LITR 4232 American
Renaissance
LITR 4232 2004 final exam
Sample Answer to Question 4 on
Classic, Popular, & Representative Literature
Literature is often divided
into categories of classic, popular, and representative. Classic literature has
stood the test of time. It does not lose its relevance as the world changes,
which means it must touch the heart of something in a way that it can be
reapplied to new issues when they come up. For instance, Irving’s “Rip Van
Winkle” is about a guy that falls asleep and wakes up decades later to find
that everything has changed. However, this touches something in us, because an
essential part of the human experience is that we eventually find ourselves in a
different world from the one we were born into. Classic literature provides
metaphors which generations can shape their experiences and understanding of
human nature by. As John Dryden surmised, it entertains and instructs. Classic
literature often confronts us with something we would rather not be confronted
with, but the effect is usually less harsh than when the same is done by other
mediums, because literature engages our minds and invites us to momentarily
enter the mind of the author, in a limited sense; we are reading it, not having
it yelled at us. Classic authors covered in the class include Washington Irving,
James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglass,
Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt
Whitman, and Emily Dickinson.
Popular literature is generally pure
entertainment. It may have vast appeal to the immediate audience, but unless it
strikes to the heart of some universal theme or challenges us in some way, it is
probably doomed to fade away and be forgotten in time. Popular literature can
provide compelling metaphors for life, but is usually as a whole rather than by
each individual work. Historians can look back to the popular literature of a
given period to how a generation organized their view of the world. In today’s
world, for instance, there is practically a whole genre of vampire and zombie
books and movies. Why do these particular types of villains keep recurring?
Vampires have come to be understood as a sexual metaphor, which would become
more relevant to a culture that is becoming more and more obsessed and open
about sex. Zombies are very impersonal villains. They are mere shells of
humanity, acting as a crowd. Thus they are a compelling metaphor for a society
that views evil as a lack of humanity (cold corporations, impersonal government
agencies, crowd mentality which individuals follow blindly though led by no one,
etc.). It also does not hurt that zombie flicks are aimed at a generation that
is not facing not a Hitler but a centerless Al-Qaeda. While both vampires and
zombies have been around for a long time (uh… in art, that is) and will
probably stick around for a long time more, they reach their peak in a time that
finds them particularly relevant to the moment. Popular literature confirms the
worldview of the reader, rather than challenging it or giving a new or fresh
perspective. Perhaps a few particularly insightful works will become classics in
time, but for now the effect is produced by the group. Popular authors covered
in the class include James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Frances Sargent
Locke Osgood, and Fanny Fern.
Representative literature, which is basically literature written by people who are different from us that has not yet become necessarily classic, is taught and read to broaden horizons and understand others better. Frederick Douglas’ autobiography cannot be read without it shifting one’s perspective on slavery, the African-American experience, and America. Like classic literature, representative works confront us and challenge us. The main difference is that representative authors were less-educated and their works of a lower literary quality (though this is by no means always the case, especially if you are considering representative literature as including other civilizations and not just our own minorities), and that we are less familiar with (if they were already an integral part of the Western Tradition, they would not be representing an outside perspective). In today’s multicultural world, with its global community, representative literature from both American minority groups and from separate civilizations is becoming increasingly important, and it seems likely that classic and some of the best representative literature will eventually merge into a new classic tradition, much like the Greco-Roman tradition merged with the Judeo-Christian tradition. [BL]