Use of the phrase “transcends genre”: chug glass
I’m in the middle of prepping for class at the moment, but I direct your attention to Justine Larbalestier’s satisfying rant about Maureen Dowd’s latest column, on chick lit.
I haven’t read Dowd’s column myself; it’s behind the pay wall, and, frankly, her obsession with referring to politicians by faux-cutesy pet names annoys me so much that I’ve stopped reading her, period. But Justine does an excellent job of highlighting the key elements familiar from many Times pieces on genre fiction: inadequate sample size; blithe generalization; treating all genre works as “interchangeable.” Maybe there should be some kind of drinking game for this sort of thing?
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[…] Another episode in the “transcends genre” drinking game, from Sunday’s NY Times review of Tom McCarthy’s Remainder: The subject of identity — how human memory and reality might be manipulated by outside agents — features in countless futuristic books, stories and films, and has been especially popular in the last decade as advances in the visual, auditory and surgical arts have made us increasingly wary of trusting our senses. But McCarthy’s superb stylistic control and uncanny imagination transport this novel beyond the borders of science fiction. […]