Does this story actually have any fans?

[Lord Lannister]

Being a nerd is a hobby for me. Something I do for fun. So reading a thesis on nerdiness complete with analysis and properly citied sources doesn't seem much fun to me.

[Lord Varys]

Problem with ASoIaF is that it isn't finished yet, and the whole GoT thing didn't really advance it as good literature to serious people. It might be discussed as a cultural phenomenon and stuff, but a serious study of ASoIaF has to wait until the series is finished, and one actually knows how the story develops and ends - because that's when one no longer has to speculate how the story is going to go.

Analyzing unfinished literature isn't fun.

[Nagini's Neville]

Most people you meet in your everyday life don't read period.

Ask around how many people have read other popular books and classics- maybe they' ve seen the movie.

 

[zandru]

3 hours ago, Nagini's Neville said:

Most people you meet in your everyday life don't read period.

I think this sums it up nicely. Why bother, when you've got the teevie, the youtube, the social media? Books are HARD!

[Hiero79]

This thread has sparked a lot more discussion than I was expecting, some of it very positive. 

I should perhaps clarify that I'm not trolling in the slightest - I try not to on principle. Nor was I making anything up - all those stories are entirely true. Most importantly I'm not attacking Martin at all. My work to date has involved locating Martin in the broader fantasy genre, which in turn has involved tying him in with some far-reaching themes in Anglophone literature going back to the eighteenth century. My basic supposition is that Martin's success is down to his ability to get the commonplaces of contemporary fantasy working to his advantage in order to venture upon those themes, rather than accepting them as strictures. Getting the conventions of a literary form working for you (instead of you working for them) is the mark of a good author, which is exactly what I think Martin is.

The point I was trying to make is that for all the millions of book sales and billions of episode downloads this story has generated, it's peculiarly difficult to find anyone who seems to have made any intellectual or emotional investment in the story. People enjoy telling the GoT joke ("In GoT, everybody dies") but seem largely uninterested in doing anything else. The TV show in particular seems to have been received as a primarily comedic text. The one viewing party I managed to attend consisted to two people repeating the GoT joke to each other for twenty minutes before one of them left early, and a third person who was confused about the walking dead ("I don't remember them from the books"). These were members of the general public; academics, as noted above, seem to be anxious to profess their ignorance of the story. As someone who devoted 18 months of my career to praising of the story as a densely layered, brilliantly executed example of fantasy in action, I find that frustrating.

The title of the thread was born from that frustration, and might have been better planned. I'm sure there are keen fans out there; I'm just having great difficulty finding them. Perhaps what I ought to do is start some specific discussion threads here ("Sansa Stark: Gothic heroine" might be a good one) and see if I can get any response to them.

[Adam Targaryen]

On 6/27/2020 at 10:07 AM, Hiero79 said:

This thread has sparked a lot more discussion than I was expecting, some of it very positive. 

I should perhaps clarify that I'm not trolling in the slightest - I try not to on principle. Nor was I making anything up - all those stories are entirely true. Most importantly I'm not attacking Martin at all. My work to date has involved locating Martin in the broader fantasy genre, which in turn has involved tying him in with some far-reaching themes in Anglophone literature going back to the eighteenth century. My basic supposition is that Martin's success is down to his ability to get the commonplaces of contemporary fantasy working to his advantage in order to venture upon those themes, rather than accepting them as strictures. Getting the conventions of a literary form working for you (instead of you working for them) is the mark of a good author, which is exactly what I think Martin is.

The point I was trying to make is that for all the millions of book sales and billions of episode downloads this story has generated, it's peculiarly difficult to find anyone who seems to have made any intellectual or emotional investment in the story. People enjoy telling the GoT joke ("In GoT, everybody dies") but seem largely uninterested in doing anything else. The TV show in particular seems to have been received as a primarily comedic text. The one viewing party I managed to attend consisted to two people repeating the GoT joke to each other for twenty minutes before one of them left early, and a third person who was confused about the walking dead ("I don't remember them from the books"). These were members of the general public; academics, as noted above, seem to be anxious to profess their ignorance of the story. As someone who devoted 18 months of my career to praising of the story as a densely layered, brilliantly executed example of fantasy in action, I find that frustrating.

The title of the thread was born from that frustration, and might have been better planned. I'm sure there are keen fans out there; I'm just having great difficulty finding them. Perhaps what I ought to do is start some specific discussion threads here ("Sansa Stark: Gothic heroine" might be a good one) and see if I can get any response to them.

Yes, I think it would be a very good idea with a discussion thread like that one about for example Sansa. A lot of people here on the forum are mostly interested in the specifics of the series (such as theories about what will happen to specific characters, prophecies and details about the in-book world) and not necessarily always the literary style in a broader literary context, but there are certainly threads about that as well and you will probably get a relatively good response. There are people who discuss the way GRRM writes in general and also the various aspects of depiction, intertextual aspects, comparisons with other fantasy works and so forth. Not super much but yeah, some of it at least.

I also understand your frustration in your experience with especially academic people not having shown any interest in the series and like others here have said, I think it's probably due to the specific subculture of the academic world. The thing about your student writing 2000 words about Natalie Dormer sounds extremely bizarre and irritating, but like I have personally experienced (I'm 22 years old and obviously surrounded by people of my own age) a large part of today's youths behave in bizarrely dull and intellectually degenerated ways so yeah, unfortunately that is just the way some people are these days. Even some of the less ambitious students taking literature courses despite not being smart or interested enough for it.

 

[norwaywolf123]

On 6/24/2020 at 1:15 PM, Hiero79 said:

I'm an academic literary critic working in the field of modern fantasy literature. In that capacity I've written several peer-reviewed publications about Martin, including a book about how he relates and compares to other fantasy authors. I won't give the titles, because I don't want to be accused of self-promotion, but I do want to observe the one key thing I've learned from several years of research and writing about A Song of Ice and Fire: nobody is the slightest bit interested in it.

Here's my evidence:

    * Multiple conventions have declined my offer to give presentations on Martin.

    * When one convention that accepted such a proposal - a con that Martin himself used to attend and has addressed in the past - the number of people I met who had read his novels was smaller than the number of people I met who'd never heard of him. My presentation attracted an audience of four, one of whom left halfway through.

     * When I gave a colloquium about Martin at my university, two people came. One left halfway through.

     * Four journalists have interviewed me about my book. All told me they were "big GoT fans" in their initial emails. None, it transpired, had ever watched it, or were aware it was a literary adaptation; one opted not to publish the interview at all.

     * I can't get my book reviewed anywhere; no magazines or literary journals want to hear about it.

     * The host of a local soft-news panel discussion on a local radio station mentioned the launch of season 4 of GoT to his three guests that afternoon. Two didn't know what he was talking about. The third said "Thank you, goodbye" and hung up on him. 

     * When I taught A Clash of Kings in a university course in 2016, most students refused to read it. The university allows students to design their own term paper questions; only one student out of a class of 42 opted to write about Martin. She submitted a 2,000 word discussion of how attractive she thought Natalie Dormer was.

     * When a friend showed me the photos she'd taken on her holiday in Dubrovnik, I noted she'd visited the place where GoT filmed its street scenes. She ran out of the room with her fingers in her ears, shouting "I've never heard of that, and neither have any of my friends!"

     * When I gave a public lecture on Martin, it attracted an audience of eight, including my mother. One friend of mine who attended did so because, he explained, "Anything has to be better than reading that crap." He was, at the time, supervising an undergraduate thesis on Martin. 

I'm not telling these horror stories simply to vent my frustration - although I'll admit there's an element of that. I'm simply posting this in an attempt to find out if there are, in fact, any Martin fans out there. Sales figures of the books suggest so, but I'm having real difficulty locating them. To date the number of people I've met who are prepared to take even a polite interest in the story is smaller than the number of people who have actually stopped talking to me when I told them the subject of my book. There's a lot to talk about in this story on both page and screen and, having invested the time and energy I have into studying it, it would be really nice to find someone to have that conversation with. I thought this might be a good place to find those people. Any takers?

How do you as a literary critic work? What is the process like?

[Amris]

What you write in the OP sounds pretty normal to me. Happens to nearly everyone in their lives that they don't receive as much interest as they would like. I tried to google the ratio of written to published books but didn't find a hard number. Anyway - we all know only a small fraction of all books that get written ever get published. Is it 1 in a 1000? That's what I would guess. If you don't find anyone willing to publish yours that's unfortunate but completely normal.

You could try to do something differently in your promotion and your writing and your teaching. Maybe that would help. Or maybe not. It's very hard to get and keep peoples' attention, regardless the topic.

However there also is another factor:

Even with a series as popular as this one only a fraction of the population will be interrested in it and an even smaller fraction will have read it. The only figure I found was that 45 million copies of the books had been sold in the US (90 million world-wide). The US has 328 million inhabitants so every 7th American has bought one or more of the books. Since many buyers likely bought more than one of the books (meaning others got none) the ratio of Americans who have gotten one or more books in the series is probably a lot smaller than 1/7th. And the number of people who have actually read the books they bought must by necessity be even smaller than this. Turn this number around and you get the following: even for a very popular book series far more than 6 out of 7 Americans are completely uninterested in it.

So even if you did everything as perfectly in your writing and promotion as humanly possible more than 6 out of  7 people would completely ignore you. That does not mean the series is not popular. It just means popular is a relative term and does not necessarily mean a majority of the population.

Add to that the problem that even the less than 1/7th of people who might theoretically have a shot at being interested in your work have to hear about your book/lectures (and most likely don't) and you get a pretty limited number of potential readers/audience members. Since it is likely that you did not do everything perfectly (who does after all?) the number must be even smaller.

There still remains the fact that it must be possible to generate some interest for a presentation on Martin that you give on a con (of all places!) that Martin used to attend. If you only got 4 persons in a situation as ideal as this then you likely did something wrong. Drawing the conclusion that no one is interested in GRRM's work is a cop-out. Yes, this conclusion may be seem easier for you (since you don't have to admit to yourself that did something sub-optimal) - but it does not help you. Analyse what you can do better and some good may come out of it.