Anthony Dauer wrote:
> Define real literary merit and provide examples of
non-masterpieces that have it as
> well as just quantified it as
masterpiece.
> Juri Nummelin wrote:
> > The term 'masterpiece' doesn't usually have
anything to do with the real literary
> > merit.
Maybe I was a bit hasty in my words. I meant that there are
books that have been called masterpieces and they have been
molded into the literary canon, but have been dropped from
it. They have become obsolete. Let me think of an example..
maybe the novels on Sherwood Anderson or Erskine Caldwell.
They have been called masterly and some of them have been
hailed as masterpieces, but not anymore by anyone in their
right mind. And this has nothing to do with their literary
merit. They just fall off the scope, that's all. Or think
back, into the 17th or 18th century. What were the
masterpieces back then? We know nothing about those works, we
only know those works that were maybe abandoned from the
canon, but have stood the test of time. (That's, by the way,
a definition of a classic, but not of a masterpiece. They are
way different things.)
Juri
jurnum@utu.fi
-- # To unsubscribe, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to majordomo@icomm.ca. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 28 Apr 2000 EDT