Teacher's Bad Rowling Advice

[davem]

Originally Posted by Thenamir

Before we glibly throw out the bathwater, let us make a cursory effort to extract the baby from it first.

You cannot say that all prose of "Form X", as exemplified by davem, is therefore "junk". That's like saying that the great romances are junk because they follow the same basic formula as the Harlequin paperbacks..

No, ok. Most fantasy is formulaic, but some, judged objectively, is great literature. Yet, accepting Nogrod's point about the 'dismissal' of crime & historical fiction one could offer Crime & Punishment as a crime novel & War & Peace as an historical novel which are not dismissed as 'trash'. They are taken up into the 'genre' of serious literature for grown ups. So while the genre of 'crime' or 'historical' novels may be dismissed as worthless the literati are prepared to consider taking novels out of them & placing them alongside ''proper' books. However, they don't seem prepared to look at the fantasy genre at all. It may be possible to find 'gems' among the crime & historical trash, but it seems that its impossible for such gems to be found among fantasy novels - by their nature (ie because there are Elves or dragons in them, & characters with 'odd' names) fantasy books must be bad - no-one can write a serious, adult fantasy novel which is great literature, however great a writer they are, because all fantasy books must be bad.

But is there any way around this? Will we ever see a time when 11 year olds aren't told to forget the fairies & write something 'gritty'? Are children always going to be forced out of faerie by 'well meaning' adults?