My problem with this is that "literature" and "literary writing" has been put on a pedestal by a particular group of self-perpetuating authorities. Certain aspects of writing are considered better and more important than others, not for any good reason I can see other than "that's the sort of thing I like, and I've got these other English professors to back me up".
This is a thorny question, I think, getting into issues of what constitutes "quality" in a general sense, etc. But I do think there's some real validity to what you're saying: for example, the English lit canon being mostly formed by upper-class white Protestant males, they were culturally inclined to value manly stories of war as being more "important" than squishy female stories of marriage. Exceptions exist -- they always do; there were influential UPWPMs who praised Jane Austen to the skies. But those tend to be exceptions.
And I think it feeds in on itself, too, in an analogue of what's happened in some SF. Just as certain branches of science fiction tend to be appealing (or even comprehensible) only to people already versed in the genre, high-end literature has turned inward in search of qualities opaque to the general reader. And it's hard not to read a quasi-class aspect into the trend of valuing the arcane and devaluing that which is accessible to a broad audience.
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yati
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Date: 2009-02-06 05:52 pm (UTC)This is a thorny question, I think, getting into issues of what constitutes "quality" in a general sense, etc. But I do think there's some real validity to what you're saying: for example, the English lit canon being mostly formed by upper-class white Protestant males, they were culturally inclined to value manly stories of war as being more "important" than squishy female stories of marriage. Exceptions exist -- they always do; there were influential UPWPMs who praised Jane Austen to the skies. But those tend to be exceptions.
And I think it feeds in on itself, too, in an analogue of what's happened in some SF. Just as certain branches of science fiction tend to be appealing (or even comprehensible) only to people already versed in the genre, high-end literature has turned inward in search of qualities opaque to the general reader. And it's hard not to read a quasi-class aspect into the trend of valuing the arcane and devaluing that which is accessible to a broad audience.