So a robot walks into a saloon…

Arts & Culture, Humor, Life by Carl Peaslee — September 18, 2009 at 11:59 pm | 2 comments | | Print

A quote from the Syllabus of my Fiction Writing class at Pomona:

“In addition to writing two original short stories, students are required to submit “creative responses” … Note: Genre stories (e.g. science fiction, fantasy, action adventure, mystery, crime) are not considered “literary,” and are therefore not acceptable as submissions.”

I almost laughed out loud when our Professor read that statement — or rather, I almost said “L-O-L” out loud (SLOLOLed?).

And I hope you can imagine with me the way one must pronounce “literary” when making a statement absurd as this. Because you don’t just trivialize the work of thousands of writers offhandedly. No, you need to say “literary” like the monocle you’re staring through depends on it. Like Dan Brown will become editor of The New Yorker if you don’t. Like someone just called your “foy-yay” a “foy-yer.”

Gosh, I hope Ray Bradbury’s feelings don’t get hurt when he learns he isn’t a real “literary” author. Hey Ray, do you think you could give back that National Medal of The Arts back?

Oh and Edgar Allen Poe. Sorry about this but I kind of need to FYI ya — you’re not a real writer. What I mean is, like, you write … but it is basically cheap pornography.

Actually, I’m going to need to CC: George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, Albert Camus and Salman Rushdie on this one too. Sorry guys, I guess you should have written about your childhood.

And I wouldn’t have found this so funny if it weren’t coming from the very department who, up until last year, employed one of the greatest contemporary writers of science fiction, David Foster Wallace. I wonder how DFW would have felt about having his work lowered to the same literary tier as an episode of “Two and A Half Men.”

I don’t want to make this article into some anti-Pomona diatribe, in fact I try and avoid resorting to school stereotype humor but this display of pretentiousness is just too extreme to go without note. It boggles my mind how one can honestly relegate so many works of fiction to a lower realm of academia simply because they aren’t emotional (read: emo) memoirs about a writer’s struggle against discrimination/depression/their own insecurities/poverty/hypocrisy and the American Dream/etc… Downers!

I understand that there is a difference between traditional “genre fiction” (pulp fiction, eg. Michael Crichton, Stephen King) writing, which is primarily plot driven, and traditional “literary fiction” (academic fiction, eg.  Richard Yates, our own Jamaica Kincaid), a style marked by internal conflicts and more stylized writing. But I see no reason why there can be no blending of plot and style, why the inclusion of action or adventure would somehow strip a story of any academic value.

…Or maybe I’m just pissed that I don’t get to turn in that soft-core robot-western I’ve been working on.