Tagging the Canon

"Genre" is a bit of a fascination with me, and Neal Hoskins' blog today got me writing a bloated post that I never submitted, but thought I'd rather like to retool for LibraryThing. The idea of World Literature or world music or world food, whatever it is, seems to be a way of creating genres or classifications beyond mere marketability. You might sell more books in translation, but will you sell the idea of Dostoevsky as mere World Lit? Sure, marketers need markets. That's easy enough. But the marketing ploy goes beyond exploiting a demographic to creating a "demographic" of products. Are the genres (beyond drama, poetry, prose) that exist now created or defined more and more by sales figures and markets, and less by patterns of study in school (the handy course titles that in themselves present an opinion), anthologies of entire literatures, or book review table of contents?

In the US, the African-American literature section causes the most conversation regarding this issue. Some stores (e.g. Barnes & Noble) call a section African-American Studies, and it can include scholars such as Cornell West or Henry Louis Gates sitting next to African-American romance fiction and gangsta-lit of the 50-Cent variety (both in cost and publisher). And then the Toni Morrison's and James Baldwin's have snug chairs in the General Fiction reading room. The primary knee-jerk response can be a blend of cries of racism and elitism. I took a course on African-American Literature where my biggest hang-up was the very idea that we have to title the class as such. Why not just study American literature in a class that covers both the minority and majority writers of our country? Of course, some universities do this well, kudos to them. But then comes the point that African-American writers ought to be studied in greater magnification because they have been devalued historically based on the very classification that makes them more suitable for study. Headaches...In any case, I can see the problems that English literature might face with its own immigrant and minority literature--though it is handy that it hasn't invented official terms like Asian-Britons or Afro-English (at least to my knowledge). But the real issue isn't what the terms and definitions are--those will always exist, intact or deconstructed--it is who makes the decisions.

Right now, it would seem that the managers of bookstores have the upper hand. By segregating whole sections of the canon (whatever that might include in your ideological world) and selling more because of it, they have created our genres (when did Asimov or Bradbury end up with the more formulaic authors on the Sci-Fi shelf?). And once a marketable genre or type is created, it becomes easier to package the story or writing in such a way as to be selling the genre instead of a book. So, which is the real science fiction? Even though genres have their traditions and "founding" authors, how real is the lineage?

I just spent a good part of yesterday tagging all my books. Of course, my copy of Their Eyes Were Watching God gets the American literature tag. So my statement is made. But is this whole idea of tagging our books the same thing as a marketer slapping a genre label on the cover? Much of what we use to classify is taken directly from the stalls of the bookstore. The library system and academics get a few points in there, but I think you'd find that many of our tags are market demographics before they are genres or academic distinctions.

So, when I search anyone who's tagged Hurston as American literature, NOT African-American literature, I know I've found a kindred spirit. We are marketing our prejudices in such a way as to make this marketing trick much more cultural and "real". Maybe I'm stating the obvious, or maybe I'm being too cautious with my tags, thinking too hard. How do you find yourself tagging/not tagging your library? And for what ulterior motives?

I'm not sure that "American literature" is any better a tag than "African-American literature": it seems even more arbitrary, to me. At least the African-American community (interpreted as the descendents of the Africans brought over as slaves prior to your Civil War) has some broad cohesion and a collective historical narrative. America is such a hodge-podge of different histories and nationalities that there doesn't seem to be the same scope for identifying an author as writing "American literature" except as an exercise in the uniquely American brand of patriotism.

I think that it's Iain Banks/Iain M. Banks who is the best example of the idiocy of the split between sci-fi and "real" fiction: his "proper" novels are marketed under the former, whereas his sci-fi novels are marketed under the latter. Yet they're all written by the same man in broadly the same style, the only difference lying in the setting, the sci-fi books being (mostly) set in a future techno-communist utopia.
If you want to read Isaac Asimov's own opinion on the term "sci-fi", then go to The Name Of Our Field in his collection, Gold.