After yesterday’s initial foray into the world of the break out novel, we were left with the daunting task of trying to figure out what a good book is, or what literature is. Unlike J. Evans Pritchard, PhD (Good for you, if you caught the Dead Poet’s Society reference!), I don’t think literature can be measured on a table. How do we do it then?
When my students and I talk about literature, the first place we start is with the definition of a “good” book. The concept of the good book conjures up a lot of stereotypes for my students: often books that employ artifice the student does not want to read, books that are long, or books written in a stilted or older language. Students enjoy genre books. They suggest these books are not the same as “good” books. I try to challenge their notions that some of them are INDEED good books, so we need to tweak the concept of what we conceive of as good.
At the most basic level, a good book can be one we enjoy. Hey, in the world of subjective criticism, if it works for you, it was a good experience! Ergo, it’s a good book. However, we know that sometimes people disagree with our subjective opinion. The problem facing a literature teacher is how do we choose a book that many people will find a useful experience to read? Notice I’ve strayed from the concept of good as enjoyable. It is enough for a reader to have a good book experience individually. It is NOT enough for a class to have several disparate opinions. It is also NOT enough for a writer who wants to sell books to have one or two people like his/her book. Usually, then, the method we use is triangulation.
Let’s talk about consensus. If several people read a book, and agree it’s a good book, well, it’s probably a book we could talk about in class, or a book we could sell several copies of. As a literature teacher, I love a book that can be read in several different ways, so students have something to talk about. That’s a little off topic, but that too means that I have to look somewhere for the consensus factor. If several people read, say, Bartleby the Scrivner over the course of the many years it’s been in print, and advance several possible ideas about what the author is trying to say, then it’s a good book for my purposes. So, if lots of people agree it’s a useful subjective experience, and there’s possible ways to talk about it, then I’m set. I just wind up the students and let them go!
Good books for literature class can be good books for people to read. Also, books that leave people disturbed or moved can be good books to read. What we’re talking about here are books that speak to the human experience . This is another definition of the good book, and it works pretty well for my purposes. Genre books, most people think, are less likely to speak to the human experience. Hold onto that. We’ll address it a little farther down the line.
The last point I want to deal with today is the other factor I use to define literature. Not only does a book have to speak to the human experience to several people, but it also needs to have done so over time. No phrase torques me off more than the phrase “instant classic.” I mean, how can you do that? You need time to help you decide whether or not something is a classic. Many people in many generations need to read the book and profoundly say huh.
Interestingly, different generations have biases and prejudices. Some authors that are considered good in one generation do not endure. The works of different authors fall into and out of vogue. One of my favorite authors, Dumas, ebbs and flows in popularity like the tide. Jane Austen has been considered inconsequential in the 19th century. Essentially, however, lots of people over time and culture buy the idea that the human experience is spoken to in classic works.
So, we’ve talked about a good book, and maybe defined literature, at least so that a student can put the concept in their pocket for class. Mind you, we also have to have discussions about climate of opinion and bias before we can begin digging around in texts, but that’s not really where I want to venture here, because the next thing I want to talk about is how genre books can be, in fact, literature, and what I think qualifies the break out novel. Also, there will be some discussions of what I see as pitfalls of genre writing.
Thanks for the way you expressed literature.
Thank you, Terry, for linking this to your site. There will be more next week, including a definition of the break out novel, as well as what keeps writing in genre-ville, and some speculation on speculative fiction.
Catherine