I just want to point out that I find it more than a little ironic that a collective made up of people who transcended conventional wisdom on what is considered intellectual television by embracing a show that is, on first glance, an apparently campy and absolutely genre show until given a chance to delight in its depths and charms which was also, for a number of years, virtually invisible to and now a celebrated part of the intellectual/academic community, would debate over the unassailablity of literary canon. Clearly you can't judge any book by its cover.

For the record, I agree with many of the points expressed on all side. It was just a weird thought I had which I wanted to share. (Which rather aptly describes most of my posts.)

But nobody can read everything...we can do our damnedest though.

I'm bristling at the notion that the baby and the bathwater both have to go. Sure, some jerks made fun of you for liking romance or sci-fi. That doesn't mean that Melville, Faulkner, and Joyce are boring shit only fit for jerks.

I didn't get that attitude from this discussion at all. Just because I don't like M-D doesn't mean I don't think other people shouldn't read it, or that it shouldn't be taught.

Sure, some jerks made fun of you for liking romance or sci-fi. That doesn't mean that Melville, Faulkner, and Joyce are boring shit only fit for jerks.

Where did anyone say that? "It's boring" is a statement of one reader's reaction to a book, not anything about anyone else who didn't find it boring.

There you go. It says something about you. For good or ill, in any number of ways. But that identification is not so much about the work.

See, I'm not sure I agree with this. I've read books that say to me, "Come in, immerse yourself, be this character and experience what happens to him/her." And I've read books that say instead, "Here, stand at a little distance and observe these characters." The former lend themselves to identification, the latter, NSM. Problem is, I can't dissect what makes one book an immersion read and another an observation one--it's like the cliche about porn. I know it when I see it. And since I prefer immersion books, I'd be all kinds of flattered if, when I'm published, a reader tells me they identified with one of my characters, because I'd know I'd succeeded in creating the immersion experience.

Of course, identification is a broad term. Sometimes all I mean by it is "I found the POV character an agreeable, engaging, and plausible set of eyes to see this particular fictional world through." Other times I mean, "Wow, this character is ME!" Which, though it may surprise some, often leads to self-examination, lessons learned, etc., because I always ask myself WHY I feel such a common bond with the character. Every once in awhile my answers surprise me.

(Fascination discussion, BTW. And I apologize again for overheating earlier. Stupid temper.)

If you come in here and say "I just re-read Moby Dick, and I forgot how much I loved the encyclopedic attention to detail," and then I said "Yuccch! I read M-D, and I didn't like it at all!" -- how is that opting for the easy and familiar over the difficult and challenging? After all, I *read* the book. How is that taking the easy way out?

It's not, Steph. You didn't like it, fine. You said why. In fact, if things had gone down like up above, I'd have followed up with the same question I started with, which is "What's not to love?"

Betsy, I'd presume that your daughter doesn't say "old poetry is really stuffy" every freakin' time the subject comes up, does she? Cause that would make me as weary as I feel right now.

So what? Do we split off a Great Books thread or a book club thread?

I think the book club suggestion was born of but not a solution to today's discussion.

It's clearly a preference for the easy and familiar over the difficult and challenging, and it's a negation of the whole point of having Great Books in the first place. I call that anti-intellectualism.

I don't see it as anti-intellectualism. There's a common denominator in thread for lighter reads, because they're more likely to be read by more people. We don't all spend all our free time reading the Great Novels.

I think my structural point stands, Hayden. The tone of the thread has a lot less to do with anti-intellectualism than it does with the focus of the community. This is pop culture community, not a literary criticism community. We may use some or many of those tools to dissect Buffy and Angel, but not everyone has access or inclination to do the same with the same novels at the same time. A common love of Melville, or even a willingness to spend a lot of time with 19th C American lit, isn't what draws us together.

And, frankly, the fact that some residents of the thread don't like Joyce or Melville, and said so, doesn't mean you can tar everyone with the same brush. What do you say to me, when I say I read Moby Dick and while I didn't much like it, I respect its place in the canon?

I'm hoping you're not trying to be patronizing and offensive to people you know are articulate, thoughtful, and incisive. But accusations of anti-intellectualism to this crowd, in particular, strike me as way off base.

Coming painfully late to all this, but it seems like there are two things going on: a lot of thoughtful discussion, and a lot of riding hobby horses around and around in tight little circles. FWIW, I don't think even Hec and hayden at their wildest are advocating the kind of lit crit Deb loathes and fears; I haven't seen anyone advocating dissection and dismemberment of the texts or submitting their authors to postmortem psychoanalysis. Most of the critical thinking people have talked about wanting is the kind that springs from that visceral place; it just goes beyond the love of the work itself to wanting to eat the author's spicy brain and explain to everyone else exactly why s/he is such a nummy treat and why nonreaders are missing out on the fourteen-course banquet of a lifetime.

I'd have to go back and dig through the stacks of my college books now sitting in my dad's back bedroom closet to give exact cites, but I know I'm not pulling this out of my ass; I know there are writers and critics out there who critique and explain and diagram out of love and enthusiasm. The school of criticism Deb describes is indeed murderous and blasphemous and intellectually masturbatory, but it's a new little thing. There are centuries of critical thought that's wildly alive.

I can't even count the number of writers I'd never have known about if I hadn't come across critical essays on them by writers I respected (and sometimes by them on writers I respected). CS Lewis introduced me to Chesterton and Charles Williams and George Macdonald; Auden's loving introduction to one of Macdonald's fantasy novels led me to his poetry. Chesterton made me pick up Robert Louis Stevenson. Elizabeth Gaskell's writing on the author of my private wildly unobjective flinty woobie Jane Eyre made me pounce on her own novels when they were assigned me in college with a cry not of, "Novels of social justice!" but of "Hey, a friend of a friend!" Dorothy Sayers gave me Dante; Flannery O'Connor gave me Walker Percy; Elizabeth Bishop gave me Robert Lowell and Marianne Moore. Thomas Merton has convinced me that I need to read Boris Pasternak before I die (and God, how I've tried--four passes at Zhivago so far, none successful, but I live in hope).

t /mememe wankery

FWIW, I'm in Heather's corner, and not far down the hall from hayden, on this: to me it seems that there's a lot of literary love in this thread, but not often a lot of serious discussion about that love. And I really kind of groove on that discussion. I miss school, miss college and even high school, something fierce. I miss being able to not just read something, but spend hours talking about it. Maybe I was just freakishly lucky, but I don't remember it ever diminishing my experience of the books. Even the ones I loved, even the ones I loved in the face of someone else's hatred or contempt--I was slow and dull enough that often I didn't know exactly what it was that I loved until I had to defend it, and that defense never killed my love, just clarified and deepened it. Sometimes I didn't even know what the fuck I thought about a book at all until I'd sat locked in the library tower with fourteen other people hashing it out over three exhausting hours. And that utterly rocked. And I miss it and want it back, and it stings a little when that experience is conflated with the truly contemptible dismissive pseudo-Freudian autopsy school of criticism.

Ah, fuck, I don't even know what I'm saying anymore.

Wolfram, that's interesting. Although I think having some commonalities in reference are important, no single canon should be, well, canonized.

There is no one canon, and whatever books are considered important today should be reconsidered tomorrow.