Stephen King: Trash, or Literature?

[JCamilo]

Of course, even to dismiss the qualities of Stephen King (he is not thaaaat bad), we must take him seriously.

[mal4mac]

Yes, the phone book is literature. You know, because listing as boring it may be, is textual form present in several works such as biblie - where they list laws or genealogies to Homer, that lists the greek fleet.

The list in the Illiad is not just a list of people in your town, it is a list of Greek heroes. For a Greek person of that time just hearing the names would have had a great emotional impact - the choice of that particular list is what makes it a work of artistic creation and a work of literature.

But, I must admit, I found the list in the Iliad list almost as tedious as the phone book because I did not know who most of those Greeks were! (Also that list was only one section - there is wonderful story telling in there. There aren't many wonderful stories in the phone book.

I find funny that you do not notice that 'Literature - Written works, esp. those considered of superior or lasting artistic merit: "a great work of literature".' are bad definitions..

I do think this is a bad, or at least ambiguous, definition; but it's what we are stuck with! (I copied it direct from Goggle define.)

Stephen King's work is literature in the broad sense, that includes the phone book. In the narrow sense, according to several critics, it is inferior literature, or not literature at all.

You make a good point about considering King to be inferior literature, rather than not literature at all. I will concede that.

Not all "classics" appeal to me. The basic readability and "teenage angst" themes of King somewhat appealed to me in my youth, and I got through some of his novels. I haven't got through the Bible, Ulysses, or Proust. I think he's a bit like junk food - goes down easy, but it's not really very nutritous or tasty - and likely to be bad for you in excess. And I could have been reading Stevenson, Dickens, more Wells,...

We need to be able to, at least, create categories of great literature and not-great literature. Stevenson makes it into the "great" camp not just because he's the perfect story teller, but because he writes superbly well, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and has some very important things to say about the human condition - Dr Jekyll has received iconic stature in our culture, second only to the greatest figures (Hamlet, Don Quixote...)

I think King is in the not-great camp, along with the phone book, though in a different category - the phone book is at least useful!

Assuming all the essays are positive then we can assume at least 14 professors in academia take King's work seriously.

As they are publishing essays on him then they take him seriously, but why do you assume they are all positive?

You *can't* assume that, for instance, Harold Bloom & Tony Magistrale appear under the same cover here:

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Y-vdjwEACAAJ

The National Book Award Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters cannot be taken seriously as an award for literary merit. You don't even need to be a writer! Oprah Winfrey has won it, and the introduction explicitly says this was for her Book Club, not for anything she has written..., for being a good book seller. Does that mean Amazon or Waterstones can win it?

"A few college level syllabi" will include anything in this dumbed down age.

You can always find some critics say positive things about anything, even (especially?) in third rate colleges.

You *can* find some great critics who dismiss books that almost all other critics say are masterpieces.

But you can find many authors that almost all serious critics admire.

Stephen King isn't one of them.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

It's so convenient to pick out one little section of a person's rebuttal to choose to refute, isn't it?

[mal4mac]

One small section? I thought I engaged fairly well with the main arguments being made. Why not engage with the arguments? It's usually a sign that someone is losing an argument when they attack the method of arguing...

[Scheherazade]

~

R e m i n d e r

Please do not personalise your arguments.

Posts containing inflammatory or off-topics comments will be further without further notice.

~

[JCamilo]

The list in the Illiad is not just a list of people in your town, it is a list of Greek heroes. For a Greek person of that time just hearing the names would have had a great emotional impact - the choice of that particular list is what makes it a work of artistic creation and a work of literature.

Probally the same impact that some people feel reading babies names books, or the list of people in their 4th grade class, or watever: reckognition and memory.

The thing is: listing is a form of organization of text (just like many others) with specific function that a writer can use to try to cause impact. You cann't dismiss the form based on effect, for as you even agreed, the effect is not a norm.

But, I must admit, I found the list in the Iliad list almost as tedious as the phone book because I did not know who most of those Greeks were! (Also that list was only one section - there is wonderful story telling in there. There aren't many wonderful stories in the phone book.

Not much storytelling in Confucious either. Or in Emily Dickinson poem. The listing obeys probally the same idea of a phone book, information: here, those are the cities that attacked troy. If you belong to any of them, see how they were represented and by which "family".

Plus, The Illiad whole organization is "artificial", when Homer was singing, the sections are probally split...

I do think this is a bad, or at least ambiguous, definition; but it's what we are stuck with! (I copied it direct from Goggle define.)

Goggle is not god, so I am not stuck with him. For example, try to use Evolution or Theory on goggle and apply it on a debate about biology or science in the middle of religious creationists. It will be truly "Useful" to use goggle as basis.

A good definition resists to testing, circunstances and can be understood by all. Goggle just select popular definitions, not the best definitions.

Stephen King's work is literature in the broad sense, that includes the phone book. In the narrow sense, according to several critics, it is inferior literature, or not literature at all.

Critics that say he is bad literature, are saying he is literature. Even because many people define literature by fiction literature, much narrow than the definition as written text. But that goes to drain: Critics consideration (specially literary critics, which obviously only have status as analysts of literature in first place, not cousine) cannt be used as basis. It is not solid. Herman Melville started to write literature after his death? Until them, critics are slamming him. So did Emily Dickinson? All would be necessary is to find one critic saying something good about King (it is not as hard, he obviously know how to write the pulp-fiction/horror, he clearly continues a lineage of authors, he certainlly provoke emotions on people) to have a new definition? Everyday, a new dictionary! Imagine then when you get a bad work from a great author. Even Shakespeare, despite doing exactly the same technique intentions, etc, you will say some of his plays are not literature and some are?

You make a good point about considering King to be inferior literature, rather than not literature at all. I will concede that.

Not all "classics" appeal to me. The basic readability and "teenage angst" themes of King somewhat appealed to me in my youth, and I got through some of his novels. I haven't got through the Bible, Ulysses, or Proust. I think he's a bit like junk food - goes down easy, but it's not really very nutritous or tasty - and likely to be bad for you in excess. And I could have been reading Stevenson, Dickens, more Wells,...

Well, you do not need to return to King, but it is insane to consider that all your reading is classical reading. You obviously do not have the capacity to judge or know the quality of works before as you may have now, so it was a path you have to walk. I see people who love Murakami, and I frankly, have yet to see something that would set him apart of Stephen King - in fact, his Kafka at the shore seemed like a Stephen King story...

And it is not Stevenson or Wells, but guys like Haggard, Conan Doyle, Lovecraft, Poe, Chesterton all suffer attack from some critics that put they waaaaaaay down on the shelves, because they could be reading Flaubert, Woolf or Faulkner... Sure, you can be reading anything, but I cannt be defining anything based on my reading story.

We need to be able to, at least, create categories of great literature and not-great literature. Stevenson makes it into the "great" camp not just because he's the perfect story teller, but because he writes superbly well, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and has some very important things to say about the human condition - Dr Jekyll has received iconic stature in our culture, second only to the greatest figures (Hamlet, Don Quixote...)

I think King is in the not-great camp, along with the phone book, though in a different category - the phone book is at least useful!

All art us useless, so...

[osho]

He is the commercial type and his creativity was not wielded in an inventive bowel and he is the bus-stand type we read while waiting for something, a kind of time-passer. He got the National Book Awards along with a life time achievement award which he did not deserve at all. That is why Harold Bloom rightly said:
The decision to give the National Book Foundation's annual award for "distinguished contribution" to Stephen King is extraordinary, another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life. I've described King in the past as a writer of penny dreadfuls, but perhaps even that is too kind. He shares nothing with Edgar Allan Poe. What he is is an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis.

[Ragnar Freund]

gone.

[Fai]

Stephen King is definitely NOT trash. Of course he's not classic or something, but I like the ideas of his books, and I enjoy films made after his novels very much. He's got his talent and I really like what this man creates, I think his life phylosophy is pretty much like mine.
_____________
ipad developer

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

it's interesting that most of you are talking of Stephen King as if he has written one book, or as if he is a book. The man has written dozens of novels, novellas, short stories, and screenplays. I agree that, generally, most of these fall under the rubric of trash, but a mature mind can evaluate each work individually. Pet Sematary and The Shining, for example, are juvenile pieces of trash, whereas Needful Things has a very profound plot. It is the story of evil that is by itself impotent, but with the help of generally good yet weak and stupid accomplices can achieve its evil goals. Sounds familiar? Hitler, Stalin, Mao - the list is long. Scrap most of the supernatural crap and put this plot in the hands of Dickens, and it would have become a classic for the ages. Even in the hands of King it was a pretty good novel.

Really? I always thought The Shining was one of his better novels, and I'm pretty sure I've seen this sentiment echoed.

[Drkshadow03]

As they are publishing essays on him then they take him seriously, but why do you assume they are all positive?

You *can't* assume that, for instance, Harold Bloom & Tony Magistrale appear under the same cover here:

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Y-vdjwEACAAJ

The National Book Award Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters cannot be taken seriously as an award for literary merit. You don't even need to be a writer! Oprah Winfrey has won it, and the introduction explicitly says this was for her Book Club, not for anything she has written..., for being a good book seller. Does that mean Amazon or Waterstones can win it?

"A few college level syllabi" will include anything in this dumbed down age.

You can always find some critics say positive things about anything, even (especially?) in third rate colleges.

You *can* find some great critics who dismiss books that almost all other critics say are masterpieces.

But you can find many authors that almost all serious critics admire.

Stephen King isn't one of them.

I made the assumption about the collection of essays from one of the Editorial reviews (magazine/journal) on Amazon, which read:

“With three respected studies of Stephen King already published, Tony Magistrale has become the strongest voice among those who argue the respectability of King's fiction. In this volume he has selected the best essays from the vast body of recent King scholarship to support his contention that King is not only one of America's most popular writers, but he is also one of its best. The essays argue collectively that King's works are deeply influenced by the mainstream traditions of 19th- and 20th-century American and European fiction and are a commentary illustrative of the major political and social tensions shaping contemporary American life. They argue further, with limited success, that King's works rely on a rich literary tradition that includes such respected genres as the gothic and classical Greek tragedy. Remarkably effective in this argument are G. Weller's "The Masks of the Godden," E. Casebeer's "The Three Genres of The Stand," and R. Curran's "Complex, Archetype, and Primal Fear."” - Choice

It sounds to me like the collection will mostly be positive criticism that analyzes the themes, structures, and lineage of King's work, especially since the first sentence informs me that Magistrale is a proponent of King's literary worth and this is his third book on the topic, even though I knew that already.

The National Book Award Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters is for "a person who has enriched our literary heritage over a life of service, or a corpus of work." So you can win it for either of those two reasons. Oprah won it for the former, while Stephen King won it for the latter. Given the many prestigious names on the list: Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Toni Morrison, Arthur Miller, Philip Roth sounds like they're awarding for literary merit to me. You might not agree with the choices, but that doesn't change what the award is for. Why do you think Harold Bloom and company got in such a huff and puff about him winning? Because they did take the award seriously. After all, you don't see them freaking out over all of King's other major genre awards.

Most serious critics admire the same exact authors because most of those authors are dead, old, and well-established. It's uncontroversial to claim Shakespeare or Dickens is a great writer. So it's not surprising we find most serious critics admire them.

But when you start looking at contemporary texts, you quickly notice there isn't that same strong agreement. Oh, there is certainly some. I suspect if you polled most academics today some names will continually pop up like Roth, Pychon, etc. But even then, you'll find a much higher ratio of professors and literati who think Roth or Pychon is overrated crap than you would for names like Shakespeare.

As for King, he's an important author in the horror genre. I think he's an author whose work (maybe not all of it, but some of it) will continually appeal to people who are interested in horror in particular. The poorness of his writing is greatly exaggerated usually by people who haven't ever really read much in the way of actual bad writing. I was particularly impressed by his first novel, Carrie, which was succinctly written (it's not long and bloated like his later novels; it's a lean, raw, powerful monster), fits in the same vein as Stoker's Dracula by taking an epistolary approach, but is experimental and modern in that it does so through newspaper clippings, magazine articles, and such. But I've never seen a novel that really understands the psyche of social dynamics of modern bullying, which is an epidemic these days.

You don't have to like Stephen King. That wasn't the point of my post. The main point of my post is please stop pretending all critics agree Stephen King is awful when in fact I just demonstrated that there are critics in academia who like Stephen King's work.

[Delta40]

Do you think most popular equates to best?

[Ragnar Freund]

gone.

[mal4mac]

Not much storytelling in Confucious either. Or in Emily Dickinson poem. The listing obeys probally the same idea of a phone book, information: here, those are the cities that attacked troy. If you belong to any of them, see how they were represented and by which "family".

I wasn't trying to argue that all literature must be mostly story, I agree that Confucius and Dickinson are literature.

Ok the listing in the Illiad certainly contained useful information somewhat like the phone book, but it shows more discrimination than the phone book (!).

You don't get Homer saying things like "Here is Pericles, he delivers milk. Here is Plato he drives mules, and so on for ten thousand people pursuing mundane tasks. This mundanity, and indescrimanation may be what makes the phone book bad literature (I'll concede your point abou calling it literature... but you have to admit it's bad!)

The phone book exists in another space besides literature of course - the space of "useful guides" - this might provide a useful two scale graph on which to place literary artifacts. For instance, a history book might score highly as literature and moderately as a useful guide.

------

I'm just using Google as a common starting point, if you want to pull out the OED and argue that Google's definition disagress with that of the OED, then let's go there!

I'm sure the Google people want to select the best definitions - they are a bright bunch of geeks, i can't imagine them throwing up any old rubbish on purpose. Given their automated processes they may not always provide the best - contact them and tell them off if you don't like their definitions! I'm happy to work with their definition of literature ... It doesn't seem too bad for a two liner...

Most critics agree that it takes time (a hundred years?) before you can be 'reasonably sure' about the status of a work of literature. The critics slamming Herman Melville when he was alive might have had "personal issues", or were not yet equipped to appreciate him properly

If you find one critic from a minor college saying that a King novel is great literature does that make it great literature?

Even Shakespeare, despite doing exactly the same technique intentions, etc, you will say some of his plays are not literature and some are?

Read my last post carefully. I'm conceding your main point! You win! Everything, including the phone book, the beer mat, and the bus ticket are literature.

How far can you go with this? I just drew a squiggle on a piece of paper that isn't a character (as far as I know...) Is that literature? Or a painting? Is it bad art - or primitive, or surreal?

I don't just read classical literature. I'm trying to read a lot of different new authors recently using a random method of picking a "rated" author of the library new shelf.

I read my first Murakami novel recently, Wind Up Bird Chronicle, and it was quite "different" to start with, so I was quite enjoying it. But I quickly got bored with it, and I now agree with you - not much to set him apart from Stephen King.

And it is not Stevenson or Wells, but guys like Haggard, Lovecraft, Poe, Chesterton all suffer attack from some critics that put they waaaaaaay down on the shelves, because they could be reading Flaubert, Woolf or Faulkner...

I read all these authors in my youth (except Chesterton) and only Stevenson and Wells left a warm glow that makes me seriously want to repeat the experience as an adult.

Flaubert is in the class of at least Stevenson, maybe Dickens - I'd personally recommend reading him without reservation. Also, most of the critics love him -and he's been around for a 100 years.

Woolf and Faulkner I have strong reservations about, I struggled reading "To the Lighthouse" and "As I lay dying". Some first-rate University professors don't rate these modernists highly (e.g., John Carey) - and they are less than a hundred years old - still subject to being hyped by trendies. Maybe in twenty years they will be consigned to the dustbin? carey makes an atrgument for such works as *trulty* elitist - they were designed by the snobs to be unreadable by the newly literate working class.

This has the unfortunate aspect of making the average reader think that "literature is not for them" and that "King is for them". Better would be *some* great literature is not for them (too archaic/specialised- Bible Illiad,...) and some supposed great literature (Wolfe, Faulkner) either isn't great, or is great, but specialised to support the leanings of a snobbish elite (which IMHO puts them beyond the pale, great literature has to be *universal*, at least for the time in which it is written.)

[Drkshadow03]

If you find one critic from a minor college saying that a King novel is great literature does that make it great literature?

Define minor college. The University of Vermont is ranked 82 out of 1600.