Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Certainly not. Literature is being written today, but I think that time is the only factor which will tell us which literature is sufficiently culturally important to be worthy of being taught in schools. Doesn't need to be 100 years, but a few decades, certainly.
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I have a problem with the label "literature". When is a book literature? What defines it? When at school, I had to read x "old" books (medieval to the 19th century), x pre-war books (think 19th century till 1945) and x post-war books (from 1945 till now).
Those medieval books were practically unreadable, the Dutch language has been changed a lot since the 14th century! But we had to read them nonetheless, in the original language even (written in verse, they generally don't translate well)
The second group of books, I personally mostly liked. The language looks a lot more like modern Dutch, a lot of travel stories in the bunch, which I always liked and still do. And prose, instead of verse.
The third group of books, I hated. All dramas, all heavy, all about some mental problems people had to go through. I hate drama. Clear and simple. I don't watch drama on TV, I don't read dram. But they were "literature"!
For me, whenever I see a book called "literature", I'll walk around it and won't even try it. My Dutch literature class has poisoned me against literature. Literature, in my mind, is a horrible boring book, not something you'd want children to read, unless you want them all depressed and suicidal...