Much appreciated.
-PE Sharp
I personally think it's great he fired back a little bit. I mean so few people seem to read these days for pleasure that it puzzles me that some of these classics types would attack authors and write them off when they are getting people to read for pleasure.
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I mean so few people seem to read these days for pleasure ...
Well, that's a stupid statement. People don't read for pleasure when they have to read something they'd rather not. Thus, the life of all students and professors, and most people in the professional world. But in the realm of fiction, unless you are an agent or editor, you are most likely to read what you enjoy. Your problem is that you don't understand how people can enjoy what you don't enjoy. The fact is that some people do read Faulkner and Hemingway and other modern "literary" authors becasue they like them.
I watched King's speech on C-SPAN2 when it aired a few days after he gave it. I thought it was windy and banal and only a tad inspirational--namely, staying focused and hopeful in the midst of desparation. I wished he would have taken the higher ground, unlike his critics, and refrained from giving a reading list. Rather, I would have liked to have seen him talk more about his understanding of fiction and what he thinks fiction means for ordinary people. The problem with most modern "literature" is that it is not written for ordinary people. If he had done that, he might have influenced a lot of young writers who think obscure, esoteric writing is real fiction. Instead, I think he confirmed their suspecions that he is only a pulp writer who used this honor to simply defend his slop.
Does Stephen King deserve this award? If Oprah does, then he does. If it wasn't for King, I wouldn't be a reader (or writer) today. I suspect a lot of people are like me, and for that he deserves to be recognized for his contribution to American letters.
Will Stephen King be remembered, as OSC says, as the Charles Dickens of our time? We'll all be dead when the judgment is finally passed, for only time will tell. Personally, I don't think so. He is a good, honest writer, but his stories lack the one thing that makes stories last: they don't, as Faulkner said, deal with the verites of the human heart. I've read a lot of King, and never are his characters deeply and profoundly changed by what happens to them.
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never are his characters deeply and profoundly changed by what happens to them
That is a sweeping and generally incorrect statement. Have you ever read "The Stand" or "The Green Mile" or "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption" or the book that the movie "Stand By Me" was based on (damn my memory). There are quite a few books of his that have dynamic characters.
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or the book that the movie "Stand By Me" was based on (damn my memory).
The Body. Not a story. In fact, I thought it was even better than the movie, which was pretty good, too. But then, that's true of every book-turned-movie, isn't it?
CVG
Edited to add: Not a bad story. I can't believe I didn't catch that earlier.
[This message has been edited by cvgurau (edited January 08, 2004).]
Let me state it differently. As a reader, I have never experienced deep and profound change due to reading Stephen King. I don't mull his stories over in my mind the way I do with, say, The Lord of the Rings or some of OSC's stories. To me, that is the hallmark of great literature: the reader walks away changed, even if that change is merely a new way of seeing the world.
Stephen King is a good writer for many reasons. His story ideas are entertaining. He tells them with exceptional skill. It's hard not to like his characters; who doesn't like the Everyman Hero typical of a King story? He is a good stylist -- better than every pop-writer he listed in his speech. And in his best stuff you can see a honest writer at work. But he isn't a profound writer. His ideas don't compell one to think. And though his characters have many external struggles, rarely to they deep interior struggles.
[This message has been edited by Balthasar (edited January 07, 2004).]
Hm. Maybe that counts as profound change. If so, then King's novels "It" and "The Stand" and stories like "Stand by Me" certainly would qualify.
Anyways, I like a lot of the King I have so far read. My childhood was spent dodging, sometimes successfully, the local bullies. I haven't come across an author yet who captures the in-the-moment terrors of childhood better than King. That alone makes him infinitely more relevant than the darlings of the academics.
So, I think you're holding Mr. King up to an unfair standard. If you make "deep and profound change" a prerequisite in judging a whether a novelist is great or not, then you will find precious few great novelists out there, and if we're completely honest, there's a good chance you won't even find one.
King's books make a reader feel, frightened, shocked, dismayed--The Stand was wonderful, profound, no I don't think so. I didn't look at things differently because of it.
For me Anne Rice writes books that chill and make me think of things differently.
Anne Perry, she writes of the Victorian age in such a way that you come away thinking I am so glad I did not live then. When I first read her books they certainly changed the way I thought of Victorian Britain.
Tony Hillerman has certainly opened the eyes of many non-Native Americans to what life on a reservation is like. Unfortunately, I don't think most people apply it to reality.
Books, other than scripture, can have deep meanings. They can change the way we look at th world, and when you look at that--the idea that reading something can change the way we see something, that is a pretty deep and profound change.
Shawn
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Books, other than scripture, can have deep meanings.
I know I tread shakey ground here -- subject matter and all -- but surely you meant especially Scripture.
I am also under this impression. It's probably a personal thing. So whether or not Steven King's writing moves you is more about you than his writing.
[This message has been edited by Nexus Capacitor (edited January 08, 2004).]
I did mean in addition to scripture.
And it is a personal thing--someone may be changed after reading SK--LOL you may leave the lights on at night. Just kidding.
But what has an affect or if you want effect on one person doesn't on someone else, otherwise we would all belong to the same religion--or the same club--we'd all like Jeeps or some such.
The point is that books can move you to be a different person, they don't have to be literary works either.
IMHO
Shawn
Maybe that's why the universities stopped trying to define Great Literature by all yardsticks save for psuedo-science of interpretive theory.
Not going off on you here - at this point I'm just babbling to no one in particular.
Of course there are books outside of scripture that can effect (affect?) profound change in a person. We should be careful not to confuse profound change with a new viewpoint, though. Take, for example, somebody who is very compassionate. Assume they don't know very much about the holocaust of WWII. When they read an in-depth account from a holocaust survivor, chances are they'll have a completely new viewpoint about the world, or at least one aspect of it. Chances are, they'll experience some very strong emotions as they read about the terrible things that those people suffered. They'll probably be induced to think about some things that they may never have given any serious thought before. How can people commit such evil acts? Why did those people have to suffer so much? Etc. etc. Does that mean the reader has been profoundly changed? No, it doesn't. They were already compassionate, they just found something new to be compassionate about. Their character didn't change, they were just given new stimuli to react to.
I think profound change happens a lot less than has been suggested here, and measuring a book, especially a work of fiction, by that criteria is not a good way to measure.
I've never been profoundly changed by fiction, because I don't permit fiction that function. Most people don't draw such a clear distinction (search for "evil squirrel shills of the nut empire" or some such phrase for some earlier thoughts on this matter), but most do draw it to an extent. Fiction is about showing us what we already know, not teaching us new truths. In my opinion, people who allow fiction to profoundly affect their view of the world are like people who use examples of events happening in a work of fiction to argue that such things happen in real life (and I know at least one person--a writer of fiction no less--who does this often enough to annoy me--one time she actually used a fictional event that she herself had recently written to argue that something was probable in real life). In fact, I can't tell the difference (logically) between the two behaviors...apparently the one is understood to be ridiculous, but the other is quite widespread.
Great fiction doesn't change us, it defines and reveals who we already are, our experience of ourselves in the real world. And that means that different things are great fiction to different people. I find the themes of all existentialist literature to be puerile and self-indulgent. No such literature can ever be 'Great' to me. But there are other people for whom such literature is the expression of the inexpressible angst they feel at a life they have deliberately stripped of meaning in an effort to avoid personal suffering. For them, it is Great Literature.
I've read a book by Anne Rice, and I found it merely amusing. I've read two books by Crighton (sp?) and I found his science so laughable that the main point of the books were lost on me (besides, I would pay to see the human race wiped out by dinosaurs or nano-robots--particularly if either had been created by human science, it would just be too precious ). But I also could tell that both authors knew the craft. They told stories (all three of which I found implausible in the extreme) so deftly I was able to simply enjoy the story.
Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky speak to me at the level of Great Literature...but I don't insist that everyone reach me to be accorded some acknowledgement of literary depth. Just the fact that I find most of Hawthorne's writing heavy handed and somewhat obvious doesn't take away his greatness, it merely fails to add to it.
P.S. The reason most people don't read for pleasure has more to do with the hardwiring of the human brain than the fact that many people have to read to make a living. And it has nothing to do with "these days", we merely bemoan this simple matter of neurophysiology rather than learning to live with it. It used to be accepted in all literate cultures that some people were better readers than others, finding meaning and imaginative force in written pages, while other people, while they could read themselves, would rather listen to someone else read.
Even today, as I push 40, well written passages continue to touch me, change me in little ways, and when I begin to add up the little moments, it occurs to me that in fact I have been profoundly, deeply changed by what I am proud to call Great Literature; my definition, not Bloom's. Dickens never touched me when I was a kid. Lloyd Alexander, on the other hand . . .
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Do you think King is justified in firing back at the "literature" snobs who take pride in saying they have never read King, Clancy, or other best selling authors of today?
Absolutely. It's like people who go around proclaiming, "I never watch television," as if that makes them better than the masses who do watch from time to time.
Fine. It's each person's choice not to watch. Or not to read "popular" fiction. But you know what? It doesn't make a person better or smarter or more sophisticated that they don't. It just makes him or her a snob. And I don't have any problem at all with King pointing this out.
Now, I have to say that it's a very fine line. It's just as snobbish to say, "I never read literary fiction." It took me a long time to come to that; I have to admit that I haven't liked a lot of the literary fiction I've read. I'm just not turned on by the kinds of stories that literary fiction often tells - or anyway by the stories that a lot of the literary fiction I have read have told. But that doesn't mean that I don't recognize that it has value.
I think that's all King was really saying to his audience and to the world in that speech. What is slapped with the label popular fiction has value. It isn't the bound equivalent of fish wrapping. It doesn't deserve to be condemned without so much as a reading.
It doesn't seem to be seperated by genre. Farenheit 451 and Brave New World ARE "literature", right?
What disqualifies The Dead Zone or Ender's Game?
I'm genuinely confused. I didn't major in English in college, so I'm sure that I'm just missing the definition. Does anyone know the criteria for writing "literature?"
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Does anyone know the criteria for writing "literature?"
1. Write something that literature professors like, or that fits their political model of the world, or that they can't understand but they think might be trendy.
2. Write something that people will still want to read more than a hundred years from now.
There is a third path (Write well and be British), but that's not open to most people.
"The secret to classical music is that there is no secret to classical music." He went to explain that the signifigance and meaning of a given piece of music was whatever the listener believed it to be. A little education could go a long way to help people understand what could be appreciated in regards to form and structure, but, ultimately, both the intepretation of, and the decision to like or dislike a given piece was entirely - ENTIRELY - in the hands of the listener, and because everyone's tastes are different, there was no point in believing that an inability to like a piece everyone else liked had anything to do with intelligence, or with any other inate human quality.
In other words, the only definition that really matters, because you're the person ingesting a given work of "art" (literature, music, graphic arts, drama, etc.), is yours.
English Lit professors can't stand that fact, and are obliged to frankly reject it because the only way they can justify their paycheck is to convince students (and themselves) that they alone understand what a work means, and, hey, they've got the "science" (read: "literary theory") to prove it. If people read the "classics" less and less, the professors only have themselves to blame - they've taken the fun out of it.
Q: So, what is "literature?"
A: Well, hey; what have you read lately that truly enjoyed, and/or that truly touched you?
I sympathize with his comments, but doubt that they'll do any good. HE probably doubts it'll do any good, but ya gotta love his going for it anyway.
HiJolly
I think our tendency to argue definitions is part and parcel of the same biology or psychology (or whatever) that lead us fire up the word processor and write things we hope other people will read. How many people, really, write and submit stuff they believe is unpublishable crap? Nope. We write stuff we believe is darn fine reading and we can certainly imagine that the literature we produce is worth other people's time and money.
Also, To own the definition of "literature" is to have the best possible justification for one's personal reading choices. It's a kind of defense mechanism against book snobs like Harold Bloom.
Can't speak for anyone else, of course, but if I ever write a book, and it gets published, I sure as heck am not going to believe that it isn't as good as anything currently doing time on Harold Blooms 100 Favorite Classics list.
SO I argue in advance, to disarm the critics (at least in my own mind). I suspect that's true for a large number of writers.