This week we discussed many things, mainly we continued the argument about the differences between commercial fiction and Literature. We read an article about these differences individually and came together as a group to state our thoughts. My favorite quote from this article is "Commercial fiction takes us away from the real world: it helps us temporarily to forget out troubles. Literary fiction plunges us, through the author's imaginative vision and artistic ability, more deeply into the real world." I think this excerpt is a good summation of the blurred line between commercial fiction and Literature. This article did make me realize that reading Literature is not supposed to be easy. It is supposed to be challenging and it is supposed to make you question yourself and the things around you. One thing that the article did inspire me to disagree with is how he portrays commercial fiction. Its not a dirty word, and its most certainly not easy to write commercial fiction. To get on the best sellers list an author must work very hard and have incredible talent even if that talent is not to make us think deeply about life. Some students got very defensive about classifying their favorite books as commercial fiction but I don't think the point of this discussion was to claim that commercial fiction is bad and literary fiction is good. Some of the books that I adore the most are commercial fiction and I'm proud to call them that. The biggest assignment we had this week was to explicate a poem and begin an AP style essay regarding that poem. Although, I din't accomplish a complete or polished essay I did learn a lot through the process of explicating the poem and the long class discussions afterwards. I was quite surprised at how many different meanings and interpretations could be found in a few short lines of poetry. I still have a long way to go in learning how to craft a "9" worthy essay but it was fun to look for the possible meanings in the poem, even meanings that the author did not intend when writing the poem.
Another stellar reflection. This quote stood out to me: "Its not a dirty word, and its most certainly not easy to write commercial fiction. To get on the best sellers list an author must work very hard and have incredible talent even if that talent is not to make us think deeply about life. Some students got very defensive about classifying their favorite books as commercial fiction but I don't think the point of this discussion was to claim that commercial fiction is bad and literary fiction is good."
You're absolutely correct to say this, and categorizing various forms of writing is a natural process. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to point to significant contributions to the literary world.