by Marco Fiori

Created on: April 28, 2009

A love of literature was not always considered pretentious. In 2009, if you sprout the words of Chaucer, Dickens or Shakespeare you are instantly labelled a book worm. Going a step further, if you find yourself echoing Eliot's sentiments on the artistic tradition or Lyotard's views on postmodernity you are at risk of social alienation. Yet go back two hundred years and you would have been ridiculed for indulging in popular culture this odd entertainment form known as the novel. Surely it couldn't catch on.

We sit here in the twenty first century overloaded with technological forms of interaction, communication and entertainment. Print publishing is declining, the newspaper is going digital and fiction is slowly heading toward e-form. Quoting Lord of the Rings gives the impression of education. Harry Potter is the new cultural opus of literary worth. Give me a world of Fahrenheit 451 rather than a university system that indulges in the exploration of wizards and witches.

The masses are always going to entertain themselves with popular fiction their minds make it unavoidable. Next time you are at a book club meeting and someone questions the validity of J.K. Rowling's work, give them a large slap across the face. Popularity does not instigate cultural worth.

You call Philip Pullman literature? Kindly take your leave sir. Simple escapism yes, but literature not by a long shot. We have reached a postmodernist space, a cultural realism that defies literary logic. Anything can be classed as literature, but it doesn't mean you should accept it. The next time someone comes to you sprouting their knowledge of Fight Club, retort them with a question concerning Defoe's Moll Flanders. Name dropping aside; they'll instantly retreat to their pseudo-intellectualism.

Popular fiction needs to stop pretending to hold the meaning of literary life. The novel's creation never pretended to strengthen culture, it just subconsciously did. The Chronicles of Narnia are not to be taught. Enjoyed, yes, but literary, no. It's a harsh, elitist view, but one that's necessary to keep literature alive. Rushdie, Atwood, DeLillo and countless others show that there are valid examples of contemporary literature. This isn't a discounting of the anything written post-World War II, merely a retort to those prancing about parties discussing the latest endeavour of Ken McClure.

Do some research into what literature is. Fiction isn't literature and Creative Writing is barely fiction. The Lord of the Rings will not change the world, but Woolf has already done on many an occasion. Literature is vast, but not limitless.

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