I’m majoring in English, going on my last year. I picked the major my freshman year because I needed to pick something eventually, and I figured English would probably be the major I was most interested in. I loved reading and writing, and I was good at them. Obvious choice. I’m not here to say whether or not it was the best one. But I think probably.
However, almost immediately I realized that I didn’t like most of the stuff I was reading. About half of it I began to appreciate after some further analysis and thought, but in general I was put off by either archaic or bombastic language. It’s quite possibly bombast in itself to use that word, but these things happen, I suppose. Here‘s the definition, if you really need it. Anyways, this frustration was most acutely sparked by poetry, but it was definitely not exclusive.
This frustration alone wouldn’t have been enough to get anyone else involved, though. I have the sneaking suspicion that I’m a little bit ADD, and it’s a well-known fact that I’m lazy as heck.
No, what gets me is the overt elitism going on in the literary community. If you haven’t read the Iliad, you’re a Neanderthal. If you don’t love Shakespeare, you lose all credibility. And even more than that–writers often create content that is intentionally complex for the sake of complexity instead of beauty. We have been taught from a young age that a text must be inaccessible, confusing, and distant in order to be of value. Anything else is purely pop culture–the horror!
Is anyone else irked by this? I am not asserting that the classic literary canon holds no value–we’ve talked already about how that’s my own fault. What I wish to convey is that I am intensely frustrated by our obsession with complexity for its own sake.
I say that anything that makes you think or feel deeply is of value and should be given a chance.
I say that the most insignificant little high school student in Atlanta, Georgia has as much chance of putting out something worth reading as an English professor at Stanford.
I say that it’s time everyone were able to enjoy beautiful literature.
Who’s with me?
CLICK. 
I graduated with a BA in English in 2010 and I haven’t read the Iliad….o.O. But yeah…Worst. Major. Ever. Sure it was all fun during school, but when it comes time to look for a job most employers just laugh at it. Hope you have better luck 🙂
Yeah, I hear it doesn’t work out so well after college. That’s kind of why I’m trying to explore this new media thing (which is more apparent elsewhere on this blog). There’s a lot of potential there!
I’ll stand with you on this one. I love a great deal of poetry and classic literature, but modern culture has a different form of language and different styles of writing. Your point that we shouldn’t fall in line and love great works if we don’t find them accessible is well taken. After all, the point of literature is to elucidate themes that resonate with people. If writing or situations fail to relate human themes because we no longer understand them, they’re antiquated, and it’s reasonable for us to pass on them.
Anyway, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with loving the past so long as we don’t get stuck in it. My real beef with literary elitism is found in your “Anything else is purely pop culture–the horror!” comment. Where does our cultural aversion to pop culture come from? Why is this aversion so ingrained in certain groups? I wonder, has literature always resisted contemporary popular cultures? What about when literature was the popular culture? Why do some people resist the human themes manifest in the mediums of popular culture today? Why do we resist acknowledging true greatness in modern films while embracing true greatness in literature? Why aren’t there more popular culture classes at universities? Why don’t we have a class on comic books or graphic novels at BYU yet (this last one’s for me)?
In any case, I don’t think we should be apologizing for our culture. There are plenty of brilliant, talented people working with new mediums among us. Popular culture has its complications, but we shouldn’t assume it’s all a big sell-out. I’m grateful for the good things about pop culture.
Ah, I agree with everything you’re saying! “After all, the point of literature is to elucidate themes that resonate with people.” Also, your last paragraph – brilliant way of putting it. We shouldn’t be apologizing for our modern-day culture. We should trying to draw attention to and BE those brilliant, talented people that are working with new mediums. There’s a lot to be explored. One thing I like about Dr. Burton’s insistence that we relate a classic novel (well, not in my case, but shh) to the digital age is that he is acknowledging the important human themes in classic literature while turning our attention forward to our own situations.
Absolutely with you. As much as I rate “Catcher in the Rye”, if I read one more lazy review of a newly published YA novel that defines it as “the next Catcher-blah-blah”, I’ll go spare. There are certain literary classics I won’t touch with a bargepole (Ulysses) because they do nothing for me. And certain authors do have a rather good cackle at their audience, penning something of “bombast”, promoting it without an ounce of sincerity and laughing in their graves, most likely, when it passes through generations as something serious.
Mind you, I personally think the literary world is slightly more accessible than the art world. Wooo boy, walk into a gallery and dare not to fawn over a Monet or Constable ..
Ha. Don’t even get me started.
I definitely agree with this, Tasha. This is something that has bothered me for quite a while, too. From discussions with professors and in classes, I’ve felt like everyone has been saying that I need to accept that complexity and inaccessibility are intrinsic to the literary life. I’ve felt kind of guilty, like I need to learn to “fall in line and love great works” (as Brandon stated so nicely). While I can see the value in the cannon, I don’t like being a part of a culture that cannot let go of its need for elitism simply because it makes us feel cool or something. I feel like the whole point of studying literature (or anything, really) is to enrich our lives through making connections in new ways with different people and cultures and ideas. In our elitism, we cut ourselves off from a whole world of connections.
Oo man! “In our elitism, we cut ourselves off from a whole world of connections.” I love it. I need to start a quote board of all the awesome things people are saying in the comments.
Hmm. It’s really hard for me to agree with some of your points (maybe because I am a little bit on the elitist side in some cases). I think Brandon was starting to gesture to the real heart of this problem–we need to define what literature is and what we gain from studying it for this question to really be fully explored and even articulated.
For one thing, could you provide some examples of the books you think are elitist or bombastic? That would really help me orient myself to the argument you’re making. You seem to be saying that literature is literature because of beauty. Though this seems tame enough, it sounds suspiciously like the aesthetics, and “art for art’s sake” is a more dangerous path to take an argument than it might at first seem.
Personally, I don’t think I study literature because it personally resonates with me. That does happen occasionally, but I read it for a variety of reasons. Caveat emptor: I am a theory-head (and I apparently like throwing around the phrase “caveat emptor”), so I love thinking about the arguments implicit in the idea of making literature complex–how is it complex? Why? What does this say about writing, about books, about the cultural milieu at the time, or about the human thought or condition generally? What is the argument a text is making, how is it supported, and how should we evaluate it? Granted, there are some texts I won’t go near (Finnegan’s Wake in particular. At least you can read Ulysses without thousands of pages of annotations), but I openly admit that I read literature for different reasons than do most of the people in the world. And that is okay–that’s why I’m an English major and not just a reader of books. I want to think about them in more terms than just how they relate to my life. Personally, I think that’s a bit of a self-centered approach. I’ve come to learn a lot through texts that I might otherwise have set aside as “boring” or “not something I can relate to.”
This is a hard argument for me to navigate though because no matter how much I gloss over it, there is some degree of elitism even in my assertion that we read books for different reasons. No matter how much I say it’s okay for people to read books exclusively for entertainment and purely personal appreciation, I can’t get over the inkling that much (but not all) of what people with these intentions have to say about the books won’t really be all that interesting or helpful to me. Granted, there’s the possibility that it could happen, but we’re reading to answer fundamentally different questions; we have fundamentally different views of what literature is and what it can or should do. So yeah, I’m not usually all that interested in what reading-for-entertainment people have to say about the books I read. I love them as people and would love to include them in the kinds of conversations I have, but I usually find that they’re not all that interested.
But it goes the other way too. Some people think that the things I read and the reasons I read are boring and not worth their time. For instance, I love the book A Hazard of New Fortunes. But everyone else I know who’s read it has kind of hated it. And it’s true that plotwise, not a lot happens until like 400 pages into the book. Call me elitist if you want, but I don’t usually read for plot. That doesn’t often answer the questions that I think literature should address for me, so it doesn’t matter as much. And I often feel marginalized because it seems like the point of view I’ve adopted is becoming increasingly less relevant.
In short, for me, this isn’t a question of elitism as it is of tribalism/chauvanism on both sides. We draw our lines in the sand and define what is interesting, what matters, and we sometimes scoff at the rest.
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