Vicki wrote:
"If you say something is a guilty pleasure, that's not saying
it's good. That's saying that you like it despite the fact
that you know it's not."
My reference to soap operas as someone's guilty pleasure was
not meant to say they were good (frankly, I'm not familiar
enough with them to say one way or the other, but I do know
Leslie Fiedler argued in their artistic favor), but to say
that any genre should be judged on its own terms.
"I guess I have to sound elitist and say that some people
know the difference between good writing and bad without
being taught, but generally good writing is an acquired taste
not shared by the reading majority."
Uh, yeah, it does sound elitist. As Tad Allagash said in
Bright Lights Big City, "Taste, after all, is a matter of
taste." And taste is highly correlated to socio-economc
indicators, primarily education and income
(see Pierre Bourdieu). So the acquired taste argument is also
a class argument -- the taste of those with the leisure time
to cultivate a preference for tasteful culture is
automatically superior. Why? Just because fewer people like
it? Is that what makes it refined? And anything consumed by
many is "common"? Wow, the Beatles must suck.
And as Kerry pointed out, a fair amount of the literary
canon, especially that part we discuss here, was once
considered very common. In fact, the novel form itself was
once railed against as pandering to the working middle class,
making literature less refined.
Too often, a bad literary novel is automatically perceived as
better (a noble failure) than a perfect thriller. Why? What
makes one genre better than another? Aren't there well
written and poorly written books in each? As Duke Ellington
said when asked about musical genres, "There are just two
kinds of music, good and bad"
Now I tend to prefer more literary writing, just as I prefer
punk rock to the Beatles, but I don't congratulate myself on
it. Okay, maybe I do, but I shouldn't. It's just my
taste.
Mark
------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor
--------------------~--> Get fast access to your favorite
Yahoo! Groups. Make Yahoo! your home page
http://us.click.yahoo.com/dpRU5A/wUILAA/yQLSAA/kqIolB/TM
--------------------------------------------------------------------~->
RARA-AVIS home page: http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rara-avis-l/
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email
to:
rara-avis-l-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 14 Nov 2005 EST