Fiction_L Archives gentle readers Dates: 4/18/01,4:20 PM  through  4/19/01,10:47 AM  (3 postings) Search for: Select one or more indexes to search: 2011-current     2009-2010     2004-2008    1995-2003    (Matches from each index will be displayed separately in the results page.) Return to April 2001 thread menu   |   Fiction_L Archives Menu

FROM: "Deb Warner" <[removed]@co.durham.nc.us>
REC'D: 4/18/01, 4:20 PM

I am musing on the fact that the accepted term for fiction that is not
heavily laden with violence and/or sex and/or profanity is "gentle", as
though the reader is being carefully sheltered from daily life, or that a
narrative that is not "extreme" (in the trendy sense) is all soft and
fluttery. Now, granted there are people whose lives are more colorful than
my own, but I don't generally encounter gun battles, murder, copious
profanity or wild acrobatic sex on a day-to-day basis (to my regret, at
times). This is just average, no? I have no problem with using "gentle",
it just amuses me...

FROM: "christine jeffords" <[removed]@hotmail.com>
REC'D: 4/19/01, 7:45 AM

>From: "Deb Warner" <[removed]@co.durham.nc.us>
>Reply-To: "Fiction_L" <[removed]@maillist.webrary.org>
>To: Fiction_L <[removed]@maillist.webrary.org>
>Subject: gentle readers
>Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2001 17:39:04 -0400
>
>I am musing on the fact that the accepted term for fiction that is not
>heavily laden with violence and/or sex and/or profanity is "gentle", as
>though the reader is being carefully sheltered from daily life, or that a
>narrative that is not "extreme" (in the trendy sense) is all soft and
>fluttery. Now, granted there are people whose lives are more colorful than
>my own, but I don't generally encounter gun battles, murder, copious
>profanity or wild acrobatic sex on a day-to-day basis (to my regret, at
>times). This is just average, no? I have no problem with using "gentle",
>it just amuses me...
>
>

Possibly this is true because fiction, like news, in order to be interesting
and therefore garner readers, must by definition focus on experiences
foreign, or at least uncommon, to the average Joe/sephine. (This is why
genrefic, like mysteries, sf, fantasy, and Westerns, soldiers on.)

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FROM: Dennis Lien <[removed]@tc.umn.edu>
REC'D: 4/19/01, 10:47 AM

At 05:39 PM 4/18/01 -0400, you wrote:
>I am musing on the fact that the accepted term for fiction that is not
>heavily laden with violence and/or sex and/or profanity is "gentle", as
>though the reader is being carefully sheltered from daily life, or that a
>narrative that is not "extreme" (in the trendy sense) is all soft and
>fluttery. Now, granted there are people whose lives are more colorful than
>my own, but I don't generally encounter gun battles, murder, copious
>profanity or wild acrobatic sex on a day-to-day basis (to my regret, at
>times). This is just average, no? I have no problem with using "gentle",
>it just amuses me...


Well, I encounter the copious profanity pretty much every day I take the
bus, and in my neighborhood gun battles and murder are not unknown,
though mercifully not yet day-to-day. And it's a well-known fact (among
nonlibrarians) that "wild acrobatic sex" is not possible for librarians
anyway because we're all too dull. But mostly your thoughts reminded me
of my similar bemusement that "adult" as applied to books or movies
inevitably means "hardcore sexual," as though real-world adults had no
other interests (or as though it were only "adults" who had such
interests at all...).

Dennis Lien / U of Minnesota Libraries // [removed]@tc.umn.edu

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