I think it was unhelpful to refer to “Harry Potter fanfiction” here instead of perhaps “a piece of fiction”—I don’t think it’s actually more implausible that a fanfic would be valuable to read than some other kind of fiction, and your comment ended up seeming to me like it was trying to use the dishonest rhetorical strategy of implying without argument that the work is less likely to be valuable to read because it’s a fanfic.
Adjusted for popularity or likelihood of recommendation, you might naively expect fiction that someone is presented with to be more likely to stand the test of time than fan fiction, since the selection effects are quite different.
I think that is a fair and accurate criticism. I do view most fan fiction as fairly low quality, but even if that is true it doesn’t imply that all fan fiction is low quality. And I do think that some fiction can be used for self-improvement purposes.
The literary quality of the fiction (which, incidentally, I thought was terrible when I glanced at it out of curiosity), is fairly irrelevant to whether it helps people be more rational (which I am also skeptical of, but that’s a separate point.)
I do suspect that some Bay Are folk would benefit from reading at least one book of “serious” “literary” fiction with zero wizards or spaceships, like Middlemarch or To the Lighthouse, but I might just being snobby/trying to justify the 2 years of undergrad courses in Eng Lit I did.
I read to the lighthouse, not far away in time from when I read methods, and I was annoyed or confused about why I was reading it. And there was a while ten years ago when satantango and gravity’s rainbow were occupying a massive subset of my brain at all times, so I’m not like “too dumb for litfic” or whatever.
Sure. Not everyone has to like every book! I don’t like Don Quixote, which has frequently been claimed to be the greatest novel ever. I loved War and Peace when I was 18, but I’d cooled on its conservatism and misogyny when I last read it, though I still understood why people see it as “great”.
But I do think there is a tendency towards the grandiose and speculative in rationalist/nerd taste and away from the realist*, domestic, psychological, etc that I (probably pompously) think can be a bit limiting. Analogous to preferring Wagner to Mozart in opera, or prog metal to the Velvet Underground in “serious” rock music. (Also reminds me of Holden Karnosfky’s blogpost about being baffled by why Pet Sounds has such a strong reputation among rock critics when its so “pop” and allegedly lacking in “complexity”) I’ve never read Satantango, but Gravity’s Rainbow is verging pretty strongly on sci-fi, and has a very apocalyptic vibe, and a general desire to overwhelm.
Not that I’m slagging it: I really liked Gravity’s Rainbow when I read it, though that’s 18 years ago now, and I’ve hated the other Pynchon I’ve tried since. And I’m not slagging also being massive nerd. I will never be a huge prog/metal fan, but I have just leapt from replaying Dragon Age: Inquisition to starting Baldur’s Gate III.
*Technically speaking, I think “To the Lighthouse” is modernism not realism as lit profs would classify it.. But in this context that really just means “about posh people, not about a war, dense prose, interior monologues’, which isn’t really incompatible with “realism” in any ordinary sense.
I think it was unhelpful to refer to “Harry Potter fanfiction” here instead of perhaps “a piece of fiction”—I don’t think it’s actually more implausible that a fanfic would be valuable to read than some other kind of fiction, and your comment ended up seeming to me like it was trying to use the dishonest rhetorical strategy of implying without argument that the work is less likely to be valuable to read because it’s a fanfic.
Adjusted for popularity or likelihood of recommendation, you might naively expect fiction that someone is presented with to be more likely to stand the test of time than fan fiction, since the selection effects are quite different.
I think that is a fair and accurate criticism. I do view most fan fiction as fairly low quality, but even if that is true it doesn’t imply that all fan fiction is low quality. And I do think that some fiction can be used for self-improvement purposes.
The literary quality of the fiction (which, incidentally, I thought was terrible when I glanced at it out of curiosity), is fairly irrelevant to whether it helps people be more rational (which I am also skeptical of, but that’s a separate point.)
I do suspect that some Bay Are folk would benefit from reading at least one book of “serious” “literary” fiction with zero wizards or spaceships, like Middlemarch or To the Lighthouse, but I might just being snobby/trying to justify the 2 years of undergrad courses in Eng Lit I did.
I read to the lighthouse, not far away in time from when I read methods, and I was annoyed or confused about why I was reading it. And there was a while ten years ago when satantango and gravity’s rainbow were occupying a massive subset of my brain at all times, so I’m not like “too dumb for litfic” or whatever.
Sure. Not everyone has to like every book! I don’t like Don Quixote, which has frequently been claimed to be the greatest novel ever. I loved War and Peace when I was 18, but I’d cooled on its conservatism and misogyny when I last read it, though I still understood why people see it as “great”.
But I do think there is a tendency towards the grandiose and speculative in rationalist/nerd taste and away from the realist*, domestic, psychological, etc that I (probably pompously) think can be a bit limiting. Analogous to preferring Wagner to Mozart in opera, or prog metal to the Velvet Underground in “serious” rock music. (Also reminds me of Holden Karnosfky’s blogpost about being baffled by why Pet Sounds has such a strong reputation among rock critics when its so “pop” and allegedly lacking in “complexity”) I’ve never read Satantango, but Gravity’s Rainbow is verging pretty strongly on sci-fi, and has a very apocalyptic vibe, and a general desire to overwhelm.
Not that I’m slagging it: I really liked Gravity’s Rainbow when I read it, though that’s 18 years ago now, and I’ve hated the other Pynchon I’ve tried since. And I’m not slagging also being massive nerd. I will never be a huge prog/metal fan, but I have just leapt from replaying Dragon Age: Inquisition to starting Baldur’s Gate III.
*Technically speaking, I think “To the Lighthouse” is modernism not realism as lit profs would classify it.. But in this context that really just means “about posh people, not about a war, dense prose, interior monologues’, which isn’t really incompatible with “realism” in any ordinary sense.