One is considered "high art", and the other part of lowly "popular culture", but what is the difference in content?
Name:
Anonymous2009-11-30 22:02
Literature is just popular fiction. It's written first as popular fiction, to make money, to pay the apartment bills, to give the author some justification for their career, and to be read by other readers, only the author happens to be better at writing than most of the other popular fiction writers out there, so it happens that critics and snooty people years later call it literature. You don't write something saying it's literature the same way you don't write something saying it's great. You write it first, and then it gets judged by others over time, even if that judgment is subjective. Twain just wanted to get paid for his magazine stories. Shakespeare just wanted to make a bunch of dick and fart jokes in front of peasants without getting beheaded by the queen. The novels you were made to read in school were just novels at one point, to be read casually like every other novel, and they just happened to be called better than 99% of all the other shit out there some years later.