Literary snobs: my first sighting
My friend (who is getting a Masters in library science, I would like to point out) had an interesting rant on his blog about, among other things, English majors and genre fiction versus “lit fic”, from which I quote most gleefully:

“Contrast people having weighty moral issues and physical travails while fishing with people having weighty moral issues and physical travails on spaceships. You should be keeping a simple fact in mind here, which is that fishing, to be perfectly honest, is REALLY FUCKING BORING, and that flying around in spaceships fighting aliens is REALLY COOL.”

It is funny and it reminded me that I myself have not ranted about this subject (in writing, anyway).

I took two fiction writing classes in college. The first I took as a Sophomore was “Fiction Writing”. I enjoyed it so much, I thought I'd take “Short Story Writing” which had “Fiction Writing” as a prerequisite. It was the only class on the list that fulfilled my last writing course requirement, didn't involve giving any speeches, and looked like fun.

The first thing that was interesting about it was, in a class of about 25, I was one of only two science majors. Everyone else was BA, most of them Women's Studies or English majors. I bring it up because over the course of the class, there was a heavy lit-fic snobbishness vibe going on, something I barely noticed in the “Fiction Writing” class which had contained a more diverse group of students.

As an example, the first day, the proff talked about how annoyed he got when people refer to the novels he's written as “adventure novels.”

“It's NOT an adventure novel,” this professor told us firmly. “Just because there is kidnapping and a rescue in the story, doesn't mean it's genre fiction. I use elements from genre fiction, but my books are serious literature.”

“What the hell?” By the proff's definition, any story that is “good” (ie, well-written and meaningful), is considered lit-fic. If that story also happened to have kidnapping, then it was simply “borrowing themes” from adventure genre fiction. If that story happened to have spaceships, then it was borrowing themes from science fiction. But all genre fiction is, by definition, crap. Therefore, unless told otherwise, you can expect that any story in the science fiction section of a book store or library is crap.

“And let me make it clear,” he told us later on, “that this class is about writing literary fiction. Not genre fiction. So I don't want to see any, you know, flying horses in your stories.”

This got a giggle from the class (except me), and an English major piped up, “are there even any science fiction short stories?” I think I actually felt my jaw hit the floor. How did you manage to make it to your last years in college and be that ignorant about an entire subset of American writing? What was worse, the people sitting next to her were sort of nodding thoughtfully. “Yeah,” I could almost hear them thinking to themselves, “how could there even be such a thing as a science fiction short story?”

You're majoring in English! I wanted to shout. Didn't you ever branch out with your reading lists? Instead, I turned and tried to briefly explain about the tens of thousands of science fiction short stories that had been published in the last 100 or so years. (To be honest, I think my exact quote was “Um, actually, there are a ton of sci-fi short stories out there”). Her response was “Oh,” and then the class moved on to another subject.

My point is: utter, complete, and ignorant snobbery. Ignorant, I'm thinking, being the operative word here.

The required book for the class was a compilation called “The Best American Short Stories.” I doubt the professor or anyone else in the class even noticed that there was a science fiction short story by Ursula LeGuin in there; it certainly wasn't on the list of stories we were assigned to read.

It was my first up-close experience of these creatures they call “literary snobs”. I've read a lot of essays on the intern3ts about this disease, the possible causes, and cures. All I know is, it's freakin' annoying.