"Literature"

What separates literature and popular writing?

critics who know what they're talking about

literature is taught at schools and has mainly lost any sort of importance other than "we said so" and its public domain

>>3
There's plenty of great literature that isn't public domain.

>>1
"Popular" writing amounts to being entertaining, as in, "it's a great story. "Literature" amounts to being meaningful, as in, "it's a great story, but it also is something more than just a great story." Generaly, a storybook that is more than the sum of it's parts is literature and true art. It there are aliens, they'll never be able to discern a human "popular" story from "true art," by definition.

   It there are aliens, they'll never be able to discern a human "popular" story from "true art," by definition.

I disagree; I think there are definitely attributes that determine whether or not a book should qualify as 'literature.'

Probably the major one is "high seriousness."  I don't think Arnold ever gave a solid definition of the term, but Burroughs once summarized it as "does it touch on basic issues of good and evil, life and death and the human condition"

>>6
Never have I heard a sillier term than "high seriousness".

Anyway, I meant hypotetical intelligent aliens, not dressed people from Star Trek. If you understand good, evil, life, death and all other things human, you're not particularly alien, are you? There is no chance to meet someone that similar to us in space.

>>7
I hate to burst your bubble, but "alien" refers to any species from another planet. If they're not weird enough for you, that's just too bad, you know?

>>8
"Alien" can be used to refer to anyone from a different place or society, but that's not his point. His point is that any aliens humans could hypothetically meet probably wouldn't be similar enough to us to understand many of our philosophical concepts(of which they might have many of their own that we wouldn't understand), and thus not be able to understand much of what makes our literature(and art in general) so great.

>>9
Obviously I mean "any extraterrestrial (except for human emigrants) qualifies as alien". And he did say, "If you understand good, evil, life, death and all other things human, you're not particularly alien, are you?" Well, who's he to say how alien aliens are?

>>10
I mostly agree with you, but I can see where he's coming from, as it's likely that, due to a different environment, aliens would have evolved quite a bit differently from humans, both genetically(if they even have something similar to genes) and culturally(ditto); and would thus think in significantly different ways.

>>11
Well, that's certainly a possibility for all or some types of aliens.

I assume you're not using the word in the sense of "anything written" ("come by one of our offices and pick up some literature on the exciting opportunities we have to offer!)

>>13
You assume correctly

I assume you're using "separates" in the sense of "differentiates" and not in the "bookshelf layout" sense. I also assume a wide variety of other obvious things.

>>15
I assume you're kind of a faggot.

lolmfao

>>8
You silly man. If we ever encounter anything, it's not going to be like in your shitty space operas, but more like Lem's concept of contact. "It's going to be like a meeting of a squirrel and a slug, I think," he said. Clever person, he; silly man, you, as was already stated.

Well, this conversation got shitty fast.  I wrote >>6 ,  and my point was that there are some "objective" standards that people can look at to evaluate writing as being literature or not.  I don't think the term is arbitrary; one of the main things that separates popular writing from literature is "high seriousness."  To what extent something has "high seriousness" can of course be argued.  Even someone completely unfamiliar with society and the idea of "literature", could, given a definition of "literature" including the concept of "high seriousness", develop an opinion as to whether or not a work qualified as "literature."

This whole alien discussion is irrelevent.  I thought >>5 's alien comment was claiming that there are no firm standards as to what "literature" is, and that because people just make up what qualifies and what doesn't with no real pattern, any consciousness external to normal society would be unable to understand the term.

>>2
this is still the correct response

>>18
Well, that's certainly a possibility, though 100% of the intelligent species I currently know of are human-like. I think we need to go back to:
It there are aliens, they'll never be able to discern a human "popular" story from "true art," by definition.
This is the problem. That's not the definition of an alien, now is it?

>>21
It's definition of true art of humans, silly. "True art" pulls human strings and makes then feel grand, which certainly wouldn't hold for any other, completely biologically, let alone culturally, unrelated hypothetical lifeforms.

>>22
certainly
...

Except that most people don't give a rat's ass about what a small self-proclaimed elite of faggots call "true art" these days.

>>24
Yeah, and that's pretty sad :/

People would have much better taste if they did.

>>25
No they wouldn't. They'd have a list of approved books and no taste.

>>26
At least they'd be reading good books.

>>27
Wonderful. Now idiots will continuously misquote classic literature instead of stupid movies.