Some Thoughts on Literary Criticism【MISC】

The following is some informal writing on my thoughts of literary criticism in response to a prompt given to a class at my college.

 One of the things I have always myself been critical of in the literary world is that it exists in the first place. There has always been this divide between "literature" and just "entertaining writing". Almost all of these methods of criticism seem to me to be an attempt to categorize "objectively" good writing through how complicated a work is or what questions it raises. While I think these are good things to take into consideration, it feels to me like the world of writing has come to a halt in creativity and is now just focusing on the past. Obviously "classics" take time to get attention, but I do struggle to find many good examples of said classics or works that may become classics in the future in the modern day. Yet I have still consumed countless works of writing from this time period that have changed my life and challenged everything I know. Though many of these works wouldn't even be given a second thought to literary critics. We're so caught up in the beauties of the past that we disallow ourselves from creating anything for humanity's future to admire.

To get back to my original point, I think there is a lot of incredible writing nowadays that goes unnoticed because it tries to bridge the gap between literature and entertaining writing. In this field it almost seems as if anything that puts any weight into the raw enjoyment of the process of reading will get thrown in the bin. I believe that gap is a large hindrance in creating writing for the future. As a writer myself, I aim to break that wall. I know that entertaining writing can be just as thought provoking, if not more so, than a lot of the classics. If YA and similar categories are to get shoved under the rug, why is it that myself and many others I know have felt numerous YA works give that emotional and philosophical punch that we only expect from classics? Why must there be a barrier? If anything, I believe writing that leans into entertainment has more potential to pack that punch, because it is far more immersive.

Horror writing is a great example of this, in my opinion. Horror hinges upon human terror; and in order to do that, the horror writer must ask themself why humanity is so terrified of certain things. That question is what separates "high brow" horror writing from "low brow" horror writing. If a writer understands why something causes fear, they themselves become the pilot of that fear, granting them the ability to push and pull a reader's emotions and expectations any which way. If the goal of literary criticism is to find the most impactful works, then critics need to just look internally.

Like I mentioned before, I do think looking at the complexity of writing tools and impactful thoughts does point us in the right direction sometimes. There are plenty of very entertaining works that have nothing of substance, just as there are so many thought-provoking works that struggle to hold a reader's attention. I speculate that a large reason why nowadays it feels like there are a whole lot less readers and writers in the world is because much of these works are just not fun to read, in a world with an uncountable number of stories out there. The idea of literary criticism how it is now is not only trying to filter out writing with less focus on philosophy and sociology, but also labeling those who don't want to read hard-to-read stories as simply not smart enough or not readers of substance. Just because something can be difficult to read doesn't mean that it should be that way. There is a time and a place for that, but I believe that "better" writing should not only be able to rock somebody's boat, but be accessible to them. There doesn't need to be this superiority-inferiority dynamic in the writing world. If somebody's world is changed by any work, no matter how many fight scenes or heartfelt love letters nor how few, that work is deserving of being looked into. The movement to objectively categorize high brow literature from low brow literature is not only needless but harmful to the writing community. Everyone reads differently, so that task is impossible anyway. Humans are intelligent creatures and all are capable of deep-thought, but every person has a different thing that brings that out of them. So why are we overlooking so much potential and just fetishizing the past, really?