Weekly Response #9

Emily Schmitt

ENG 280

Natalie M. Phillips

10/26/12

Weekly Response #9

“What I was really after was why some people, people like me, failed to recognize naturally and effortlessly the supposedly obvious differences discussed so confidently by professors who appeared genuinely moved by Ishmael’s damp November of the soul and by the epiphanies of Stephen Daedalus but utterly disdainful of the trials of Silas Marner and Clyde Griffiths, that to mention Scarlett O’Hara or Marjorie Morningstar” (Hadway 4).

“He made no answer, and they were again silent till they had gone down the dance, when he asked her if she and her sisters did not very often walk to Meryton” (Austen 124).

Q: Do all works of literature start out as ‘midbrow’ and if they do, are all enduring works of literature fated to a classification of ‘High Literature’ after enough time has passed?”

A: What I wanted to get at with this question was that while reading this introduction, I had a thought about what classifies a midbrow piece of literature, from High Literature. Supposedly at one point, all of the literature we revere as High Literature today was more assessable and relatable when it was penned. It was only its endurance through time, and the complications that come with that, that turned it into something harder to understand, and more highly coveted. The point is that High Literature wasn’t always high literature and it I think it is stupid to classify something based on its being ‘scholarly enough’ because in a few hundred years people will be looking back at things like Twilight and Harry Potter as if they were some great epics that only the most highly educated will have the means to understand. The only difference between high and low is time. I picked this particular quote to go along with the excerpt from the theory, because I thought it was boring. The fact that it is boring to me extrapolates the point made in the excerpt of the article that not all of us are immediately enthralled with something so far removed.

Work Cited

Radway, Janice A. Introduction. A Feeling for Books. Janice A. Radway. Janson: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997. 1-17. Print.

Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. Ed. Robert P. Irvine. Toronto: Broadview Press, 2002. Print.