Generic

Stephen King's acceptance speech has caused a bit of a stir. All I'll say here is that "literary" fiction and "genre" fiction often have a symbiotic relationship instead of an oppositional one. Literary authors have always appropriated and revised genre conventions, just as genre authors have borrowed technical strategies commonly associated with literary fiction. A number of contemporary literary novelists, for example, have revisited the historical novel, often self-consciously reflecting on its conventions. Think Russell Banks, Pat Barker, A. S. Byatt, Warwick Collins, George Garrett, Charles Johnson... Similarly, a "genre" novelist like Reginald Hill quite explicitly--and usually quite playfully--structures his mystery plots as conversations with canonical literary works. (See, for example, Pictures of Perfection, a gloriously twisted revision of Jane Austen's novels.) Or remember Alfred Bester's experiments with point of view in his terrific SF short story "Fondly Fahrenheit." Golden Age detective fiction can seem amazingly avant-garde in its use of metafictional techniques (see John Dickson Carr). George Eliot, that most consistently "serious" of Victorian novelists, was not averse to playing around with themes drawn from sensation fiction. And so forth, down through the ages. In other words, the best literary fiction and the best genre fiction exist in a mutually energizing shared field.* It's true that many literary novelists wind up rejecting genre fiction while they borrow from it (and vice-versa), but it's just as true that even such negative contact can prove imaginatively fruitful.

*Comparing Patrick O'Brian to Dewey Lambdin, say, might be one way of getting at the distinction between "energized" vs. "non-energized" genre fiction.