The study of philosophy doesn't dramatize. Fiction does.
Yet your point is fair. It's the definitions you list for "literary fiction" that are at fault — i.e. it's the (pseudo) academic institutions coining bad definitions for "literary fiction," along with the writers who then practice this bastardized form — they are the ones most responsible for souring readers on literary fiction.
The distinction between literary fiction and genre fiction exists along a spectrum or a continuum of degrees, the criteria graded. This is why all genres of commercial fiction can and often do possess elements of literary fiction, just as for the same reason literary fiction can and often does possess elements of commercial-genre fiction.
Literary fiction isn't journalistic, which is what you're describing when you discuss in your article the displeasure you feel in reading about the issues we all deal with in our day-to-day lives — the bleak, depressing, awful things, or "sordid perils of daily existence," as Oscar described it — which so much of today’s fiction, commercial and literary, depict. Journalistic fiction — which is also known as naturalistic fiction — isn’t synonymous with literary fiction. And I absolutely agree with you that much of this literature is pretentious, insulting, disgusting even, and boring.
Literary fiction, on the other hand — good literary fiction — like good commercial fiction, inspires and takes readers away to places of pure magic. The difference between the two is that literary fiction drives deeper down than commercial fiction — whether stylistically, thematically (which entails a deeper investigation of character motive) or both combined. Think, for example, of Wuthering Heights or Pride and Prejudice versus a Harlequin Romance novel. All of these books are romance novels, but Wuthering Heights and Pride and Prejudice devote a great deal more time to explaining character motives, as they give greater attention to matters of style.
This exists, I say again, along a spectrum of degrees.
The latest movie version of Casino Royal, for instance, starring Eva Green, Judy Dench, and Daniel Craig, is without question literary. The writers of this latest version gave the characters of James Bond and Vesper a psychological depth that neither Ian Fleming (in the original novel) nor the writers of the first movie version (starring Sean Connery) came anywhere close to matching. The first Borne Identity movie is also literary — very literary, in fact. So is The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, book and movies alike. So are the first two seasons of the HBO series True Detective.
The Brothers Karamozov is in many ways a murder mystery story — and a very good at that.
Academia has corrupted the meaning of "literary fiction" — and so have the writers who practice the sullen corrupt form. In the same way, pulp fiction (the genre, not the movie) and dime-store fiction corrupted genre fiction, so academia and academics corrupted literary fiction.
I enjoyed reading your article. It’s thoughtful and well-written. It’s without any doubt literary -- in the best and truest sense of the term.
