Why and How Do We Catagorize Fiction?

Two articles (LA Times and Time Magazine) I read recently got me to thinking about the difference between genre fiction and literary fiction – what those differences are, if it matters, how those distinction affect me as a writer, and how the idea of genre vs. literary changes when passing from one art form to another – say from novels to theater to TV and film? Reading those articles led to reading others, which led to more questions.

One of the interesting questions for me is how the idea ge...