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Kimberly Hall
December 7, 2016
There Is No Box: Thoughts on Classic, Popular, and Representative
Literature
Throughout Dr. White’s American Renaissance class, one thing we learned
about was how to distinguish between classic, popular, and representative
literature. These styles tend to be separated according to their primary
purpose, their target audience, and their writing styles. However, while reading
samples of various styles and studied them more closely, it struck me that there
was a great deal of overlap in which works could be placed in which category–so
much overlap, in fact, that the use of these terms to distinguish between works
of literature seems almost unnecessary at best, and given the connotations of
each category, possibly harmful at worst.
If
the point of literature is to educate and entertain, then classic literature
typically leans more heavily to the ‘educate’ side of the spectrum. Classics are
typically known for having a long shelf-life, complex themes and ideas, and for
being intellectually challenging. They often raise questions of abstract
concepts like morality and ethics, while still being respectful of literary
tradition. Due to its academic prestige and frequent myth-like status, there is
a great amount of social capital to be gained from having read a classic–you
would not believe the level of approval 12-year-old me received for bringing her
own copies of White Fang and
A Tale of Two Cities to school and
willingly reading them.
Popular literature tends not to get the same credit for educational
value, with the stereotypical popular novel leaning more towards entertainment
than instruction. As noted on Dr. White’s Terms & Themes page, popular works are
typically easier to read than classics, appeal to a wider audience, and are
often more immediately relevant than long-lasting. The writing style and content
often follow the trends of what people are reading; the plots may be formulaic
or predictable, with the ending tied into a neat little bow.
A
problem then arises when all popular fiction is given this negative reputation
for having little to no real benefit to the reader. Certainly, not all popular
literature is quality literature – just look at
50 Shades of Grey – but I think that
the stereotype is pervasive enough that quality literature is sometimes
automatically dismissed when it has widespread appeal and is thus labelled as
‘popular’. The cause of this problem may simply be the nature of the
stereotype–it assumes that what is popular cannot be quality. This stems (at
least in part) from both social and academic elitism, with the idea that popular
works must be inherently less intellectually stimulating than classics, and that
only a select few have the capability of truly understanding the classics.
Trying to draw a distinct line between what is popular and what has long-lasting
value demeans possibly great pieces of literature for simply having widespread
appeal. It subsequently ignores the possibility of classic literature also
having entertainment value and popular appeal; for instance, Edgar Allan Poe,
with the musicality of his writing and gothic subject matter, was wildly popular
during his lifetime and continues to be wildly popular. And after all,
literature does not simply become classic because it is well-written–it has to
be interesting enough that a large number of people read it once, and then keep
reading it. Thus, at some point, what is now considered classic literature
almost had to be popular literature.
This
idea that widespread appeal and literary quality are mutually exclusive is
something that I believe we have to start moving away from. Contemporary popular
novels like The Hunger Games and
Battle Royale both are popular and
have large fan bases–but they also have diverse casts of characters, and deal
with themes of political unrest, social and economic inequality, and police
brutality, all of which are both hugely relevant and intellectually challenging
ideas to confront. They are also more readily accessible than some classic works
containing similar themes, like Victor Hugo’s
Les Misérables or Henry David
Thoreau’s Resistance to Civil Government.
Thus, making a judgement of continuing value based on a book’s designation as
‘popular’ or ‘classic’ is, in my opinion, no longer really appropriate.
More
dangerously, though, trying to create a strict divide between popular and
classic can lead people down path of excluding diverse writers and audiences
from the literary canon; works which are considered ‘classic’ tend to have been
written by white men, like Nathaniel Hawthorne and James Fenimore Cooper, while
popular literature has a much broader representation of social minorities. Here
is where representative literature comes into play.
As
stated on the Terms & Themes page, representative literature is that which is
written by, about, and/or for an underrepresented or marginalized group. By its
very nature, though, representative literature challenges what is considered
mainstream or traditional, and changes the scope of what can be considered
classic or popular, or both. Often, representative works aim to educate others
about the struggles of a particular group, the way that Frederick Douglass’s
autobiography, A Narrative of the Life of
Frederick Douglass, and other slave narratives aim to educate about the
effects of slavery and racism–and so may be considered classic for their
long-lasting educational value and the intellectually challenging subject
matter. They often have to entertain, as well, in order to reach a wide enough
audience to get their points across; they may have sentimental writing styles or
contain sensationalized events to do so, like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and so may fall in
line with popular literature. As such, trying to narrow these works down into a
single category simply is not practical, and may be inadvertently exclusionary.
Given the scope of literature we have read throughout this course, I do
not think it fair to try fitting any of these works or authors into a single
category. All of them have aimed to educate, or get their readers to critically
think; all have also had enough popular appeal to have lasted since into the 21st
century. Those that are representative have aspects of both the classic and the
popular. Although these groupings do have their differences, which are useful as
discussion points, there is so much overlap between them that the use of these
labels as categorical dividers may no longer be appropriate. Additionally,
making qualitative judgements of educational value based on such labels is also
becoming inappropriate. By focusing more on what we can all learn from aspects
of each of them, people may benefit from having access to literature that they
may not have been exposed to before. As Dorothy Noyes states at the end of her
final essay on this subject, breaking down the walls that keep literature either
inaccessible or undervalued can only benefit us, as students and as a society.
