Post by A comet crashing into Earth on Sept 18, 2017 10:52:29 GMT -5
Baby, don't hurt me.
I was at a lecture today that infuriated me in a really satisfying way. The speaker was one of the founders of a small local publishing company, which has branched out into a so-called writing school (that's a much debated topic in our classes, too: Is writing even something you can teach?). It gradually became clear that he had a very clear definition of literature: Efficiently written texts. He did not allow metaphors in anything he called literature, unless it was explicitly described in the text how the metaphor worked. Every sentence should be self-explanatory out of context, and if a later sentence changed your view on anything previously stated, that was a flaw. Ambiguities were a no-go, and there should be no room for interpretation. If the reader doesn't have the exact same images in their head as the writer did when he wrote it, that's not - according to this guy - Literature™. He did, however, have the grace to mention that it's okay to read other things, the way it's also okay to watch Game of Thrones or cartoons once in a while if you wanted something easy and unenlightened.
This guy is in publishing. There's people who get published by subjecting their work to his advice, and that agitates me.
He also had the nerve/sense of culture to recommend us some essays by Nabokov, which worries me a little - if he reads only the literal, and rethorical devices are nothing to him but failures to communicate clearly, I'm almost worried that he might just have read Lolita as a possibility to get a short taste of a pedophile's life - and apparently liked it.
Anyway, the lecture was effective in one way: It made me consider my own criteria for literature, even if those were pretty much all on the list of things this guy felt would exclude a work from the category.
Rant over, thanks for reading.