This thread has always had an anti-intellectual, anti-academic, pro-populist slant. People are actively hostile about critical reading and defensive about reading for pleasure. And it's never simply championing genre or the pleasures of reading, but there's a weird defensive/guilty/angry whipcrack of resentment about difficult literature, the way literature is taught in colleges and critical theory. And it's layered on with self-congratulation and reverse snobbery.

Hec, I think this is unfair.

Is there defensiveness about genre and/or "pleasure" reading? Yes, of course there is; there's a lot of received wisdom to combat, if one is to read what one enjoys without public self-abasement.

Have people complained about how literature is taught in colleges? Yes, although I've seen (for that matter, told) a number of stories about how reading in a class can be worthwhile.

Do we dissect in detail every Great Novel that is brought up? Of course not! Harry Potter is new, and people are all reading it at the same time (much like a Buffy episode), so of course the discussion will be more intense and more thorough and involve more people than if I bring up, say, Great Expectations. Even those who have read GE aren't necessarily moved to talk about it that day, and unless a critical mass of readers are both moved and thinking deeply about that book on that day, it won't have legs as a topic.

I do recall thorough, exciting discussion of a number of books, however, some of which are ambitious in nature. I really liked the talk we all had a year or two back about His Dark Materials, when Angus got himself into COMM with "Anvils out the ass!" Fact was, a large percentage of us had read it and had strong emotions about it, so talk ensued.

That's probably the feeling. You want to say, "But, but you like morally complex stories and anti-heroes!"

Couldn't that POSSIBLY be because some of us are a little tired of having our tastes slammed as unworthy by the establishment?

Aye caramba, Susan. I can damn well set my watch by when you're going to bristle about the Romance genre being dismissed.

And what the fucking FUCK is un-intellectual about loving Jane Austen?

This is a tough sentence to parse. I didn't say Jane Austen was unintellectual - though what discussion I've seen here hasn't gone much beyond strong identification with Elizabeth Bennett.

People are actively hostile about critical reading and defensive about reading for pleasure. And it's never simply championing genre or the pleasures of reading, but there's a weird defensive/guilty/angry whipcrack of resentment about difficult literature, the way literature is taught in colleges and critical theory. And it's layered on with self-congratulation and reverse snobbery.

Well, speaking for me? And just for me?

I think that's horse manure on toast points.

If you think there's reverse snobbery, you might want to consider that the reverse is in reaction to something, in this case, literary snobbery and the feeling of being chided for not "getting it."

I'm pretty upfront about my take on it: I write for a living, I come from a family of voracious readers, and reading to me, in fact the absorption of any art at all, is a form of practicing witchcraft. And I get really fucking annoyed with the "if you don't like this, you Have No Intellectual Cred" attitude, as annoyed with it in 2004 as I did in 1968.

I didn't take Hayden's - or your - remarks personally, because they don't apply. I don't dislike discussions of crit; I just don't understand it, because, as Hayden pointed out, I come from a different place. But as a Joyce fan who also enjoys Georgette Heyer, and as a high school lecturer on the Scots play who also worships Robertson Davies and Michael Chabon, I am rather pissed off, more so than is possibly called for, at being accused of being "anti-intellectual." I do love Melville, as it happens, but I totally get why, for instance, Teppy doesn't. It's all in the visceral curlup, to me, and that's totally subjective.

And with that, back to work. Better to not be in here for a bit, I think, and anyway I've been saddled with a completely unrealistic deadline.

Also, agreed that Austen is not anti-intellectual -- if any woman of 19th C. Britain is canon, it is she.

And it's "Wimsey", even I know that. Although "Lord Peter Whimsy" is kind of cute.

Yeah, but that's why I read Chandler, too.And the word, if not the concept, canon, wigs me. Cause it sounds like a Dead White Guy secret Handshake. That said, I appreciate authors I don't always like. Like Dickens and Poe. I can appreciate their gifts without them being my first choice at the beach.

You want to say, "But, but you like morally complex stories and anti-heroes!"

"Dreams about dead horses! A hooker with a heart of gold! People with names like Svridigailov!"

I can damn well set my watch by when you're going to bristle about the Romance genre being dismissed.

And I can set mine by when you're going to genially accuse the thread of anti-intellectual reverse-snobbery. So at least we're all synched up.

To play the Devil's advocate here (with the understanding that I'm neither agreeing nor disagreeing with hayden or the idea that one must read "great books" one hates)...

I learn more, and more deeply, from a rancorous conversation in which I must to force myself to remain engaged than from a conversation between myself and someone with whom I agree and with whom conversation blooms easily.

As much as I love the Sonnets, and as much as I think I "get" them with relative ease, forcing myself to the end of Moby-Dick and discovering I loved it was more rewarding.

Now, I'm the queen of not doing things that I don't like to do, which is why my floor so desperately needs a vacuuming, so I'm not saying I do this all the time and I'm not saying everyone else should either--read what you want, and it's none of my beeswax what that happens to be. I'm just saying there's sometimes a reason to read unenjoyable texts full of hateful characters.

Some of us got fed lit like broccoli. "You'll thank me later...it's good for you."I still hate broccoli and a lot of those books. But some, I hung in with and was glad.