Happy smiley literature?
I’ve been trying for something like three days to post a comment on Alayna’s blog entry about why American literature is so depressing and why I’m inflicting it on my poor innocent students who just want to be happy, but I guess everybody’s blogging about the election, because something’s going on and I can’t get my comment to post.
Alayna writes:
“My point is... stop giving us such crappy literature and choose something cheerful and positive for once! We don't need to add to the depressing.”
Yall just finished your survey of American literature courses, and one thing I read in a number of your project papers was that you found the courses very similar in their coverage--what authors were being taught, etc. There’s a reason for that: experts in American literature have decided together what constitutes the “best” literature. As you’ve also seen, that changes over time, so that we’re reading literature written by a much more diverse group of authors than you would have read even when I was in school (which is now 20 years ago! Oh my God! When did I start getting so old?). But what experts in recent decades have valued is complexity, often of plot or writing style, and almost always of subject matter. So the theory basically runs, the more complex the novel or poem or story is, the better. Generally happiness is a little simple for that interpretation.
This question also requires you to think about what you mean by “happy” literature. OK, so Hawthorne would not come up as a possible author here--but Whitman is an optimist on an earthshaking scale. So does he count? I find Douglass’s narrative about his experiences in slavery empowering--literally an example of the best of humanity. And it’s all about living in and escaping from slavery. What about a book we’re not reading here, but that many of you may have read at some time, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women? Children read this book, a novel with essentially a very uplifting tone--about a family sinking into poverty in the Civil War. So what do you mean by happy? Yall be thinking about what you would consider “happy” literature--what examples could you give? And we’ll talk about this in class one day.
And anyhow, happy literature is boring. :)
Alayna writes:
“My point is... stop giving us such crappy literature and choose something cheerful and positive for once! We don't need to add to the depressing.”
Yall just finished your survey of American literature courses, and one thing I read in a number of your project papers was that you found the courses very similar in their coverage--what authors were being taught, etc. There’s a reason for that: experts in American literature have decided together what constitutes the “best” literature. As you’ve also seen, that changes over time, so that we’re reading literature written by a much more diverse group of authors than you would have read even when I was in school (which is now 20 years ago! Oh my God! When did I start getting so old?). But what experts in recent decades have valued is complexity, often of plot or writing style, and almost always of subject matter. So the theory basically runs, the more complex the novel or poem or story is, the better. Generally happiness is a little simple for that interpretation.
This question also requires you to think about what you mean by “happy” literature. OK, so Hawthorne would not come up as a possible author here--but Whitman is an optimist on an earthshaking scale. So does he count? I find Douglass’s narrative about his experiences in slavery empowering--literally an example of the best of humanity. And it’s all about living in and escaping from slavery. What about a book we’re not reading here, but that many of you may have read at some time, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women? Children read this book, a novel with essentially a very uplifting tone--about a family sinking into poverty in the Civil War. So what do you mean by happy? Yall be thinking about what you would consider “happy” literature--what examples could you give? And we’ll talk about this in class one day.
And anyhow, happy literature is boring. :)
posted by Lisa at 11/04/2004 05:58:00 PM
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