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Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Evaluating Books




Over a year ago Janet at Dear Author argued that
Reading is an experience, and it is shaped by how one reads just as much as by what one reads. And that experience begins even before the reader has the book in hand. Clearly price is associated with value in a somewhat delicate balance. If people are asked to pay too much for books, we will buy fewer books and less content will be sustainable in the marketplace. If we pay too little for books, content can be perceived as de-valued, either because the creator gets little or no financial benefit for writing or because there is simply so much content available that consumers cannot or do not make discriminating choices.
According to Jennifer Crusie "There is a real correlation between how much somebody pays for something and how much they value it." Hence, I suppose the cachet of being published in an expensive hardback format. But is it just price that affects perceptions of the literary value of a novel? It would seem not. Crusie and Barbara also mention the importance of cover art and Crusie adds that:
you could often associate poor writing with poor production values, the self-published book was kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. But not on the net. I think the production values are going to be where the stigma is.
Some aspects of the ebook/paper book debate remind me of an earlier period in publishing history. When Penguin was
Founded by Allen Lane in 1935, the imprint, at first operating under the aegis of Bodley Head, reprinted recently published successful books in stiff paper covers and clear type at the price of sixpence each, at a time when hard back editions of the same novels would sell for an average of 7s.6d. (Humble 56)
The result was that
Penguin made once highbrow texts available at a price and in a form – compact, pocket-sized, virtually disposable – that effectively transmuted them into the middlebrow, as they became widely available, widely read and commodified. Or rather – the very project of Penguins began to dissolve the highbrow/middlebrow divide. The strength of its series identity worked to dissolve the status differences between various forms of literature. (Humble 56-57)
It's worth noting that the covers of the Penguins "were consciously different from the gaudy, lurid paperbacks that preceded them" (Humble 56); they may have begun "to dissolve the highbrow/middlebrow divide" but it would appear that they left the divide between highbrow and lowbrow intact.

Nicola Humble suggests another way in which the literary value of what we read may be "shaped by how one reads just as much as by what one reads":
I want to suggest that it is the different ways in which the body is configured in the act of reading that provides one of the most powerful, if unconscious, contemporary modellings of the distinction between the high and the middlebrow [...]: books are ‘highbrow’ if read at a desk, pencil in hand, and middlebrow if read while ‘lolling in a chair or lying on the sofa, or in the train’. The battle of the brows can, on one level, be seen simply as a matter of sitting forward or sitting back. (47)
The position of the reader, she argues, is an indication of the reader's attitude towards what is being read. A different posture is adopted for the reading of serious, valuable texts because these are texts which, supposedly, call for a different type of reading:
The acquisition of new and distinctive reading skills was the initial point of entry into the literary academy for many, and I would argue that it is these skills and practices, above all else, that constitute the divide between the high and the middlebrow – both in the interwar years and ever since. Middlebrow and highbrow books are distinguishable, fundamentally, not by any stable intrinsic differences, but by how they are read. (46)
Humble states that
Upright, rigid, physically unable to relax, the scholar engages with his reading from a bodily position of alertness, hostility, separateness from the text. In marked contrast, the leisured reader lolls, relaxing into his book and chair, spine curled, virtually foetal, fleeing into the body with the comfort of sleep or womb rather than in monastic disavowal of its needs. (48)
I'm not entirely convinced that all scholars read their primary texts in a rigid, upright position but there does seem to be a perception that uncomfortable, difficult to read books are better and more valuable. For example, in "The Practice of Reading Good Books" Corey Anton states that
Many good books [...] offer natural resistances, not problems that could have been solved by simpler writing. [...] We should recognize this as one of their strengths. They gain part of their value because they can be so difficult, because they require patience and devotion. (71)
Humble believes
It is no coincidence that it is exactly as universities began to recognise English Literature as a subject distinct from the history of the English language, that there emerges a group of voices committed to establishing the notion of a distinct highbrow modern literary culture. If English Literature was to be recognised as a serious subject, one capable of rigorous examination, then it needed to have boundaries, definitions, and –most importantly of all – it needed to establish and privilege a very particular way of reading. The various forms of close reading pioneered by the ‘Scrutiny’ group and their followers all have in common an insistence on the need to study a text rather than simply consume it. The writing they championed was distinguished particularly by the need for close study. (45)
Many of us are aware, however, that it is entirely possible for romance readers to curl up in a comfortable position to enjoy reading Austen, the Brontës, and other "classic" authors rather than sit austerely upright in order to study them. Lillian S. Robinson, having bought, quickly read, and almost as quickly forgotten, a "novel called something like Bath Cotillion by one of the Heyer epigones" (221) asks
Does the reader who relished Bath Cotillion find that the issues and problems Jane Austen raises stand in the way of her story? Does the more elegant style interfere as well? Or do the superfluous elements of superior character, incident, and analysis simply go unnoticed? If this last is the case, as it must be for one segment of Jane Austen's modern readers, then it becomes somewhat more challenging to examine both the Regency romance itself and the sources of its appeal. (221)
While there may well be intrinsic differences between lowbrow novels and books which, unlike Austen's, are "distinguished particularly by the need for close study," I would argue that there are, nonetheless, a great many high, middle and lowbrow texts which can be read in both an upright and a recumbent position: we can read them for both pleasure and for study. Perhaps we should value them all the more for it?
-----
The photographs came from Wikimedia Commons. The "Chest with inlaid interior. About 1500 Italy, Friuli-Venezia Giulia. Walnut, with iron mounts over textile, and inlay of various woods"
combines security and elegance. It is made of walnut boards fixed with meticulous dovetail joints. It uses both internal and external hinges, as well as a steel lock. Inside are three banks of drawers and compartments to hold smaller objects, and space for a false bottom, under which particular treasures could be concealed.
It was photographed by David Jackson. The recycling bins are Brazilian and were photographed in 2005 by Patrick.

25 comments:

  1. Most of my work reading is done at my desk. I view that as my "serious" reading. Thus perhaps serious reading = work reading = upright versus leisure reading = less serious reading = recumbent?

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  2. "Thus perhaps serious reading = work reading = upright versus leisure reading = less serious reading = recumbent?"

    I'm sure that's how it is for many people. It doesn't really work that way for me, though. On the one hand I rarely find recumbent positions at all comfortable, and on the other, when I'm taking notes from a Harlequin/Mills & Boon I end up strangely contorted as I try to hold the pages open and type at the same time.

    Metaphorically, I'm also in an odd position: my leisure reading can, at any moment, transform itself into scholarly work reading. That's one of the interesting aspects of being an academic studying popular culture.

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  3. Does any of this take into consideration the external restrictions that may be placed on readers, such as taking advantage of commute time on a train or bus or carpool? Readers may not have a choice in the position they assume when reading, so how does that reflect their attitude toward the material?

    And if a reader reads a variety of "brows" of material in the same position, does that not suggest that physical position is less dependent on the material than on physical comfort?

    And what about the public attitude toward what the reader is reading? Does a reader holding a lurid-covered historical romance alter her(sic) position depending on whether her commute-mates are males (or females) who would denigrate her reading choice (and by implication her self) based on the stereotypes of bodice rippers, heaving bosoms, and throbbing manhoods, or she's riding with fellow romance readers?

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  4. Does any of this take into consideration the external restrictions that may be placed on readers, such as taking advantage of commute time on a train or bus or carpool? Readers may not have a choice in the position they assume when reading, so how does that reflect their attitude toward the material?

    I think that the statement about how a book might be considered

    middlebrow if read while ‘lolling in a chair or lying on the sofa, or in the train’

    implies that people are more likely to read middle or lowbrow fiction when travelling. Scott McCracken begins his Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction by commenting that

    Some of my happiest experiences reading popular fiction have been on trains. There is something about the combination of being trapped yet going somewhere that is particularly conducive to the pleasures of pulp. While the popular narrative also traps in its predictability, despite, or maybe because of, that predictability, there is more scope for an escape into fantasy. (1)

    Maybe the link's only metaphorical, but there's an element of speed involved in reading on a train or plane, and lowbrow reading's associated with that, too:

    Speed is the operative metaphor. Novels are praised for being a "fast read" and above all for having writing that "flows." "Flow" is an especially fascinating term because it's one that literary critics have never used, and it perfectly captures the way that clichéd prose can be gobbled up in chunks at a breakneck pace. "The Da Vinci Code" is over 400 pages long, but you can race through it in about three hours. (Miller)

    And yet, Jonathan recently posted here about how

    Romance novels, [...] at least those that I have been reading lately about a virgin’s first time, seem to thrive on this slowness. We are slowly led through the development of the relationship between the protagonists.

    --
    McCracken, Scott. Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1998.

    Miller, Laura. "Why we love bad writing." Salon 14 December 2010.

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  5. Wow, I did pretty much all my grad school reading lolling in bed, pen in hand. Of course, a lot of what I read (e.g. Dickens) might have been considered "lowbrow" when written, but what about Derrida and Lacan? Certainly difficult. Maybe if I'd sat up while reading them, I'd have had a stellar academic career.

    I'm struck by Robinson's assertion that some modern (what about contemporary?) readers of Austen "must" ignore/be incapable of seeing the highbrow aspects of Austen. Can't romance readers appreciate those even as they read for the romance? I can.

    I think that, like a lot of high/lowbrow distinctions, these begin to fall apart when pushed. Genre fiction can be read in a scholarly/highbrow way. Difficult modernist texts (and Austen novels) become easier to read with practice and knowledge of context, and experienced readers of genre fiction bring new levels of understanding and reflection to a book when they read it in context of their knowledge of the genre. I do think the difficult can have value, but that doesn't mean the "easy" is valueless (or can't be read in more "difficult" ways).

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  6. Laura wrote:

    Maybe the link's only metaphorical, but there's an element of speed involved in reading on a train or plane, and lowbrow reading's associated with that, too:



    On the other hand, I save long, more difficult (for me, at least) reads for those occasions when I have a long journey because I know I can't interrupt myself. The world races by, perhaps, but I'm essentially sitting still, not going anywhere. The antithesis, from my pov, of "speed."


    And if I have a particularly difficult read -- Georg Lukacz comes to mind -- then I want to make sure I'm as comfortable as possible. And what's comfortable for me might not be at all comfortable for the next reader, depending on physiological considerations.


    Liz wrote:

    I'm struck by Robinson's assertion that some modern (what about contemporary?) readers of Austen "must" ignore/be incapable of seeing the highbrow aspects of Austen. Can't romance readers appreciate those even as they read for the romance? I can.

    I think that, like a lot of high/lowbrow distinctions, these begin to fall apart when pushed. Genre fiction can be read in a scholarly/highbrow way. Difficult modernist texts (and Austen novels) become easier to read with practice and knowledge of context, and experienced readers of genre fiction bring new levels of understanding and reflection to a book when they read it in context of their knowledge of the genre. I do think the difficult can have value, but that doesn't mean the "easy" is valueless (or can't be read in more "difficult" ways).



    I totally, totally agree on the high/low/middle brow distinctions, partly because I think they're artificial. Dickens is "literature" today but certainly wasn't in his own time; ditto with Shakespeare. Were Austen or the Brontes deliberately writing highbrow, or have subsequent critics "made" them such? Do the lit-crit people **keep** some works in the high brow category so the unwashed masses can't access them, thus maintaining an artificial elite?

    For whom is "The DaVinci Code" a fast read? For those familiar with the background, who recognize all the clues, who don't care about the story or the people? Is it a "fast read" for the elites and therefore dismissed?

    "Can be" doesn't mean the same thing as "is," and "may" doesn't mean the same thing as "does."

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  7. Do the lit-crit people **keep** some works in the high brow category so the unwashed masses can't access them, thus maintaining an artificial elite?

    I'm not sure exactly who "the lit-crit people" are. If you mean academics who study literature(s), we're a pretty varied group.

    Humble is certainly suggesting that

    If English Literature was to be recognised as a serious subject, one capable of rigorous examination, then it needed to have boundaries, definitions, and –most importantly of all – it needed to establish and privilege a very particular way of reading

    In other words, English lit scholars had a vested interest in (a) presenting English literature as something valuable and worthy of study and (b) presenting English literature as something which could best be accessed via the specialist skills they had.

    The situation is a bit different nowadays, but academics in the humanities are still having to justify their existence/role, and distinctions between "high" and "low" are still relevant, even though they don't manifest themselves in exactly the way they once did. Nowadays, if we study texts/objects which are popular/fun we may be accused of doing "Micky Mouse" research. If we study ancient/medieval/difficult texts, we can be accused of being out of touch and irrelevant.

    This article in the Telegraph from 2004 illustrates the problem. It begins like this:

    'Mickey Mouse' courses, such as a BA in Popular Music, can be rigorous, relevant and lucrative, says Bryony Gordon

    When Paul Carr applied for the post of lecturer in Popular Music at the University of Glamorgan, he knew he had a tough task convincing everyone of its validity.

    "University advertises for lecturer on Kylie Minogue, Take That and the Beatles," the local press screamed, no doubt imagining a course where students did no more than analyse Busted lyrics and memorise back issues of the NME for their finals.


    Unfortunately (in my opinion) it ends with this:

    "I think it's more valid nowadays to look at a subject such as Classics and ask what the point of that is."

    So, the academics have to prove that they're relevant and studying something worthwhile. Authors also have a lot at stake. Melba Cuddy-Keane writes that

    The hostilities that arose when people wrote and talked about the brows were [...] fueled by perceived or feared injustices in the distribution of power. For the defenders of "high culture," the issue was the threatened loss of economic and communicative resources, since they were concerned that small volume publication was becoming less financially viable and that intellectual influence on general culture was rapidly diminishing in its effect. For those engaged in "middle or low culture," the compelling issue was exclusion from cultural prestige - or cultural capital - especially since threatened highbrows frequently responded by disparaging the quality of non-highbrow work. (21)

    I agree with Liz that "a lot of high/lowbrow distinctions [...] begin to fall apart when pushed."

    ---
    Cuddy-Keane, Melba. Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, & the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.

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  8. Seems to me the implicit suggestions of differing value in low/middle/high miss the point. That some things are more difficult to read, require more attention, a slower pace, etc. is simple fact. I find many directions for putting knocked down items together far more perplexing than say, 'The Wasteland,' but I certainly don't place a higher value on reading one rather than the other.

    Conversely, that I find a romance a more readily accessible read than Eliot's poem doesn't mean I place a lower value on reading the romance. They are simply different reads with different levels of complexity.

    At the same time, as contributions to the human spirit, I think I have to maintain that some literature that has been labelled high-brow does have a more lasting value than some literature that has been labelled by the other terms.

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  9. I think that Nicola Humble is approaching academic readers "from a bodily position of alertness, hostility, separateness from the text." And that's the most polite response I have to her suppositions.

    Also, can I just say that I'm. so. damn. tired. of this pitting of "literary" against "genre" or highbrow v. lowbrow or whatever it is, like it's a contest of quality v. money or treasure v. trash or whatever. There's crap written every day in every genre, and there's great work written every day in every genre. How is this not obvious?

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  10. "I think I have to maintain that some literature that has been labelled high-brow does have a more lasting value than some literature that has been labelled by the other terms."

    Yes, but there are probably a couple of factors which contribute to that:

    (a) the people doing the classifying attached the highbrow label to a great many works which had already stood the test of time and

    (b) by creating a literary canon they ensured that some texts were more likely to remain in print and have their value noticed.

    "can I just say that I'm. so. damn. tired. of this pitting of "literary" against "genre" or highbrow v. lowbrow or whatever it is, like it's a contest of quality v. money or treasure v. trash or whatever."

    Humble herself isn't pitting highbrow against middlebrow. As I quoted above, she's arguing that "Middlebrow and highbrow books are distinguishable, fundamentally, not by any stable intrinsic differences, but by how they are read" (46). In other words, in her opinion the differences are, "fundamentally" in the eyes, posture, and literary critical techniques of the readers. Since the article was published in a special issue of Modernist Cultures which was focussed on the "middlebrow" she doesn't address the question of how the "lowbrow" compares to the "highbrow."

    "There's crap written every day in every genre, and there's great work written every day in every genre. How is this not obvious?"

    Well, Humble and Cuddy-Keane suggest that some people might have a vested interest in maintaining distinctions between high/middle/low culture. Northrop Frye thought so too:

    Rhetorical value-judgements usually turn on questions of decorum, and the central conception of decorum is the difference between high, middle, and low styles. These styles are suggested by the class structure of society [...]. Every deliberately constructed hierarchy of values in literature known to me is based on a concealed social, moral, or intellectual analogy. [...] The various pretexts for minimizing the communicative powers of certain writers, that they are obscure or obscene or nihilistic or reactionary or what not, generally turn out to be disguises for a feeling that the views of decorum held by the ascendant social or intellectual class ought to be either maintained or challenged. (22-23)

    ---
    Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. 1957. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000.

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  11. Oh, I understand the investment some have in maintaining the difference. And I think that investment comes from both sides of the fence, so to speak.

    IMO Humble's approach is camouflage for maintaining that distinction, as well. Beyond the fact that I think she's just plain wrong, I think placing the burden of valuation on the reader *in the way she does* really doesn't challenge the categories or the perceived hierarchy. Now, if she'd premised her argument on, say, how a reader perceives the value of reading, instead of on the material itself . . . well, actually that has problems, too.

    I'm just feeling cranky today about this type of categorization, especially in an environment where reading is becoming so much more flexible (with the realization that such is probably catalyzing a lot of the discussion and what looks to me a bit like defensiveness). On a somewhat related note, have you read this piece (including comments)? http://bit.ly/itNGSe

    Re. Frye, as often as I think he is unjustly dismissed in the current critical environment, I think the construction of high v. low when discussing social class and political import is incredibly problematic, even when it comes from a place of trying to discern social conflicts or ideological stakes. It reminds me of those well-intentioned folks who insisted on the "cycle of poverty" theory to answer the question of why some social subsets remain relatively and persistently bereft of social and economic capital.

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  12. "Now, if she'd premised her argument on, say, how a reader perceives the value of reading, instead of on the material itself . . ."

    I only quoted a few bits of her article and she does discuss what readers were actually reading, and how they felt about the books they read. For example, she quotes surveys carried out in the 1930s and 1940s:

    these reports suggest that, in practice, most people were not ‘highbrows’ or ‘middlebrows’: rather, ‘serious’ and ‘leisured’ reading practices were moved between by individual readers according to time, circumstance and mood. (53)

    She also quotes a "brief passage" in which a

    working- or lower-middle-class woman neatly succeeds in both deconstructing the notion of escapist literature as meretricious and disrupting any easy distinction between the ‘brows’ (54)

    I hadn't read the article you mentioned. My worry isn't that books will die, but that we may have trouble archiving them in the long-term. In some ways ebooks are extremely easy to store, but I worry about format changes and obsolescence.

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  13. It's interesting, Laura, because with print books I worry about their fragility and susceptibility to time and the elements. Who knows what we've lost because there is no permanent record of it. At least with digital you can have a widely traveled footprint, although you will always need a certain type of technology to access. Maybe it will be like microfiche or something similar.

    So Humble believes that readers were MORE flexible in previous decades? Hmmm.

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  14. I tend to agree rather strongly with Robin on this, and yes, I'm cranky today too. But I think the points being made in the original post and by the original sources are predicated on facts (?) that are so fluid between groups of readers, individual readers within those groups, and the individual reader in any given time and place and circumstance as to be totally and completely unsupportable by anything approaching scientific validity.

    Studies conducted in the 1930s and 1940s? Is Humble serious?

    Even going back to the original impetus for this thread, which was the $$$ value of books, isn't that also a very fluid element of the equation? Library books are free; used books are cheap; borrowed books are free; Gutenberg texts are free; pirated texts are free. There's a shelf at my local coffee shop for free "exchanges," and guess who picked up Simpson & Kafka's "Basic Statistics" (c) 1952 there this morning? Does that mean because a book is cheaper, it's easier to read? Ha!

    I too dislike this insistence on categorization, ESPECIALLY when the motive seems to be primarily privileging one group over another. And I use that particular word because it comes from a passage quoted in the original post. It implies the maintenance of a hierarchy -- I'd actually say a snobbery -- that I find abhorrent.

    Robin thinks Humble is "just plain wrong." I think Humble is full of .. . . . . .herself.

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  15. "So Humble believes that readers were MORE flexible in previous decades? Hmmm."

    I don't think she's saying that. Her article is really focused on (a) the period when the "battle of the brows" was raging and (b) the distinctions drawn between highbrow and middlebrow. My post isn't in any way a review or summary of her entire article: I've just extracted the bits I thought were thought-provoking and relevant to the subject of this blog. Here's a bit of the abstract:

    This article begins by asserting that the distinction between high and middlebrow literary texts rests fundamentally not on literary merit or cultural hierarchies but on the culture and practices of reading as they changed and developed in the first half of the twentieth century. It explores the difficulties of drawing a firm dividing line between high and middlebrow experienced by contemporary critical and cultural commentators such as Cyril Connolly, Q. D. Leavis and George Orwell, and argues that what was crucial for these commentators was not so much the precise boundaries they drew as the fact of drawing them. It suggests that we need to find new ways of thinking about the literature of the first half of the twentieth century that avoid simply replicating the snobberies and anxieties of that period.

    ---
    "with print books I worry about their fragility and susceptibility to time and the elements. Who knows what we've lost because there is no permanent record of it."

    I'm still a medievalist at heart, so I know that books can be damaged and lost but all the same, we do have manuscripts and early printed books which have been kept in libraries for hundreds of years. For example, in England one can argue that the principle of "legal deposit" has been around since 1610, and "King Philip V of Spain founded the Royal Library (Biblioteca Real) as the Palace Public Library (Biblioteca Pública de Palacio) in 1712. The Royal Letters Patent that he granted, the predecessor of the current legal deposit requirement, made it mandatory for printers to submit a copy of every book printed in Spain to the library" (Biblioteca Nacional de España). I'm just wondering what kind of maintenance thousands of ebooks are going to require so that they're still readable in four or five hundred years time.

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  16. People classify and sub-classify; classes bring order. And the moment sub-classes come into being they're going to be ranked, just as we rank animals. The real problem, as this discussion makes clear, is what is to be the basis for the ranking.
    Humans are supposedly the most rational of the animals. If that be true, then how much of that ability it requires to comprehend a piece of literature, whether genre or canon, is what gives that piece of literature a higher rank because it fits our humanness. And, like it or not, the genre fictions require less of that ability than other kinds do. One can bring very little information or thought to a piece of genre fiction and still comprehend it. One must bring far more information and ability to a piece of literature labelled as part of the canon (highbrow?).

    I would posit that the more competent, the better informed (I might even say the better-trained) a reader is the less likely that reader is to enjoy reading something that is too easily comprehended and thus he will place a lower value on those things that don't require the same level of competence, just as a highly trained athlete would soon grow bored playing with amateurs. I don't think it makes much difference that the genre literature can be studied for things of value that can be found within it, either, because it will always be looked upon as literature for the less adept simply because it's more readily assimilated.

    I don't think those distinctions between classes of literature will change much. One corner of my mind keeps whispering that they probably shouldn't.

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  17. like it or not, the genre fictions require less of that ability than other kinds do. One can bring very little information or thought to a piece of genre fiction and still comprehend it. One must bring far more information and ability to a piece of literature labelled as part of the canon (highbrow?)

    Again, coming at this from the point of view of a medievalist, it seems to me that many of the barriers to comprehension of older canonical texts are the result of the passage of time: language has changed considerably and we exist in a very different cultural context so there are many references which now require specialist knowledge to understand, but at the time would have been readily and easily comprehended.

    The conclusion I draw from this is that all modern popular culture will, with the passage of enough time, become "difficult."

    I would posit that the more competent, the better informed (I might even say the better-trained) a reader is the less likely that reader is to enjoy reading something that is too easily comprehended and thus he will place a lower value on those things that don't require the same level of competence, just as a highly trained athlete would soon grow bored playing with amateurs.

    So what do you make of the large numbers of academics who study popular culture and, in particular, the "aca-fans"?

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  18. Anonymous said: I would posit that the more competent, the better informed (I might even say the better-trained) a reader is the less likely that reader is to enjoy reading something that is too easily comprehended.

    LAWHilton replies: In other words, no intelligent, well-educated person would/could possibly enjoy reading a romance novel.

    Anonymous wrote: Humans are supposedly the most rational of the animals.

    LAWHilton replies: Yeah, right. Can you spell Afghanistan?

    Anonymous wrote: how much of that [reasoning]ability it requires to comprehend a piece of literature, whether genre or canon, is what gives that piece of literature a higher rank because it fits our humanness.

    LAWHilton replies: If "literature" is so much more universally applicable to our humanness than non-literature, how is that not all of us humans are able (or allowed) to enjoy/comprehend it?

    Anonymous wrote: One must bring far more information and ability [and class??] to a piece of literature labelled as part of the canon (highbrow?).

    LAWHilton replies: And who will be the gatekeepers of information?

    Anonymous wrote: I don't think those distinctions between classes of literature will change much. One corner of my mind keeps whispering that they probably shouldn't.


    LAWHilton replies: Meh. Written like a true RWA, and I don't mean Romance Writer of America.

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  19. Laura, I have spent the past half hour trying to access Humble's article through my Uni library system to no avail (sometimes I can't tell whether it's the ridiculousness of the way the digital access works or the lack of the citation), so I can't check it out for myself, but I did note that the title contains the versus construction itself, which definitely peaks my curiosity given your response (since you have read it). Oh, well.

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  20. @Laura Vivanco: Well, you know, I wasn't speaking of academic interest in popular culture, but I wonder what would be the result if one were to poll the academics who study it if they were asked whether they would be more willing to obliterate knowledge of a romance novel or knowledge of a book in the canon. The intrinsic value of a piece of literature and its value as a subject for research are completely different things, I think.

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  21. @LAW Hilton: I think humans who think enjoy reading those things that make them think more deeply or simply more. I think they rank those things higher. I enjoy reading genre fiction as much as I enjoy reading literature from the canon. I don't think the way we rank classes of literature has much to do with what we choose to read or enjoy reading. Whether I can spell a specific word or not, although asking is effective sarcasm, is a shift I think I'll pass on.

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  22. Anonymous wrote:

    @Laura Vivanco: Well, you know, I wasn't speaking of academic interest in popular culture, but I wonder what would be the result if one were to poll the academics who study it if they were asked whether they would be more willing to obliterate knowledge of a romance novel or knowledge of a book in the canon. The intrinsic value of a piece of literature and its value as a subject for research are completely different things, I think.



    Obviously, Anonymous believes the opinion of an academic is much more important than the opinion of a non-academic, because Anonymous might get an entirely different response if Anonymous polled the non-academic readers who read romance for enjoyment and who are routinely insulted for their preference by those academics who "privilege" not only "the canon" but those who read "the canon."

    I'm quite certain that there are many great works of litt-rah-choor that have been lost over the centuries, either because there weren't enough hand-scribed copies made or the books didn't last or because no one even published them. We'll never know how much better the world might have been had those works been published and saved and entered into the sacred canon by the gatekeepers (who may in fact have been the very people who kept them out in the first place).

    But it's my humble opinion that those gatekeepers who continue to set themselves up as gatekeepers, who defend their intrinsic right to be gatekeepers, and who routinely and continually denigrate those they are keeping outside the gates (and don't even have enough imagination to create a cyber alter ego) have not made the world a better place at all.

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  23. I wonder what would be the result if one were to poll the academics who study it if they were asked whether they would be more willing to obliterate knowledge of a romance novel or knowledge of a book in the canon.

    I feel as though you'd like us to burst out into an academic version of the "little list" song from Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado. ;-)

    The intrinsic value of a piece of literature and its value as a subject for research are completely different things, I think

    The "value as a subject for research" seems as though it could be relatively easy to measure, if one took that to mean "how many papers/books have been written about this text." Of course, literary texts aren't just subjected to literary criticism; they can be studied for what they may reveal about their author/historical context/readership/relationship to other texts etc. This measure would be affected by academic fashions, the number of academics working in particular subject areas, the availability of particular texts and no doubt a number of other factors I haven't thought of.

    I have no idea how one would go about determining the "intrinsic value of a piece of literature." Here are a few possible measures, all of which seem rather subjective: the "how much did I pay for it" test; the "does this make me think hard" test; the "do I read this leaning forward or back" test; the "did this book change my life" test; the "will it impress a potential date" test. Re that last one,

    Nearly half of all men and one-third of women have lied about what they have read to try to impress friends or potential partners, a survey suggests.

    Men were most likely to do this to appear intellectual or romantic, found the poll of 1,500 people by Populus for the National Year of Reading campaign.
    (BBC)

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  24. If we could eliminate all knowledge of some book in the canon, it would certainly make life easier for young academics to get published!

    More seriously, though, I do wonder about the way we shade from the idea that some texts are more complex or challenging than others to the idea that those texts are somehow better for us, or make us (as one of my older colleagues likes to opine) "more human."

    Has anyone ever produced any evidence of this? Any evidence that reading one kind of book or another changes the reader in some way? If so, I'd love to see it; I can't think of any, myself.

    I can't help but think of the poem “National Poetry Day” by Gael Turnbull (from Scotland, I believe):

    “Transform your life with poetry”
    the card said, and briefly I fussed
    that this overestimated the effect
    until I remembered how it had thrust
    several old friends,
    plus near and dear,
    into distress and penury,
    how even I, without the dust
    of its magic, might have achieved
    peace of mind, even success,
    so maybe the advice is just,
    not to be ignored, a sort of timely
    Health Warning from the Ministry
    of Benevolence
    at the Scottish Book Trust.

    As a recovering poet (sober nearly twenty years now) and poetry scholar, I can testify that my own life has been transformed by both poetry and popular romance fiction, rather more pleasantly by the latter.

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  25. E. M. Selinger wrote:

    As a recovering poet (sober nearly twenty years now) and poetry scholar, I can testify that my own life has been transformed by both poetry and popular romance fiction, rather more pleasantly by the latter.



    LAW Hilton writes: In the past few months, as I have contemplated resurrecting a moribund romance writing career, one of my dearest friends has encouraged me, not only with her supportive emails but with announcements of her successes as poet.

    Thank you, E.M.

    Thank you, D.W.

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