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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33053 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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The decline of the Literary Bloke: "In featuring just four men, Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists confirms what we already knew: the literary male has become terminally uncool."

Just some scattered thoughts.

The Great Literary Man is no longer the role model he once was. The seemingly eternal trajectory outlined by Woolf has been broken. The statistics are drearily familiar. Fewer men read literary novels and fewer men write them. Men are increasingly absent from prize shortlists and publishers’ fiction catalogues. Today’s release of Granta’s 20 best young British novelists – a once-a-decade snapshot of literary talent – bottles the trend. Four of the 20 on the list are men. That’s the lowest in the list’s 40-year history. In its first year, 1983, the Granta list featured only six women.

It has to be pointed out that any such "great upcoming young novelists" list must be comprised of mostly women, out of necessity. Otherwise the organizers of the list would be painted as sexist and privileged and out of touch and it would probably jeopardize their careers. You don't even need to reach for the more subtle types of criticisms that revisionists make of the traditional canon: "yeah, I know like you feel you were just judging works solely on literary merit, and you just so happened to collect a list of 100 deserving authors where 99 of them are men, but actually you were being driven by subconscious patriarchal bias and you need to escape from your historically ossified perspective and so on and so forth". What's going on now in the publishing industry is far more overt: "it's time to hand the reins over to women, period". In such a cultural context, how could a list of the "20 best young British novelists" be taken as unbiased evidence of anything?

The irrelevance of male literary fiction has something to do with “cool”. A few years ago Megan Nolan noted – with as much accuracy as Woolf on these men in Mrs Dalloway – that it might be “inherently less cool” to be a male novelist these days. Male writers, she continued, were missing a “cool, sexy, gunslinger” movement to look up to. All correct.

It's true that literary fiction is not as cool as it once was, although this in itself is not a great moral catastrophe. It's part of the natural cycle of things. The "cool" things now are happening in TV, film, video games, and comic books. When was the last time a literary fiction author of either gender captured the imaginations of millions of people the way Hajime Isayama did? The literary novel is not eternal (many will argue that historically speaking, it's a relatively recent invention) and it is not inherently superior to other narrative art forms.

The decline of male literary fiction is not down to a feminist conspiracy in publishing houses

Correct, it's not a conspiracy, but only because there is nothing conspiratorial about it. If you were to ask any big (or small!) publishing house if they gave priority to voices from traditionally marginalized groups, they would say yes. If you were to then ask them if women are a traditionally marginalized group, they would say yes.

...

It's not a conspiracy if they just tell you what they're doing!

The most understanding account of male literary ambition was written by a woman.

There's been a meme for some time that goes something like, "men don't understand women, but women understand men - maybe even better than men do themselves", which I find to be quite obnoxious. If there is any "misunderstanding", then it surely goes both ways. There are plenty of things in the male experience that have no natural analogue in the female experience, same as the reverse.

Women purchase a lot more fiction than men, a trend that goes back at least to the early 90s and precedes the dominance of female authors in the market. The share of female authors in general ticked sharply upwards starting in the 70s but only cracked 50% in the last couple of years. Why this is I'm not sure. When I was in high school a couple of years ago all the girls read for fun but few boys did. Men tend to read non-fiction a lot more than fiction but even there I think women read a bit more.

Women buy more fiction: "We must cater to women, they are our natural market"

Men buy more fiction: "We must cater to women, they are an untapped/underserved market"

And your reference for women purchasing a lot more fiction than men?

While little publicized and hard to document, it is a widely held belief in the book business that more women buy books than men -- perhaps as much as 70 or 80 percent of fiction.

So, at least in 1997, they didn't even know. It was just a "widely held belief" that couldn't be documented.

In fact, that same reference makes the case that, if there is such an effect, it's push rather than pull -- publishers are refusing works which appeal to men:

Last fall Matt Bialer, a book agent at William Morris, sent publishers the latest manuscript by Ed Gorman, the author of 17 works of fiction, primarily suspense novels that have had steady, if not spectacular sales. But Mr. Gorman's newest, ''The Poker Club,'' which is about four card-playing professional men who accidentally kill an intruder and see their lives unravel, was turned down flat by nearly a dozen houses.

''People said it was a good story but it was too male-oriented,'' Mr. Bialer said. ''They said it needed a stronger female protagonist.''

Do publishers really cater to men? Or do they have imprints that minimally cater to men in ways that people who aren’t men think won’t give men harmful notions? For example, I have some French comic adaptations of Conan stories that are amazing. They’re full of action, adventure and excitement. The original short stories are also included, as if daring the reader to find fault with their adaptation. I have heard that modern domestic comic productions of Conan are less intense by comparison.

The preceding text was fed through my sensitivity reader.

The preceding text was fed through my sensitivity reader.

This is obnoxious. Stop it.

Stop doing it, or stop saying I'm doing it?

Sigh. Both?

We have already modded people for using ChatGPT to write posts without announcing they were doing this. It's disingenuous and not speaking clearly.

OTOH, this schtick where you pretend that golly-wolly you just don't know how to write words that won't randomly "trigger" people anymore is also disingenuous and obnoxious.

(If you think I'm being harsh, you should read the reports. Nobody is impressed by this routine, dude.)

Realistically, if your "sensitivity reader" is good enough not to be obvious, I am not going to play "spot the AI," so sure, go ahead and have ChatGPT rewrite your posts for you and treat it like a proofreading pass, minus the passive-aggressive "sensitivity reader" bitching.

That said, come off it.

(If you think I'm being harsh, you should read the reports. Nobody is impressed by this routine, dude.)

I'm unconcerned with impressing anyone. Have any reports been for language, being uncharitable or combative? No? Then I consider it a resounding success.

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stop saying you're doing it. that's much more off-putting than idiosyncrasies of speech.

[EDIT] - I think the mods have dinged people before for having GPT write their posts for them and not announcing it. On the other hand, it seems to me that if you're going to pass every post through it, just declare that you're doing this from now on, and then everyone will know it without having to be told.

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