Quote:
Originally Posted by Worldwalker
There has never been a consensus about what is great literature and what is dreck.
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In one sense you are obviously right - there very often is disagreement about whether this or that work is great literature, particularly in discussions which take place contemporaneously with the production of a particular work. There's also disagreement about what criteria to use for deciding what is to count as great literature - is it the polyphonic harmony created by the interplay between the strata of the work, is it the evocation of emotion, is it the realism with which characters and states of affairs are portrayed, is it the degree to which the work shows but doesn't tell...and so on. But what there is consensus on is that it is possible in principle to tell the difference between great and good literature on the one hand and dreck on the other. There is consensus in the sense that even if you believe that to set about defining great literature and marking it out from dreck is an inevitably elitist activity, you have accepted that there is such a thing as dreck - writing with no literary value.
Why is it so bad to rely on the thoughts, insights and arguments of others who have more experience and expertise in a particular field to help us work out what we think about something. This seems to be particularly prevalent in relation to the creative arts - it's the "I don't know anything about art, but I know what I like" syndrome. Fine, nobody is telling you what you should like, but to dismiss the opinions, thoughts and arguments of people who have often spent many years developing their expertise, putting it up to scrutiny, testing out how their ideas work as some kind of snobbery is itself a kind of inverse snobbery. It's an aspect of the anti-intellectualism that seems to be prevalent in much of western culture and is as damaging as anything the nasty big corporations might do.