Heyyy <3 Not to sound offensive or anything, but I wanted to ask you: As a literature student, what's your opinion on modern (mostly American) popular culture books? And, on the other hand, what do you think about worldwide classics?
Oh, absolutely not offensive - and a veeeery interesting question.
I have a very inclusive understanding of literature. I believe that everything added to our vast literary landscape has inherent value, especially since so many of the books that are maligned and notoriously dismissed as "bad literature" are written primarily by women and for women.
Unfortunately, the establishment of the literary canon, propagated over decades and centuries by academic authorities at universities and through the arts and review pages of newspapers, has been relentlessly used as an instrument to erase the literature and writing of marginalised groups. As much as I enjoy a good classic - and don’t get me wrong, most of the novels classified as classics today are classics for a reason - being introduced to feminist and queer literary theory opened my eyes to the fact that, even in our current era, the books that survive as the supposed pillars of our canon have been highly selected through a bias that has spent centuries attempting to uphold the status quo.
For example, something that really fucked me up was learning that, in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain, a great many of the books being sold were written by women and read by women - to the point that men adopted female pen names because literature written by women was held in such high regard. Yet almost none of it has survived in our cultural consciousness or is given much consideration, even within literary studies, because the process of canonisation was largely controlled by men in positions of power, who naturally elevated the books written by members of their own in-groups.
That history has taught me not to pass judgement on the popular romance novels that are relentlessly mocked in our current culture. It haunts me to think about how many books by women we have lost over the centuries because we were not taught to defend literature that was not held in high regard by the people responsible for constructing the canon - and in fact even be ashamed of reading it!
Of course, that does not mean that everything I make these impassioned speeches in defence of is something I personally enjoy or read. But I still think it is important that we, as literature students, neither ignore these books nor make fun of them. They are an important part of our current Zeitgeist, and we should all be much more conscious of the mechanisms through which books become canonised.
Having said all that, my favourite publishing category is actually one that was popularised in the US: upmarket fiction. Upmarket fiction essentially combines a highly literary, sophisticated writing style with more compelling and commercially accessible plots. It is what I prefer to read - at least at the moment - and I would place it somewhere between the so-called classics and more mainstream commercial fiction. Taylor Jenkins Reid’s novels would be an example.
But I also enjoy literary fiction a loooot, and despite all my issues with the canon, I do love reading a classic novel.
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