“Divination is one of the most imprecise branches of magic. I shall not conceal from you that I have very little patience with it.” – Minerva McGonagall
You have a right to your opinion, of course, on the merits of the books. But as far as canon goes, what’s taught is what’s the canon of English Lit – at least this is how the term is used in literature courses. I challenge you to come up with another definition of canon that does not default to your subjective taste of what’s a good book. I’m all for subjectivity, but if canon is an agreed-upon body of work, we need a wider definition.
I’m not about to write off an entire field of study because a few books I don’t like are on the canon. Otherwise, I’d have to leave literary studies until the works of James Joyce are committed to the furnace.
And finally, every period for which extant work exists is studied. And no one can predict what works people of the future are going to enjoy.
Take the two most-read Middle English works today – Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and the Pearl-Poet’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Canterbury Tales was evidently popular, given the large numbers of copies we’ve found, frequent references to it, and Chaucer’s name-recognition. As for Sir Gawain, the poet’s name is lost, and there is only one extant copy (the original is lost) made shortly after the original. It was never mentioned in any other sources until that one manuscript was rediscovered.
And now it’s popular. Incredibly popular. And meanwhile the Middle English equivalents of bestsellers – various versions of the Physiologus and Piers Plowman – are only read by people making a special study of the era, or who are forced to by teachers. Tastes have changed. People want a good King Arthur story, not a Medieval Christian morality play in book form.
There’s simply no way to know what will be considered canon in the future.
As for why literary studies get no respect, my take on it is quite different. I believe it comes down to the snobby assumption that things popularly read could not have any artistic merit. This is particularly prevalent in my own field, Canadian Lit, where critics will increasingly turn up their noses even at Margaret Atwood’s best in favour of dull experimental authors like Clark Blais, for whom things like writing in the second person (like a Choose Your Own Adventure book) will substitute for such conventional things as character, plot, theme, dialogue, or even having something interesting to say.
The result is that people see literary studies as a dull, closed system with no relevance to the larger world. And literature students see the public as crass and stupid while at the same time largely definition as the opposite of what the public reads.
(Of course, there is always someone who’s a fan of a work nobody else likes, and I’m not taking aim at them. I have a few books like that myself. Tastes can be very individual. But I’ve had a professor claim that Finnegan’s Wake is the best book out there because he wasn’t able to finish it. I think we’ve crossed over, at this point, into Swiftian satire.)
I’m with Voltaire, myself: “All styles are interesting, except the boring.” This is why I’m trying to interest my fellow students in what I consider good popular work such as Harry Potter – it’s an effort to break them of their extreme snobbery, and bring literary studies back on a path to human relevance.
I’d also recommend the Wizard of Earthsea series for children…I think it’s written so well that it translates to both age groups (child and adult, that is).
Eve --excellent! Again, again! (but didn’t the Noo-noo have something to do with the pillagiing?)
Hamish --shades of Jane Austen’s “oh, a novel! Just a novel” (paraphrase) type stuff here.
I think the jury is still out on HP and will be for some time. I am not sure just what people are looking for when they talk about Great Literature. Shakespeare is certainly great, but he was enormously popular in his day. DH Laurence, not so much (and not so much today, either!). Faulkner, Joyce, Austen, the Bronte sisters, Wilde, Dickens, Thackeray–all of them were both lauded and panned in their time. But–they stood the test of time (so far). Who can say in one hundred years what will be revered or not? Certainly noone is reading Pilgrim’s Progress unless it’s assigned–but it was a Great Book of its day.
HP suffers from being a book aimed at children and also a fantasy–neither category has ever gotten much respect from either critics or the public. Fantasy is too close to pulp fiction (it’s not “real” enough-whatever that may mean) and kid’s books receive very little regard outside the field itself–evidence the NY Times creating a new list, just to placate those adults who couldn’t handle HP being #1 on an “adult” list.
I cannot put HP with Scooby (and who is this Scrappy of whom you speak? Sounds like a death knell to a series to me!); I cannot put HP with Harlequin Romances either–or Nancy Drew/Goosebumps type stuff. It may be plot driven (which to my mind is what separates a Literature from a “good book”: Literature is character driven; good books are plot driven. Neither is superior to the other–kinda like apples and oranges, IMO), but there is too much depth there and too much character developement to just dismiss HP as overblown crap.
the hysteria is over the top–but who can be churlish about kids getting excited about books? If JKKR leads half of her kid fans to read other fantasy series, like Narnia etc–that is a Good Thing.
Interesting, then, that Austen is Rowling’s favourite writer
And I agree with what you said, though fortunately some of the better genre fiction is finally starting (just starting) to get some respect in English Lit courses. I’ve had a sci-fi course and graphic novel course, and a literature-in-context course did spend some time discussing genre fiction in a rather abstract way – the way cultural assumptions are encoded in genre.
I didn’t know that about Rowling. Austen is far and away my fav. I tend to reread her in the fall; her books act as a sorbet to the (reading) palate for me. I like Charlotte Bronte too, but loathe Emily.
Anyhoo, it is good to hear that some “popular” fiction is getting the time and attention it deserves. Frankly, I am not sure if a deconstruction of say, Nancy Drew or the Bobbsey Twins belongs in Lit class or Soc!
I’ve read very little Austen, I’m afraid – one of those authors I hear good things about and always mean to get back to, and never do. I’ve always heard that Mrs. Norris is an Austen reference, though I’m not sure who Austen’s Mrs. norris is.
Well, Cultural Studies is sort of where literature and sociology mesh – trying to understand society through the stories it tells and consumes.
I have read a very good article on sexual imagery in Nancy Drew – apparently there was some very suggestive stuff in earlier editions that were expurgated in later editions of the same stories.
And we have had a few discussions about how mystery novels represent post-Enlightenment rationalist discourse – how everything has a linear, rational answer and can be solved, and thus represents what has become, in the last 300 years, a standard Western myth.
(Of course, increasingly you have self-aware examples in each genre that purposely play with the rules, so this is less and less true.)
I’ve been involved in such discussions, as well. Also, how Prohibition changed mysteries and other popular culture by introducing the idea of the sympathetic criminal, so that mysteries can be solved but in some cases perhaps shouldn’t be solved.
I’ll recommened anything by Diana Wynne Jones - again. People who must have wizardry in boarding schools can pick up Witch Week. No, this is not a HP rip-off, it was written 20 years before Harry.
As for HP. Read what you like. However, I find the fact that so many people find something so mediocre a terrific read depressing.
Or the killer takes their own life, thereby thwarting justice–it’s almost always thought to be “for the best”.
I think I would love cultural studies–didn’t exist when I was in college. Although I did do an analysis of some popular nurse references and how they reinforced the stereotypes of nursing.
Sexual innuendo in Nancy Drew! I need to gather some chums in my roadster and re-read! (Wasn’t George-girl- gay? or was it Georgette?)
Unfortunately, the chances are very slim of getting an uncensored copy. You’d have to have first editions. Plus they aren’t too racy by today’s standards, and some of them may not have been intended as innuendo (although at least one critic I’ve read argues convincingly for it as such).
Here’ an excerpt from The Sign of the Twisted Candle, 1938 edition, that did not appear in the reprints, apparently because it was thought to suggest masturbation:
I realized around the fourth book that Rowling was not one of the world’s greatest writers from a mechanical, technical standpoint. It was released when I was thirteen and just starting to read more “adult” fiction," and that was also when I started writing stories for myself. The fourth book made me rethink my expectations for the series.
That said, I still enjoy Harry Potter and am (im)patiently waiting for my copy of Half-Blood Prince. The books are fun, and reading has always been a largely about entertainment for me. I love her literary references and word play. I am interested in the plot and characters. I like pissing off the contingent of people who go “OMG! Witchcraft! Evil!”
I don’t think it’s juvenile or childish for an adult to be interested in dhildren’s lit either. Many books marketed toward a younger audience can be enjoyed on another level by adults. How many half-pints get all the mythology references in Harry Potter? My favorite children’s books, “A Series of Unfortunate Events,” includes references to Virginia Woolf, Dante, George Orwell, and Johnathan Swift. In fact, I suspect that plenty of children’s lit wasn’t written with kids in mind, but is sold that way because the sex and violence is minimal and by virtue of the main characters being young.
Hey HEY! Don’t be dissin’ Nancy Drew. Why she and her plucky friends inspired fives of girls in my elementary school to solve mysteries and aspire to breaking the glass ceiling!
Hamish, I agree with you wholeheartedly. I’m a Multicultural Lit major, which means I have to read a lot of “modern classics” like Nadine Gordimer (who needs to learn what quotation marks are) and V.S. Naipaul (who needs to take some St. John’s Wort or something) and I can see the suckiness continuing through the decades. I feel like someone in the early 20th century must have when they read Joyce or Thomas Wolfe.*
Popular books are not a bad thing. “Literary” works are not a bad thing. Taken together they can be wonderful things. But leaning too far from one to the other is a mistake and leads to elitist nitwits like ol’ Joely.
*It is my fondest wish to one day go to Asheville and kick Thomas Wolfe’s grave. I want the time I wasted reading Look Homeward Angel back with interest.
Good dialoging with you. You are Hamish, not matt_mcl? You live together? OK. Data input, and I suppose the quote thing below should be “Hamish.”
I’ve got some quirky opinions about literature, so maybe stating them will make some of my responses to what you wrote clearer.
*I think novels are mostly for entertainment and best written with that intention. If the writing is so good that the result transcends entertainment to become art, so much the better; but if the writer starts off writing to produce art, then usually neither art nor entertainment results. In our own era, the novel is alive as entertainment but dead as art. “Serious” novelists have lost their audiences on a fundamental level by, well, taking themselves and their topics too seriously. No one reads the stuff.
I think the novel and short story are fundamentally flawed as media of “art.” Poetry and drama do a better job. The reason for this, I believe, is that the novel tries (or is forced) to be naturalistic, but by its very nature it fails. The novel is also too weighed down by its “duty” to fill in details. Drama, on the other hand, is naturally, fundamentally abstract and achieves its artistic goals. It conveys archetypes better. Poetry, obviously overlapping with drama (drama can be written in verse), aims to make language itself beautiful in a way that the novel cannot.
The novel and short story are, at base, the decendents of casual, campfire storytelling, not children of the oral poetic tradition. They were conceived originally as entertainment and diversions (I’m thinking of the 18th century). Only in certain authors have the media “clicked” and produced true art.
The success of these certain authors has, I think, created in us a blindness to the fact that we should not expect art of the novel. We assume that, in our very era, there ought to be novelists producing “great works.” I think the successful examples, mostly in the 19th century, were the product of the right confluence of elements producing great literature.
So let’s bust that habit, I say. Let’s not take the novel so seriously. And let’s avoid the topic of the short story altogether.
*I don’t myself believe that the canon of great works of the past has been firmly grasped. For the 19th century and going backwards, we have lots of false negatives. For the 20th century, both false negatives and positives. It’s a mess.
*As I said above, the greatest conceit of our era is that someone must be producing great art in every category: poetry, drama, painting, whatever. And an academic excresence has emerged that both judges the output and presumes to supply it. It is a parasitic entity feeding off of government and “charitable” largesse but easily and even unconsciously dismissed by the public. In short, art today is by the presumtive artists for the presumtive artists. Meanwhile, the average person cannot name a single modern poety or painter. And in the “arts” that remain popular, such as the novel and film, the gulf between the presumptive artists and what the public pays to enjoy is extremely wide.
All that said, comments on yours:
I meant canon as a collective opinion of academics as to what is truly good and worthy literature, not merely what is discussed in the classroom. Indeed, certain works are taught not because they are good art but merely because they were influential at the time or are early works of someone who later went on to become “major.”
If this definition of “canon” varies from how academics themselves define the word, then so be it.
I am saying “canon” is what academics consider to be great literature. This does not default to my own subjective taste as to what’s a good book. Note, however, that I do not believe what academics consider to be good is in reality what is good.
I don’t write off the field of study, but I think it has lost its way to the point where it is, as a practical matter, broken and unfixable. Several factors have served to divorce academics’ analysis and appreciation of art from common sense and the opinion of the masses.
Crappy art considred good is one factor. I’ll second your call of crap on Joyce. When crap is considered art, naturally the academics lose the respect and trust of the people.
Further, considering non-art media to be art has become a flaw in the very DNA of art criticism. I don’t consider either the novel or film to be truly art-producing media on average; they are fundamentally entertainment medium. In contrast, painting is either good art or bad art; it is fundamentally not an entertainment medium.
Third, the methods of criticism have fundamentally become crap. Too many academics with too much time on their hands competing with each other to publish papers no one wants to read, including the academics themselves. The really wrong road taken is the dropping of the good-bad axis in criticism and faux-ly analyzing extraneous details. An opinion as to whether a writer’s works and the elements thereof are good or bad should always be in the foreground, or at least the background. Merely assuming that an artist is big and worthy of analysis while examing in post-modern detail influences, politics, whatever, is faux Ivory-tower bullshit.
That’s wrong. You can chuck a lot of stuff with 100% accuracy.
A hundred years from now no one is going to enjoy any of the generic genre fic that is written today: the paint-by-numbers Westerns, romances, sci-fi. The bargain bin junk that is forgotten as soon as it is dumped in bookstores.
I think we forget how much has already been trashed. We have no conception of the number of novels that were published in the 1920s–hundreds of thousands, almost all forgotten. We are left with a wee handful of authors from that period that are still read.
Predicting the positives and dismissing some of the big names–yeah, that’s a lot harder. I certainly hope that Stephen King is not considered a major author in the future, but I really don’t know.
That’s a good point, but our modern conundrum is unlike anything known in the past. You and I could read all IIRC 250-odd extant Elizabethan plays within a short amount of time (a few years). The same is true for most European lit categories until the 19th century or so.
Once you hit the 20th, you get an explosion of works. No one could ever sort through it all. Crap is getting praised and good stuff consigned to the oubliette.
I guess I agree that we can’t know the positives, though we can accurately predict many of the negatives. I do think, however, that our era will mostly be known as an artistic wasteland for the written word. The problem is that I think it’s very hard for a work to become truly famous that was never popular in the first place (your medieval example notwithstanding, as that was from an era in which all the literature may now be studied by one person). Art lit is no longer popular, so it will be very hard for someone in the future to hone in on the good and preserve it as canon.
[quote]
As for why literary studies get no respect, my take on it is quite different. I believe it comes down to the snobby assumption that things popularly read could not have any artistic merit. This is particularly prevalent in my own field, Canadian Lit, where critics will increasingly turn up their noses even at Margaret Atwood’s best in favour of dull experimental authors like Clark Blais, for whom things like writing in the second person (like a Choose Your Own Adventure book) will substitute for such conventional things as character, plot, theme, dialogue, or even having something interesting to say.
[quote]
I agree that the current “art” lit is basically worthless, yet reiterate my above contention that pop lit is basically just entertainment and not worthy of deep study. I think literary studies get no respect basically because people perceive that its gurus and mandarins are not supplying wisdom the public desires but are members of a self-centered academic cabal supported by the government and university system, the latter of which is in turn supported by the artificial requirement that people get an “education” in order to get a white collar job.
Quite so!
No doubt!
Here I think you desire your students to think in this way because their doing so would validate your chosen method of making money, ie, teaching or otherwise participating in academia. What I say is, drop the assumption that we need to analyze entertainment in this manner and at this level. HP is either a good read or a bad read; it is not art.
Please don’t take personally my view of academics as parasites. You sound like a very reasonable person who is trying to change things for the better. I just think that world is corrupt beyond saving.
