(...) critics of genre are increasingly counter-balanced by prominent proponents and practitioners, including Haruki Murakami, David Mitchell, Joyce Carol Oates, Jonathan Lethem and Junot Diaz. The Library of America has published elegant editions of authors who only two generations ago gave libraries across America pause, H. P. Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick. Genre films and books are no longer a minority interest. They top the bestseller lists and popularity polls: we are all geeks now.
Chabon himself, attained the ultimate goal of the “pop artisan”: a delicate balance between “the unashamedly commercial and the purely aesthetic”. He disagrees with those who equate literary entertainment with mindless escapism, passive consumption or unproductive activity (“guilty pleasures” is “a phrase I loathe”). Instead, he finds that different forms of writing offer distinct satisfactions to an alert reader. There is no single standard for literary merit; Chabon’s personal list of pleasurable encounters includes “the engagement of the interior ear by the rhythm and pitch of a fine prose style; the dawning awareness that giant mutant rat people dwell in the walls of a ruined abbey in England; two hours spent bushwhacking through a densely packed argument about the structures of power as embodied in nineteenth-century prison architecture”.The rise of fan fiction and comic book culture (Times Online)
On en discutait l'autre jour : les auteurs "mainstream" font dans la littérature de genre mais leurs livres sont vendus en France dans les rayons littérature et non dans les rayons Science Fiction ou Policier. Est-ce le début d'un changement et de la fin des "genres"?