I'm just wondering how you define what is valuable
My friends, I'm just throwing this out into the blue. How do you tell the difference between a good book and a bad book? To be more precise, I would like to know how to determine the value of a literary work without recourse to either
1) subjectivism (people like what they like) or
2) dogma (literature "must" have theme or form or political subtexts or whatever).
If subjective preference is the sole measure of value, then Shakespeare is no better than Dan Brown--in fact, he's objectively "worse" than Dan Brown in a trans-subjective sense, since far more people prefer to read Dan Brown. Is there a sufficiently flexible alternative to subjectivism in matters of evaluation?