"You don't understand the point of the example, since you give it back to me as a supposed counterpoint. When a book is overwritten and fairly laborious to get through, but still considered a pageturner, the term obviously lacks merit as an evaluative criterion."

No, your example was a bad one because it didn't have any fidelity to the reality of what the majority of readers want in their fiction. You chose to define a pageturner in terms of a clear style, which was your mistake. Not all popular works can be readily described as "pageturners," but almost any of them are closer to that status than ULYSSES, which *in the terms of average readers* is unreadable both in terms of style and content.

You're just trying to avoid lending any validation to the straightforward reading experience.

"What popular writer worth anything but what he has in the bank only tries to write what he guesses the majority of readers will like? That only produces shit, period."

Not THE END, period or not. There are bad writers who write absolutely nothing but what the market will bear, and produce nothing original, and their work can fairly be assessed as "shit." Many popular writers, however, have a keen sense of the bottom line-- of what their readers want to see transpire-- and yet enjoy exercising their talents both to meet that need and to come up with their own take on the subject. Often that's because such writers share the tastes of their audience. Gardner Fox wrote a lot of junk that deserves to be consigned to the pulp mills. I've read a good selection of his SF-paperbacks and even I wouldn't bother to make any apologies for most of it. But at his best he was reliving his own passions as a disciple of the "gosh-wow" school of science fiction, and his talents are seen to best effect in translating that passion into the superhero comics-medium.

"what writer has no reader in mind (in actuality, a reader-model, which is also what any popular writer uses) when he's writing?"

If the model is barely distinguishable from the writer himself, then he's producing a "writerly" work, seeking only to please people who have the same level of education and perceived taste, as per your "intelligent writers writer for intelligent people." There's nothing wrong with this activity, but it's an activity distinct from the readerly approach, and a good aesthetics had to account for "le difference." You objected to being accused (hypothetically?) of not liking SF because you preferred Lem to Asimov, or whichever examples you used. I object to the implication that Asimov is not writing for any sort of intelligent people simply because he's not writing high-toned fiction.

"your take on this readerly vs. writerly division is horseshit, as it reduces good popular works to being a mere tool design and assumes the only type of reader one can have in mind is the popular audience"

It's the choice of the readerly writer as to whether he brings anything creative to the generic design he largely inherits from earlier writers, just as it's the choice of the writerly type whether he really finds a Muse worth talking to or just recycles what I called "pseudo-literary fiction." It's not a given which way either of them will go.

"Audiences" would be a better word than "audience" here, since I'm saying that genre work by its nature creates multiple audiences. Some time back one used to be able to buy SF-convention T-shirts that said things like, "Fantasy is just a crutch for people who can't handle science fiction." The fantasy-people, naturally, reversed the saying. In the mind of outsiders to both genres, the two are easily conflated, but they're very distinct to those readers who identify themselves as belonging to one tribe and not the other. There are writers who can create for both audiences as well as whatever middleground exists between the two, but to do so those writers have to be able to understand the aesthetic preferences of each group. It's not some slavishness to a fancied "lowest common denominator," as the Frankfurt School tended to believe, but an awareness of what Durgnat called "the highest common factors" uniting differing reading-tribes.

What good do you think comes from by validating a unitary system of aesthetics?

I don't see how anything from Kafka can be considered a non-ironic meditation on the theme of good vs. evil.

He wrote about one of the great evils of our time: the effect of bureaucracy on the will. Nothing ironic about what he thought of it. What was that great work of simplistic good vs. evil?

bah.

Don't forget "humbug."

A good nuanced story of good vs. evil which uses those concepts broadly (yet not simplistically) would be Peter Beagle's THE LAST UNICORN.

So it doesn't treat good and evil in a black-&-white fashion?

Since when are Joyce's and Dostoevsky's readers' concerns identical with Stan Lee's?

Hi, Jamie.

My example wasn't about what readers wanted, but about the politics of calling something a pageturner, the resultant contradictions, and how that makes it unreliable as an evaluative criterion. Research in theoretical physics appearing in specialized journals is "unreadable" to most people. People don't wish to read or haven't thought about reading Joyce, or simply haven't got around to him, yet.

Camus is a much more straightforward reading experience than Claremont (no detours through numerous other texts, for example, and the prose is far more direct, for another).

I already considered and dealt with all of this: if a writer is enjoying doing what he's doing, then he's writing for himself as he's pretty close to his reader-model. All your readerly vs. writerly stuff is just another way of restating the politics of genre and has little to do with whether an author has a reader in mind or not. All good authors have readers in mind, just different types of readers, due to the author's interests. Jamie's question is a good way of showing the deficiency in your distinction here.

Durgnat's approach is pretty close to my own. The highest level of writing in genre G is comparable or should be comparable to the highest level of writing in H, I and J if one is to say that all are equally or potentially equally meritorious. Saying Fox was as good as one could get writing within the constraints of having to appeal to the dumbest of 5th graders does no favors for the superhero genre.

The only concerns that remain within the sphere of the writer to the exclusion of those of the reader are things like what word processor you use, the terms of your contract with your publisher, etc., and even those are up for grabs by the curious.

I suppose there exist readers who explicitly understand their literary requirements such that they demand to be pandered to ("more leg!", "more flying" "more ray guns" "more blood" etc.), but I always thought that the writer should be writing for him/herself in that they should be trying to write the best work they can, unless they're writing reading primers or instruction manuals or whatever.

My point exactly.

Your point is that Lee is a writerly writer or that he's not because he writes with those readers in mind?