Yet again I’ve been brought up short by someone describing their own writing as “literary.” How can they do that?
After years in the field, I am less and less sure what “literature” actually means. More and more, I think it is something someone else thinks you “ought” to be reading: and that is a judgment that can only be made on an author’s work by others, retrospectively.
If by “literary” you mean well-written, don’t we all aspire to that? If you’re breaking norms and conventions, what you are writing is experimental. Only someone else can say it is literature. And the majority of so-called literary authors are dead.
So there.
2 comments:
I've been meaning to drop by for ages - lovely blog! My definition of literary is very personal, but I use it to refer to books I have to concentrate to read. That doesn't mean they're worse than other books, or better. But if I need to be in a quiet place without sounds of husband, son, television, etc breaking my focus, then I think of it as literary. So, A. S. Byatt: literary; Anita Shreve: not literary. Orhan Pamuk: very literary!, David Lodge: not so literary. It may well not work for anyone else, but it does the trick for me.
I definitely don't think of literature as what I ought to be reading, though. That must surely be the kiss of death to any book. :)
I so agree. I've been saddened as a teacher of English to sixth formers to see how some apparently 'literary' students came to us already hostile to some of my favourite, and I thought accessible authors by their experience of them as set books. I think if I'm ever published I shall make it a condition that my work never forms part of an exam spec - as if!
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