Prizes, publishing and theory

A symbol is an energy-releasing and -directing image

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I think one could define a symbol as an energy-releasing and -directing image, and since the symbolic systems of the world include many symbols that are practically universal, the questions comes up as to the universality of symbol, and then how the universal symbol should be directed to this, that or another culture intention. What is it that affects these directions? —Joseph Campbell

http://www.jcf.org/new/contribute/index.php?main_page=product_music_info&cPath=77_78&products_id=242

In Lecture I.4.3 – Society and Symbol [New!], apparently,

“Joseph Campbell begins by noting how a symbol can work as a kind of “automatic button” to release and channel energy. Why do some symbols seem almost universally potent? It is because such resonant symbols speak to human experiences that have remained constant throughout the ages. Campbell explores how an individual’s relationship to society changes as one grows from infancy to old age. A culture’s view of this shifting dynamic is best understood, he argues, by examining the symbols with which the society expresses its ideals. He shows how western psychologists, Diskicularly Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, have shaped our understanding of the human experience. He concludes with a discussion of key Oriental beliefs, demonstrating how the prevailing myths and dominant symbols of each culture reinforce its understanding of an individual’s role.”

Writers are people

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“Writers are people who process emotions into words….” ~ David Gerrold

Ref: p.37 David Gerrold ‘How the Dragonlady Saved My Life’ pp.34-40 Ed. Todd McCaffrey, with Leah Wilson (2013) Dragonwriter: A tribute to Anne McCaffrey and Pern. Smart Pop, Dallas, Texas

Small publishers are always opening gateways

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“Publishing Rule Number One is that it’s hard to keep small literary publishers solvent unless you have the equivalent of gardening books to support them, because even if by some fluke one of your authors does well, he or she will soon be courted by a larger publisher with more funds to offer. Small publishers are always opening gateways they can never walk through themselves.” (pp.16-17)

but… “a country needs to hear its own voices, if it is to become or to remain an aware society and a functioning democracy.” (p.24)

Ref: Margaret Atwood Survival: a thematic guide to Canadian Literature

Structure and Form – Fowler

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There are criticisms that could be made of this (it’s nigh on 30 years old), but according to the Dictionary of Modern Critical Terms(1987):

Structure

“All critical theories have some notion of structure: the developing unity of a work. But, according to what characteristics are emphasized as providing that unity, the terms will vary: pattern, plot, story, form, argument, language, rhetoric, paradox, metaphor, myth. Starting from these dispositions, the term ‘structure’ then becomes an enabling reference; the reader is advised to consult potentially parallel entries (e.g. FORM, where structure is distinguished from texture, both being aspects of form) to see how this can be. The proposition is reversed here: such features are typologies of structure, organizational means for arriving at hypotheses about the principles of coherence in a given work. There are many such means, but they fall into two main categories: those derived from internal means and emphasizing features likely to be found especially in literature, and those derived from applying general principles of structure found in language, or the psychology of individuals or communities, or in broad areas of style in all the arts and in life, or in social structure, to works of literature for typological purposes.
I here assume what I think must be assumed for criticism effectively to exist: that every work is a distinct and verbally-created universe and must have a self-created logic or sequence for which the author is responsible. The work will have its own expectations and probabilities which constitute the unity of that universe. There is likely to be a coherence of social relationships and possibilities of relationship, constituting a society; a coherence of action, of probable behaviour in development, constituting a plot; coherence of attitude or value to these things, constituting a tone; coherence of rhetorical tactic, or point of perception and view, constituting a technique or (in a local sense) a language; there are likely to be other significant blocks of coherence – metrical and stanzaic features; acts and scenes; generic conventions – also inviting our sense of significant development. As we begin reading, we recognize that an author, starting writing, has made certain committing choices: where to commence his action, from which standpoints to see it, which language(s) and convention(s) to maintain. As we continue reading, we see that from these a logic flows – not a single logic of tone, technique, story or metaphor but a compound, total system of development or order which enables us to structure our own perceptions, acquire a sense of relevance, see what is persistent and significant in this universe. In some structures it will be apparent that one particular type of order – story, language, composition (in Nabokov’s phrase) as hero – seems dominant. We are not engaged similarly from genre to genre or work to work; and as the significant dispositions, the sense of primary structure, vary so will our terminology.”

Form

“form is often used to refer to literary kinds or genres (e.g. ‘the epic form’). But we prefer to take form as what contrasts with ‘paraphrasable content’, as the way something is said in contrast to what is said. The word ‘paraphrasable’ is important since the way of saying affects what is being said – imperceptibly in prose works of information, vitally at the other end of the spectrum in lyric poems. But since authors do in fact often revise their works to improve the STYLE rather than the matter, since synopses are written and found useful, since writers can turn prose versions of their work into verse (like Ben Jonson), and since it is evident that much the same point may be made in plain or figurative language, simple or complex sentences, it is clear that even though form and content may be inseparable for the ‘full meaning’ of a work, the paraphrasable content may nevertheless be used to enable the concept of form to be discussed.
Form in this sense is often felt to be organic or imposed. Felt, because this is rather a psychological distinction than a technical one. In the one case, manner seems to fit matter like a velvet glove, form seems to spring from content; in the other case, the form seems an iron gauntlet that the content must accommodate itself to. In some short lyric poems where form and content are inseparable anyway, it may be difficult to decide whether, say, apparent oddities of metre and rhyme are flaws in an imposed form or examples of organic fluidity. In most of these cases, however, the difficulty of decision will itself suggest that the decision is irrelevant to a critical judgment. For the modern dogma that organic form is better hardly stands up to examination. All ‘given patterns’ such as sonnet, rondeau, ballade – are imposed forms; and while it is true that the content must fit them effortlessly or be faulted, it is also true that the form took precedence. In some cases, too – particularly in large novels dealing with amorphous material – imposed form may seem a beneficial discipline even though the imposition is evident. Moreover, it is easier to encompass aesthetic effects of composition and complementarity … by imposed form than by organic form. Organic form tends to emphasize what is said, imposed form how it is said. So where neither emphasis is evident other approaches to the work will clearly be more profitable.
Whether organic or imposed, form must be either structural or textural, the one being large-scale, a matter of arrangement, the other small-scale, a matter of impressionism. Structure at its most obvious (plot, story, argument) is the skeleton of a work, texture at its most obvious (metre, diction, syntax) is the skin. But certain elements are comparable to muscles. A motif for instance is structural in so far as the images making it up are seen as a chain, textural in so far as each is apprehended sensuously as it comes – and contentual, rather than formal, in so far as the chain carries a meaning that one link, an unrepeated image, would not. In the last analysis, structure is a matter of memory, texture of immediacy.
Since structure is a matter of arrangement, it includes the formal ordering of the content in time. Temporal form may be linear or fugal. Linear form is that of traditional literature, in which first things come first, last last, as in life. Fugal form is characteristic of modernist experimental writing, which takes liberties with chronology on the grounds that literature is not life, and need not resemble it. Linear works, of course, may give more or less reading-time to similar periods of narrative time, but fugal works, in addition, re-arrange temporal sequence so that first and last things come not in order but where they will make most impact (usually by standing in juxtaposition) Counterpoint takes over from melody, so to speak. Such structuring, used well, gains thematic and aesthetic benefits in return for the sacrifice of story-line and suspense. Such emphasis of temporal form tends to give greater importance to textural quality (since the reader is less distracted by an eagerness to see what happens next).
Works of this kind present themselves more concretely as objects in space than as abstract patterns of cause and effect, and it follows that the reader’s attention will be directed towards their textural rather than their structural qualities. The elaboration of texture invariably has the effect of arresting movement – whether of thought or action – and substituting the opaque for the transparent in language. ….”

Ref: (bold emphasis, capitals and italics in original) Ed. Roger Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern Critical Terms. London, Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987

Problems with the everyday

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In their book, Slow Living, Wendy Parkins and Geoffrey Craig address concerns around ‘the everyday’ (and its theorisation in recent times). They write:

“In focusing our attention on slow living, we can only begin to sketch, from that heterogeneity, how the practices of time, space, pleasure and politics associated with slow living are both enacted in the everyday at the same time as they put the category of the everyday under question.
Despite being such a significant and widely used concept, however, the definition of the everyday or everyday life is often elusive or unstated. It seems to be ‘everywhere’, as the routine, ‘the taken-for-granted’ which then becomes invisible (Felski 1999-2000: 15, 31; Chaney 2002: 10). Beyond the problem of defining the facticity of the everyday, however, theorists also dispute the significance and potential of the realm of the mundane. Rita Felski, for instance, has persuasively argued that the focus on the everyday by radical intellectuals over the twentieth century (such as Lefebvre, Debord and the Situationists) rested on the construction of the quotidian as ‘an imagined reservoir of utopian energies and unruly impulses’ (2002: 609). In this radical tradition, ‘To affirm the everyday is thus simultaneously to negate it’ because it was only in overcoming the ‘very everydayness of the everyday’ that its true potential could be realized (Felski 2002: 610). Michael Gardiner, by contrast, with reference to some of the same theorists that Felski examines, argues the virtues of an approach which problematizes everyday life, ‘expos[ing] its contradictions and teas[ing] out its hidden potentialities’ (2000: 6).
It seems to us that it is possible to recognize the ‘unruly’ elements of everyday life which point to its ‘irreducibly imaginative and symbolic dimension’ (Gardiner 2000: 16) without either condemning the immanence of the everyday or excoriating habit as inherently inauthentic (Felski 2002: 608, 615, 611). Seeing the everyday as a messy or ‘dilemmatic site (Honig 1996) is not an attempt to master it, nor to imagine it is possible (or even desirable) to expose all our everyday assumptions to critical interrogation (see Heller 1984). It is an attempt to attend to its ethical and affective potential.” (p.6)

Ref: (emphases in blue bold mine) Wendy Parkins and Geoffrey Craig (2006) Slow Living.  Berg: Oxford, New York.

Reference is to: Felski (1999-2000), ‘The Invention of Everyday Life’, New Formations, 39: 15-31

Felski, R (2002) ‘Introduction’, Special Issue on Everyday Life, New Literary History, 33: 607-22

Gardiner, M (2000) Critiques of Everyday Life, London: Routledge

Honig, B (1996) ‘Differences, Dilemmas and the Politics of Home’ in S Benhabib (ed), Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, Princeton: Princeton University Press

Popular fiction is…

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I like this quote (the crux of the essay that precedes it):

“Popular fiction is not a symptom of the decline of the public sphere. It is, rather, one of the most vibrant places to find arguments about the nature and limits of the public.” (p.83)

Ref: Roger Luckhurst ‘The Public sphere, popular culture and the true meaning of the zombie apocalypse’, pp.68-85 Eds. David Glover and Scott McCracken (2012) The Cambridge Companion to Popular Fiction. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK

Popular fiction defined – Glover and McCracken

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The Cambridge Companion to Popular FictionIntroducing the concept of ‘popular fiction’ for The Cambridge Companion to Popular Fiction, David Glover and Scott McCracken write:

“‘Popular fiction’ is a deceptively simple phrase, at once indispensable and commonplace, yet often left unsettlingly vague. One of the problems with finding a clear definition of popular fiction is that the object of study is not always clear. The cultural formation designated by ‘popular fiction’ has changed over time and varies according to its cultural and geographical situation. In this volume, we identify the late nineteenth century as the period when the genres that constitute so much of popular fiction emerge; but we recognise that the reception of these genres is in a state of continuous evolution.” (p.1)

The simplest definition, according to Glover and McCracken is to state that: “popular fiction is frequently thought of as those books that everyone reads, usually imagined as a league table of bestsellers whose aggregate figures dramatically illustrate an impressive ability to reach across wide social and cultural divisions with remarkable commercial success. In itself, this open-ended definition tells us very little, since it suggests that popular fiction is merely an empty box within which almost any novel might find a highly lucrative place. But a quick glance at the weekly charts shows that this is not so: certain popular genres predominate.” (p.1)

“The fact that it is possible to pick out recurrent topics and formulae in these weekly [bestseller lists] suggests another way of understanding popular fiction. According to this approach, popular fiction is primarily based upon a limited number of forms or genres of narrative pleasure, such as suspense, romantic complications, bodily horror or futuristic speculation. These repertoires of devices effectively bring their audiences into existence using fictional lures that hook readers into the text, so that they are driven to repeat the experience at regular intervals. In one of the earliest analytic surveys of science fiction, New Maps of Hell (1960), the novelist Kingsley Amis identified this type of pleasure-seeking as a type of addiction that characteristically begins in adolescence. To get to the heart of any given genre, so the argument goes, it is necessary to probe the nature of this intense fixation. Despite Amis’s somewhat dated insistence on the inherently addictive properties of genre reading – today we would speak of ‘fans’ or ‘fandom’ – readers who are strongly committed to particularly kinds of writing can certainly be identified.” (p.2)

“…it would be misleading to imply that the ‘popular’ in popular fiction is purely a matter of sales. In fact, the concept of the ‘popular’ has a longer and more complex political and cultural history that also impacts upon the ways in which popular fiction has been understood.” (p.3) Glover and McCracken discuss the etymology (and different nuances) of the term since its appearance in sixteenth-century legal texts, going on to write: “for anyone trying to make sense of the ‘popular’, this tension between what is genuinely a manifestation of popular taste or will and what is imposed upon people by those for whom culture is a business constitutes the central historical dynamic of modern popular culture, ‘the double movement of containment and resistance’, as the cultural critic Stuart Hall once characterised it.” (p.3)

“Like Stuart Hall, we, too, see the end of the nineteenth century as the period when the distinctive genres of twentieth-century popular fiction – detective stories, science fiction, romance and Gothic horror – emerge in their modern forms. This is not to deny their much older precursors. As Roger Luckhurst notes in Chapter 4, the roots of the Gothic are usually located in the eighteenth century and some critics date elements of detective stories, romance and science fiction as far back as the myths of antiquity. Nevertheless, it is the application of the new technologies of industrial production to publishing, an expanding market driven by increased literacy and urbanisation, and the emergence of new commercial media that together decisively change the conditions in which popular fiction is created.” (p.4)

Ref: David Glover and Scott McCracken ‘Introduction’ pp.1-14, Eds. David Glover and Scott McCracken (2012) The Cambridge Companion to Popular Fiction. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK

Book blurb: “Popular commercial fiction emerged in the nineteenth century, with serialised novels and sensational penny dreadfuls. Today it remains a multi-million dollar industry giving pleasure to many, but it is also a field of growing interest for scholars and students of literature. This Companion covers the major developments in the history of popular fiction, with specially commissioned chapters on pulp fiction, bestsellers, and comics and graphic narratives. The volume also examines the public and personal everyday contexts within which popular texts are read, highlighting the ways in which such narratives have circulated across a variety of constantly changing media, including theatre, television, cinema and new computer-based digital forms. Case studies from key genres – crime fiction, romance and Gothic horror – as well as a full chronology and guide to further reading make this collection indispensable to all those interested in this complex and vibrant cultural field.”

Table of Contents

Introduction David Glover and Scott McCracken; 1. Publishing, history, genre David Glover; 2. Fiction, theatre, and early cinema Nicholas Daly; 3. Television and serial fictions John Caughie; 4. The public sphere, popular culture and the true meaning of the Zombie Apocalypse Roger Luckhurst; 5. The reader of popular fiction Nicola Humble; 6. Reading time: popular fiction and the everyday Scott McCracken; 7. Gender and sexuality in popular fiction Kaye Mitchell; 8. Pulp sensations Erin A. Smith; 9. Bestselling fiction: machinery, economy, excess Fred Botting; 10. Comic books and graphic novels Hilary Chute and Marianne Dekoven; 11. Popular fictions in the digital age Brenda Silver; Further reading; Index.