I have commented before about the part of my freelance work that has me read and write up popular novels. I am most of the way done with such a project now--I expect to finish today--and another is waiting for me to do soon after. The current project has added some things to the list of requirements (and to the words for which I will be paid); while before it asked for a review, discussions of characters and setting, and chapter summaries, now it asks for those plus discussions of major symbols, motifs, and themes. As I do fancy myself something of a literary scholar, enough to teach literary scholarship, I find no challenge in doing so, although the turnaround on the task precludes my delving as deeply into them as I know I can do.
Why the increase in desire materials would occur, though, is not clear to me. My experience with general readership--which I will admit is somewhat restricted--is that the average reader will not delve much into such things as simile and metaphor. They will pass largely unremarked, or if remarked will be taken as a decorative fillip meant to "make it pretty" rather than a means to connect the text to what has gone before and embed in it evidence of authorial context and expected readership. Such things do not add to the enjoyment most readers seek in the texts that they read, although there are some who enjoy the puzzle aspect of tracing them out. Most, though, will make some comment such as "It's just a story" and reject investigating it as too much work to do. (They are the same people who will spend hours standing in the glaring sun to play a game or freezing in the crotch of a tree to shoot meat they do not need to have to survive so that they can mount heads on their walls, which would seem either to belie their argument or suggest that reading deeply is work, maugre the protestations of many. But that is another discussion entirely.)
I have to conclude that the guides I am writing to popular fiction are to be used as ways to ease entry into literary study--which is not something I oppose. Rather the opposite is true, in fact. And that tells me that literary study is being applied more and more frequently and broadly to genre fiction--which I knew was the case at the conference level, but which seems to be spreading into the conservative bastion that is mainstream public education (which is invested in perpetuating a specific narrative of culture that varies by nation and state but which in each case works to the maintenance of a stable understanding of the nation or state as a good thing, to be supported and obeyed). There, it had been (and is still in large part, if what I see among education students and the products of mainstream educational systems is any indication) anathema to consider popular work as worth serious study. I disagree, of course; how could I not, given the work I do? And I cannot say I am sad to see it shifting...
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In my experience, most protestations to such work carry the implication that to seek out and study the symbols, metaphors, etc ruins the story. Most people seem to think that literary scholarship looks too hard for these things and in their anticipation of them, finds what is not there and then ruins the story by going on and on about these imagined larger implications for the work.
ReplyDeleteI would ask if you agree with such assertions, in whole or in part. *Are* there works that have no deeper implications than themselves?
ReplyDeleteI believe there are times when people (not necessarily the literary scholars that "most people" gripe about) do see implications and connections for works that aren't there. I too find myself annoyed at times at people going so far up their own ass about the importance of a work that they lose sight of the fact that their study of the work has stopped being about the work itself, or about creating new meaning and ideas but has become purely an exercise in self-aggrandizement. But this isn't typically the same complaint that I mentioned before. I also believe that most people who make such complaints are making them because they don't like to read or think, so they bitch about and lash out at others instead.
DeleteAs for the other question, I am at least knowledgeable enough (brainwashed, some might argue) to know that even the phone book has deeper implications than itself. But perhaps I, too, am too far up my own ass to see how stupid of a statement that is. Lol.
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