Reading time: about 6 minutes
Out of all the horrifying icebreakers she could have gone with on that snowy first day in a class full of English majors, Prof. Masha Raskolnikov, literatures in English, chose the absolute worst one: “What is your favorite book?” The second the words left her mouth, my brain kicked into high gear, rifling through my mental bookshelf. Already impossible on the best day, my predicament became even worse when my classmates began to name the greats. Brontë, Dostoevsky, Conrad, Tolstoy, Joyce. I froze. Abort! Abort! Alarms blared in my head as panic consumed me. I could only form one thought: “I can't tell the truth.”
Because even if it wasn’t the best book I’d ever read, my favorite was a young adult fantasy novel that suddenly seemed silly when some of the most important names in the history of literature were being thrown around. Enjoyment didn’t seem like enough of a reason. So I lied.
Years of wrestling with difficult texts in the classroom while devouring light-hearted novels only within the cozy embrace of my bedroom seemed to have conditioned me to believe that only certain kinds of literature were valuable to an academic audience. And yet my foundational texts, the ones that cemented my love for reading and shaped me into the person I am today, are all genre fiction. They’re fantasy, romance and myth. They’re not the literary fiction degrees are built on.
In an attempt to understand where that perceived distinction is, I asked a few professors who write and teach genre fiction my own scary question: “Why do you think there is a general perception that genre fiction is less substantive than literary fiction?”
To my delight, I received a lot of pushback.
While I was focused on examining a division, the professors were all determined to find ways in which genre fiction can coexist with academia. Prof. Andrea Bachner, comparative literature, agreed with my sense that genre fiction has been “sidelined” and confessed to having been a “crypto reader, especially of fantasy” before biting the bullet and making it part of her academic work. “We cannot just work on something that has already been established as worthy of attention and theorization and of being taught,” she asserted.
In line with that sentiment, Bachner teaches a course on Game of Thrones: “My idea … is you bring in students because they're interested in the content and they're engaged. And then you invite them to do different types of readings and methodologies, which they can then extend to read … whatever kind of high literature they need to read.” And the reception has been extremely positive; Bachner has held out a hand, and students, many of whom major outside the humanities and are unfamiliar with literary analysis, have taken it. “You engage with the students on a slightly different level, because you … take for granted that they're excited about the content,” she added.
Prof. Cary Howie, romance studies, was excited to take it even further: “I find that genre fiction is a really great way to build bridges from people who are pursuing higher education to people who are not necessarily in our world. It's surprising how many people in my life, casually, if they see me reading a romance or a fantasy novel in public, will be like, ‘Oh, oh, oh! I have all these books. I want to talk about all these books!’”
That definitely rings true. Many of the books I’m often excited to talk about are popular novels everyone seems to be reading, the ones capable of forging an immediate connection between me and the random person sitting next to me on a park bench. Genre fiction fosters community because it makes us feel everything, because it sparks joy.
In the course How Reading Changes Your Life, Prof. Raskolnikov is on a mission to help students rediscover that sense of wonder often lost after childhood. The students enrolled in the class are “beginning to realize that in addition to having a job, you also need a life,” she said, emphasizing the importance of “being able to read for escape and being able to read for community.”
High-paced academic environments can easily turn reading into a chore, especially when the chosen texts are often dense and difficult to get through. While literary fiction often “hit[s] you over the head with weirdly sharp prose,” observed Howie, genre fiction “raises huge questions and manages occasionally to say really poignant and important things without making a fuss about it. … For me, difficulty is overrated.”
From a writer’s perspective, Prof. J. Robert Lennon, literatures in English, affirmed that a large part of the division is borne more from “marketing categories than meaningful artistic distinctions.” Raskolnikov agrees: “the whole idea that ‘real’ literature fits in one book, and genre fiction is a series, for instance, is kind of silly. … It's binding and marketing. … High fiction gets marketed to ‘educated people,’ and what that means is that if you market something as non-high fiction, you can actually get lots of people to read it sometimes. And isn't that good?”
Wrapped up in academia, I seemed to have lost sight of that vital idea — all reading is valuable, regardless of its classification as literary or genre. If you ever feel ashamed of the books you read because they don’t feel as impressive as the stuff you’ve read in class, remember that little kid who read just because they loved it, because it was joyful.
Genre fiction is where many of us find each other, and importantly, where we find ourselves, so let it be present in every part of your life. Your flirty romances and sprawling adventures shouldn’t be confined to the quiet corners of your bedroom; they can coexist with the Dostoevskys of the world. Because like Howie told me, “I don't want to become too sophisticated for that. That's a necessary part of me too.”
Rafaella Gonzalez is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. She can be reached at rgonzalez@cornellsun.com.
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