Category: Genre

Writing is One Big Genre Soup

11/1/2024

by Ellie Cameron

It’s a winter night in your childhood, you have a cold. Snow is falling; it’s almost as icy in the house as outside. Someone--your parent, grandparent, sibling, guardian--brings you a steaming bowl. You ask what’s in it, receive a single word response. Soup. You wonder what kind, try to decide if you’re hoping it’s tomato, chicken noodle, alphabet, chowder. Who knows? Broth and some floating ingredients, it could be anything. It’s all soup.

0 Comments

The Myth of "Literary Fiction"

4/1/2024

0 Comments

by Allison Padron

For some, the words "literary fiction" brings up images of tweed jackets, learned academics, dinner conversations over wine, and personal libraries filled with only the finest of literature. The "literary" label is usually applied by critics to novels considered so intellectual, so linguistically beautiful, and so meaningful that they apparently need to be separated out from the mass-market, "mindless" genre novels. The debate about the distinctions between genre fiction and literary fiction still rages (as it likely will for many more years), with some classifying literary fiction as an entirely different genre, others as a continuum with genre fiction, and still others saying the "literary" quality is something that a novel of any genre can possess. From everything I’ve read on the subject, though, no one seems to have come up with a clear definition of literary fiction (other than "not genre fiction"), which begs the question: why call anything literary fiction at all?

0 Comments

Comedic Context and How It Shapes the Jokes We Laugh At

11/1/2023

1 Comment

by Ellie Cameron

People like to laugh.

We laugh at jokes on our phones, we laugh at characters in sitcoms, and we laugh with our friends telling stories to embarrass each other. I think it’s safe to say that the average person picks up some sense of comedic timing simply by consuming comedy.

As an editor for “R U Joking?,” an online comedy publication edited by Rowan University students, I'm constantly bothering my friends, colleagues, and random strangers on the street to write and submit the stories they find funny. Almost every time, I’m faced with variations on the same responses: “I can be funny in conversation but I can’t write funny,” or “It’s a funny story to tell but not when I write it,” or “Please leave me alone.”

Photo by Call Me Fred on Unsplash

So why do we feel that we can be funny, just not in writing? Is it lack of confidence? Is it lack of skill? Is it the lasting trauma of high school writing classes? Or is it a matter of context?

1 Comment

On Promoting Contemporary Literature

7/1/2023

0 Comments

by Lesley George

I’ll admit—I have spent hours skimming through fanfiction, picking the perfect tag to fit into the hyper-specific story I wanted to read: friends to lovers, fluff, slice of life, alternate universe (AU). There is something euphoric about being able to find a story so acutely tailored to my tastes; the only thing that could ruin the experience for me would be a misuse of a story tag [“Please use story tags correctly!” I cried]. Tropes and tags are a staple within the fandom realm and exist to satisfy the fans desire for curated content, made by other fans, involving their favorite characters. But can these markers exist outside fandom culture?

Photo by Shelby Miller on Unsplash

0 Comments

DIY Zines in a DIY Scene

6/1/2023

1 Comment

by Skyla Everwine

The most punk-rock thing I did this semester was stand in line at a UPS and try not to cry. It wasn’t the basement shows or broken guitar strings, but being at UPS at 4 p.m. on a Tuesday. I had but one task: to print nine pages, double-sided and in color. And then do that until 50 more times.

Photo by Jo Szczepanska on Unsplash

It was the fourth or fifth printer I had gone to in order to print the zine I was making. I had learned that commercial printers were hellish portals to untamable frustrations, and that making the project for my Self-Publishing course with Dr. Jason Luther was far more difficult than it needed to be. I had turned what could have been a single page mini-zine into 36 pages of digital and hand-collaged interviews.

1 Comment

<<Previous

Writing is One Big Genre Soup

The Myth of "Literary Fiction"

Comedic Context and How It Shapes the Jokes We Laugh At

On Promoting Contemporary Literature

DIY Zines in a DIY Scene

Categories

Archives