Free Sample Essays > Literature
The best thing about popular literature is that you don’t have to think about it: popular literature is pure escapism.
Popular literature is often praised for its apparent lack of demand on the reader, and its wondrous ability to provide pleasurable reading while transporting the reader into a fantasy realm untouched by the stresses of ‘real life’ and the dreaded ‘thought’. Despite the apparent praise, however, there are underlying negative value judgements behind comments like these. Why do so many people seemingly accept that reading for pleasure, and reading popular fiction, precludes thoughtful engagement with a text? The term ‘escapism’ also has negative connotations, due to the supposed ‘irresponsibility’ of reading for pleasure while denying the far more important duties of the ‘real world’. To understand whether popular literature is, as it would seem, being praised, or if it is being devalued, it is important to recognise what it is about certain texts that designate them as ‘no-brainers’, and why it is that escapism, seen as an irresponsible and negative trait in a text, is associated primarily with popular literature.
The most commonly used measure for a text’s literary worth is the basic literary structure of the text. The most obvious and general example of this is the language – for the most part, we can recognise a Shakespearian drama or a piece by James Joyce as having literary merit because of the erudite language and complexity of the grammar, syntax, and general structure. So what does this mean for a popular fiction text, written in a more conversational tone, using slang and technically incorrect grammar? The fact that we do not have to think about the language used does not mean we do not think about the content. Janice Radway describes the traditional view that
the only literature that can provide nourishment for the mind is that which refuses to be immediately comprehensible, that which forces the reader to create new codes with which to decipher its simple signs and complex structures. (Radway, 1986: 8)
If this is the case, then Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary cannot provide ‘nourishment’, and will not provoke thought. With sentences like ‘Ah well, time for a little drinky’ (Fielding, 1996: 123), not let us think about what is going on? Radway mentions “the notion that all human activity, including pleasure reading, should engage all of an individuals faculties all of the time” (Radway, 1986, 7) – if this is the ideal for all literature, then it does not provide much room for ‘easy access’ texts like Bridget Jones’s Diary. This quality of most popular literature is, however, a useful tool for allowing us to think, because we are not estranged and distanced by complex and unfamiliar language or structure, and we are not alienated by unsympathetic or erudite attitudes. It is precisely because the structure of the text does not actively engage our consciousness (that it, make us think) that we are able to think about the issues raised within the text, and provokes a thought process deeper than ‘… but what does that word mean?’.
To charge a text with being ‘escapist’ is an interesting judgement – [next page]