Quote:
Originally Posted by DawnFalcon
I am yet to know someone with Masters Lit. who is not a snob about what he/she reads.
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But is that not just a refinement of taste, an expansion of reading materials offered beyond that which the 'market' deems worthy or makes available? If I'd been to chef school, would I not want more than chips and egg for tea? If I'd become a mechanic, would I not look upon the Ford Fiesta as a piece of shit (works, gets you from a-b but still a piece of shit). What you are calling snobbery, I just see it as advancing from one form to the next. I used to really admire realistic painting, but now I'm older I prefer Picasso and surrealism, it doesn't make realistic painting objectively better or worse, but in my opinon it is worse because it has become too simplistic to me. My tastes have changed over time, become more adult. I'll admit I'd probably never would have read Kobe Abe or a lot of Japanese writers if I hadn't studied for my Masters. Although I was reading Steinbeck and Kafka alongside King and Barker as a teenager, so maybe I would have found them eventually.
EDIT: And I'd love to carry this discussion further, because I think it's really interesting (beyond any imagined slurs, and they are imagined), but I'm away on holiday in about thirty minutes, so if you have any witty retorts or you know, want to burn me at the stake, I won't be around to reply or beg for water.
I'll leave you with this quote from JG Ballard talking about his novel 'Crash' and I think it sits well with my own reasoning:
"By calling a novel like Crash science fiction, you isolate the book and you don't think about what it is."