[lit-ideas] Re: On Nip Thievery
- From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 05 Jun 2008 18:32:03 -0700
Julie Krueger wrote
Ah, the heady, intoxicating and slightly mad days of early summer when
dizzying heat and free days explode.
David Ritchie and I would like to discuss this with you.
Just one question, though -- did War of the Worlds cease to be
literature (or take a hiatus from being literature?) when thousands of
people listening to it broadcast believed it to be factual? If so, what
restored it to literature-status? Is the category of "literature"
dependent on the reader, the author, reality as we or any one of us may
know it, static or fluid?
You may be confusing literature with fiction, and as for fiction, that
some people might believe that Huck Finn was a real person who floated
down the Mississippi on a raft, doesn't entail that he was; or, more to
the point, that a number of people think that in reading The Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn, they're reading a true account of the adventures of
a real person doesn't make TAOHF any the less fictional.
Most prose fiction is literature (unless it's so awful as to not deserve
the name) but not all literature is prose fiction—lyric poetry, Japanese
haiku, parody and satire (which are by definition art forms parasitic on
some underlying text, words, actions, whether or not these are prose or
fiction), e.g. Well-written history, criticism, and 'memoirs' are surely
literature.
What is fiction? is a tougher question, for fictional works might
include accounts of actual historical events, actual persons and places,
and so on. There's much more to it than that, of course, but I'm about
to freeze to death.
Robert Paul,
dreaming of Tahiti
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