieno posted:On top of the fact that the "literature" genre, as Bakker says, in order to keep its own garden clean from contamination, in order to maintain a sense of identity and distinction from what outside and still claim a certain superiority, ends up endlessly repeating itself, and so just becoming trite redundancy. That's why within genre is even more likely to find something innovative. There are less rules, less requirements to respect, less boundaries. Less prejudices overall that censor the range of what you can write about and how. Genre fiction itself is made of endless contamination, and that's a good thing that will keep it relevant.
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Jul 9, 2016 12:35
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Lunchmeat Larry posted:
Oh I have nothing against long books, I just cannot help but notice literally every book he recommends is over 600 pages. Abalieno posted:This was brought up because The Vegetarian attempts certain things that are common in genre fiction, in the way it spins its metaphor. But readers who shun genre fiction of course don't know, and so applaud a weak book like this one and admire it because it's "haunting" even if its message is trite and shallow. For someone who exists without judgement or whatever this is a pretty radical and indefensibly prejudiced position to take about literature readers. What makes you think literary readers and writers don't know about genre fiction and the tropes of genre fiction? What makes you believe literature is locked into this little tower away from the genre peasants. What actual proof of this assertion do you have other than your own paranoia and the select blog posts of wildly insecure white men? Also will you quit calling the message trite and shallow when literally everyone else in this thread disagrees with what you say the message is? There have been several different meaningful interpretations that all give the story a much richer context than you are willing to give it, and yet you still assert your interpretation as the one "correct" one by a combination of sheer arrogance and fiat. Mel Mudkiper fucked around with this message at 15:06 on Jul 9, 2016 |
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Jul 9, 2016 14:50
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Mel Mudkiper posted:wildly insecure white men So now the discussion devolved into both sexist and racial attacks? quote:Also will you quit calling the message trite and shallow when literally everyone else in this thread disagrees with what you say the message is? Not sharing a popular opinion isn't a point of merit or demerit. The value is only in the motivations. The message is trite and shallow and I will repeat it because that's how I see it. It's not the number of people disagreeing that can convince me (especially in the form of the self-congratulatory circlejerk you entertain here), only the motivations. And right now those motivations didn't convince me. quote:There have been several different meaningful interpretations that all give the story a much richer context than you are willing to give it, and yet you still assert your interpretation as the one "correct" one by a combination of sheer arrogance and fiat. Huh? I never claimed my interpretation trumps everyone else's. I'll quote again myself: quote:As I said, THIS is interesting. Because if this interpretation is correct, its logic overwrites the simple "feminist" angle that I considered very weak and shallow. In this case, if this is correct, the feminist message is only a veil hiding a deeper undercurrent that is more pervasive and moves away from a simple critics of a certain society and gender roles. It actually removes the genders as the focus. It's more universal and a radical description of the whole world. Where's the "arrogance" in saying I interpret a story differently? No one discussed my interpretation, no one discussed yours either. It seems no one here felt like engaging with that richer context. It was mentioned briefly by you and then nothing. Everyone else was a lot more keen on commenting on the patriarchy, male predators and a feminist angle. I also went reading a number of official reviews from the more popular news sites and magazines online, and there's a hint of the same debate. For example here: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2016/02/han_kang_s_the_vegetarian_reviewed.html quote:Some reviews of The Vegetarian have insisted on viewing the novel as a piece of social protest, but this seems beside the point, unless the protest is against existence itself. There just doesn't seem to be this univocal consensus around this book. Abalieno fucked around with this message at 02:49 on Jul 10, 2016 |
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Jul 9, 2016 18:14
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Abalieno posted:So now the discussion devolved into both sexist and racial attacks? Lol OK Mudkiper out
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Jul 9, 2016 18:35
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Abalieno posted:So now the discussion devolved into both sexist and racial attacks?  
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Jul 9, 2016 21:02
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Dismissing an argument not on its merit but on the premise of gender and color of skin is both sexist and racist. If I claimed this book was awful and shallow by underlining it was written by a Korean woman that claim would have been equally sexist and racist. But of course I haven't done it because I don't think that way. Abalieno fucked around with this message at 21:13 on Jul 9, 2016 |
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Jul 9, 2016 21:07
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Misandrist Mudkipper
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Jul 9, 2016 21:29
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Abalieno posted:Dismissing an argument not on its merit but on the premise of gender and color of skin is both sexist and racist. Not if you're a white man, dingus lmao This guy's very first post in this thread was "this book won a prize because it is short and reviewers are lazy but want to look smart". Which is the most pretentious and loony thing anyone has said about a book iit, even the people mocking fantasy. I don't know why anyone is even humoring this poo poo at this point, the guy admitted he didn't even read the book right out of the gate.
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Jul 10, 2016 00:16
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Abalieno posted:On top of the fact that the "literature" genre, as Bakker says, in order to keep its own garden clean from contamination, in order to maintain a sense of identity and distinction from what outside and still claim a certain superiority, ends up endlessly repeating itself, and so just becoming trite redundancy. That's why within genre is even more likely to find something innovative. There are less rules, less requirements to respect, less boundaries. Less prejudices overall that censor the range of what you can write about and how. Genre fiction itself is made of endless contamination, and that's a good thing that will keep it relevant. Hello can you give some examples of this stuff happening in real life, thanks.
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Jul 10, 2016 01:38
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Guy A. Person posted:This guy's very first post in this thread was "this book won a prize because it is short and reviewers are lazy but want to look smart". Also people who like literary fiction are just trying to look smart, and people who think a fantasy author got his neuroscience wrong are just trying to look smart.
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Jul 11, 2016 12:14
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Hello fellow haters! I've developed one more arguments to discuss The Vegetarian from a different angle, joining it up with the scorn thrown at Donaldson and his Thomas Covenant. It is quite typical to see Thomas Covenant dismissed because the protagonist rapes a woman in the first book, and this is also conflated with a trope of fantasy as a genre. Some readers just reject that part, but I'm not sure they realize its deeper implications and the moral subtlety that derives. As in The Vegetarian, Thomas Covenant is trapped inside a dreamworld. This dreamworld is not a separate dimension, as if walking directly into another world. It's instead an internal landscape, a metaphor, that turns outside. Exactly as it happens to everyone of us when we dream: what is inside is projected outside. At that point in the story Thomas Covenant his angry at himself and his life. When he rapes this woman, he does it fully aware that this woman is "fictional", that she's a projection of his mind, and the violence of the act is not an act of violence to some other person, but to himself. The struggle that comes out of that scene is a "symbol" of the protagonist own internal struggle, and coming to terms with that act is a symbol of the conflict he lives. So this woman isn't a "woman", but she's a representation of an idea. A metaphor. One of Thomas Covenant own voices, taking shape as a person. Mirroring in fiction what happens in reality: a writer that puts on the pages these voices he find within himself, as if those voices are real, whispering to him. Thomas Covenant is himself the metaphor of the writer and writing. Exactly as in The Vegetarian the characters animate ideas. In The Vegetarian the frame of the story is not unlike Thomas Covenant. The woman is blocked into her dreamworld, a violent dreamworld that represents her own internal conflict. The same pattern is reproduced: the sublimation of an internal landscape made into a statement (to the reader). The premises are all the same, what changes is how the respective protagonist deals with that internal conflict. For the woman in the Vegetarian it's just going downward a spiral. There's no way to come to terms with her dreamworld. She never questions what she sees, she never enters in dialogue with it. She's just a passive observer of what happens to herself. The dreamworld dictates who she is and who she becomes. And her voice becomes the voice of the Dreamworld, she's lost to it. Whereas in Thomas Covenant that dreamworld is the place of a continuous struggle, of continuous self-observation, judgement and self-hatred that is pushed to its limit. It's, in the standard context of fantasy, a journey. A journey through a landscape that symbolizes a journey of the soul and its qualities. And it integrates a deep and complex epistemological discourse, because it implies that the persons you recognize beside yourself are just aspects you find already in yourself. Like Husserl's phenomenology, the world is built through an act of observation, all its moving parts are always internal. Same as in Von Foerster's constructivism. Which make Thomas Covenant "dream" as valid of moral implications as the real life. Which is why I find The Vegetarian "weak". The theme of the impossibility to escape the cycles of consumption, that the review brands as "the protest against existence itself", is a theme that is only hinted at. Many reviews don't even acknowledge it. So, for me, the moment the book becomes interesting and shows some actual complexity, it stops. It doesn't dare go further to explore what it is actually saying. It ends up described by many as "haunting" and "evocative", but meaning that it stays vague. It walks up to the edge, then turns. Leaving itself to readers' interpretations, that in this case end up so conflicting to be more like "misunderstandings". Instead, stepping slightly outside topic but back into that genre versus literature argument, I propose a quick challenge if there's someone who wants to take it. Read just one page of Malazan, and tell me what you think about it: http://www.tor.com/2016/04/04/excerpts-steven-erikson-malazan-fall-of-light-chapter-one/ Just that first section that ends *before* the first chapter. It's a single page, it doesn't require any previous knowledge of Malazan or Erikson, or fantasy as a genre. It's just a statement. Having read lots of reactions of various readers to the book, I'm not sure it is understood. That's for me something unprecedented in literature, and in fantasy as well. As a rarity within a rarity. And that, in just a page, contains a lot of what makes Malazan something part of the genre, while defying its boundaries. If you do, I'll then offer my interpretation, since I'm more used to Erikson, and will explain why it is that it does something unprecedented, that few readers seem to have understood.
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Jul 11, 2016 22:47
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Dude, if you didn't like The Vegetarian, and you like Fantasy, why are you wasting everyone's time posting in this thread, and not reading the new BOTM, which is relevant to you?
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Jul 11, 2016 23:30
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okay we've had our fun can we kick this guy out of the thread now
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Jul 11, 2016 23:54
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I didn't like The Vegetarian because it was not fantasy. And I'm not immediately interested in something just because it is. This discussion here is relevant to me, the one over there is not.
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Jul 11, 2016 23:56
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Abalieno posted:I didn't like The Vegetarian because it was not fantasy. And I'm not immediately interested in something just because it is. Hoookay, I don't want to shut down legitimate discussion but this is starting to sound like you're more interested in talking about Malazan than you are this book, and we have a separate thread for Malazan already. It's probably best if you take further discussion of Malazan to the Malazan thread instead of this one (feel free to start up a Donaldson thread if you want). I mean, feel free to talk about what you want but let's try to make sure posts in this thread for this book are at least 50% or more about this book.
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Jul 12, 2016 00:35
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Abalieno posted:Hello fellow haters! I've developed one more arguments to discuss The Vegetarian from a different angle, joining it up with the scorn thrown at Donaldson and his Thomas Covenant. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_6CZ2JaEuc
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Jul 12, 2016 01:23
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Abalieno posted:Just that first section that ends *before* the first chapter. It's a single page, it doesn't require any previous knowledge of Malazan or Erikson, or fantasy as a genre. It's just a statement. Having read lots of reactions of various readers to the book, I'm not sure it is understood. That's for me something unprecedented in literature, and in fantasy as well. As a rarity within a rarity. And that, in just a page, contains a lot of what makes Malazan something part of the genre, while defying its boundaries. Oh btw I read this and it was clumsily worded and said nothing interesting.
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Jul 12, 2016 01:24
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I really liked this book and I liked it so much I gave my mum a copy for her birthday. Excited to hear what she thinks of it!
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Jul 14, 2016 00:41
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Mel Mudkiper posted:If you have such a bone to pick with pompous elitist literature types take it to the literature thread. Plenty of people would probably be willing to be the evil fantasy hating villain you keep wanting me to be. I should've jumped on this
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Jul 14, 2016 16:52
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Ras Het posted:I should've jumped on this I actually had you specifically in mind
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Jul 14, 2016 16:55
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