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Cult Writing


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I think the definition is almost too vague to be meaningful. I've read so many blurbs about books claiming to be "cult classics", and yet there's no defining theme at all; and even there's no real defining theme in terms of the audience. Some are, in fact, just mainstream. Some are, in fact, so obscure as to have a tiny audience, and the publisher's only way to try and pretend they're readable is to claim the tiny readership is "cult".

 

I guess, though, if anything the definition is not actually about the readership, but about a counter-cultural content. It's about subversion, but also about creating an inner grouping of people who have a feeling that they're the chosen ones able to look cynically on the rest of the world. "We understand that you're all a bunch of losers". It's not quite that, but there's certainly an element of that from authors as diverse as Ballard, Pynchon, Self, Kerouac, Brautigan or Murukami, to think of authors that I like that have been described as cult.

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