While perusing through the different blogs for our class this weekend, I happened to stumble upon a group of related blogposts that intrigued me. They all are related to something that was brought up in Beardsley’s essay. Specifically, they all regarded the question of whether labeling something as literature should be a sort of normative judgment. That is, if I call something literature, does that mean that it is a good piece of writing?
Before I go on about my thoughts on this topic, I should point out that I think this is a conversation which deserves a discussion. In the majority of situations in which I have used or heard the term literature, it has been in a way that puts a positive connotation on the term. It is honestly a challenge for me to think of an instance where I labeled something as literature when it was writing of poor quality.
With that said, I think it would be a mistake to associate the term with only writing of a certain quality. In Tom’s post, he warns of the problems associated with “disengage one's sense of aesthetic value”, but I do not view this as a problem. I just think that we should only engage our normative judgments after the label of literature is already given. I agree with Avery’s post on this subject, in which Avery makes clear that there is such a thing as bad literature. Keeping with this line of thinking, after something is deemed to fit in the category of literature, it should then be determined what type of aesthetic value it contains.
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