Michael Saler takes a probing look at the rise of geek — and specifically comic book — culture:
But critics of genre are increasingly counter-balanced by prominent proponents and practitioners, including Haruki Murakami, David Mitchell, Joyce Carol Oates, Jonathan Lethem and Junot Diaz. The Library of America has published elegant editions of authors who only two generations ago gave libraries across America pause, H. P. Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick. Genre films and books are no longer a minority interest. They top the bestseller lists and popularity polls: we are all geeks now. The establishment’s disdain for genre, and the populists’ suspicion of experimental techniques, are largely things of the past. Generations weaned on cultures “high” and “low” have become the producers and arbiters of the arts, enabled by the expansion of the internet since the early 1990s. (Even the “establishment” is being overtaken by the less euphonious but more democratic “blogosphere”.) Two eminent figures in the effort to reconcile mass entertainment with intellectual respectability, the music critic David Hajdu and the novelist Michael Chabon, have taken stock of the irrational intolerance faced by genre artists in the past. Neither overtly celebrates today’s relative catholicity of taste – battles remain to be fought – but the simultaneous publication of their works reflects a broader cultural turning point.
