Mass literature is the works of commercially successful, clearly formal, “assigned” to certain genres, so they rarely violate the genre conventions: the horror movie will be on the horror shelf next to the ax, and the family saga on the shelf of family novels near the old photo album. Such books do not need intermediaries, you take from the shelf and read. Each next will be easier to read, because you have already learned to read the previous one and fell in love with it precisely.
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Elitarian literature needs intermediaries, such guarantors of interpretation - critics, teachers, scientists, authors of comments and preface, in extreme cases - authors who make up the guides and routers according to their works. These books violate the rules, in particular the genre, each next will be more difficult than the previous one, because it does not imitate, but refutes it.
To attribute some work to mass literature or to elitist means to say nothing about its quality or originality. “Lєdd Krasiviy, yak lєbt, and Obzyan, as it is overwhelmed,” we quote our living classic.
It's still clear, true?
But this is if you think very roughly and speak very briefly. And most importantly: if we live somewhere in the 1980s and think of then categories. In the 2020s, the question of elitism and massness completely blurred.
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Officially, the moment when it became unacceptable to share high and popular literature, came in 1980 - then the book of Umberto Eco “The Name of Rosa” was published, which for decades holding the bar is incredibly popular and cult and in many ways changing the configuration of the entertaining prose field (it translated into Ukrainian novel.
The monk and the novice are investigating the murder in the remote monastery, playing the classic pair of “investigator and a fixed” and using detective methods.
But in fact, Aristotle’s lost treatise on a comedy, the place of crime was an archive, and this book about the impossibility of modern consciousness to perceive direct messages; not protected by formulas and patterns, a modern person is self -destructive. This is a book about post -truth even before the very concept of post -truths came up with.
The eco megazhinstele seemed to have written a detective, most of its readers, I must say, a detective and read. Does this prevent the “name of the rose” from being one of the most difficult in the ideological plan of works of the late twentieth century? By no means. Eco committed this sabotage quite consciously. You can not read and comprehend all the significant works of mankind for one human life, so the culture cuts off the knowledge that it seems superfluous to it now. You can prevent these processes, making classic prose vaccination with a popular prose, replacing shocks of novelty with genre stability.
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Today, the thought of breaking up high literature and popular is the idea of \u200b\u200ban idea of \u200b\u200ba reader who thirsts for entertainment or in need of self -development. And already here the problems begin. When we talk about the book as belonging to a high shelf, or gravitating to popular prose, at this moment we are never talking about the reader, but only about the formulas and structure of the work itself. In theory. But in practice, the separation of elite and mass literature becomes just a way, one of the ways that the reader receives pleasure from reading. “I read books that not everyone understands and which is not available to everyone” - this is one variety of pleasure. “I read books written by living people for normal people” - this is another kind of pleasure from reading.
It is obvious that the person who reads the Hungry Igri Suzanne Collins, and the person reading Robert Valser reading the Rozbizin, completely different expectations from the process itself and completely different habits. Agree? But the person who reads the “Wronger” by Stephen King, and the person who reads the “Makov Vіin” Rebecca Kwan is also very different? And the man with the “saliblies” of Elias Kanetti and the man with the “Ostanim Svit” by Christophe Ransmeira in a backpack - they contrast themselves or solidify themselves? It is more difficult to answer, true? Well, because each of these people reads an interesting book, complicated in the framework of his experience and receives equal pleasure from this.
I have a familiar young mother who reads Borges stories for his four -year -old child at night. Says that in this way it brings up good taste in the baby. On occasion, I asked the girl, what these stories about. “About traveling through big houses, about funny men in funny hats, about cockroaches on skates,” she answered me immediately. The pleasure of her mother is to read Borges's child. The pleasure of the child is to invent another instead of an incomprehensible story.
And this story, as for me, is a wonderful illustration of why we hold onto these two concepts - popular/mass and elitist/high literature - when they lost relevance for literary criticism and book publishing. Because now these categories relate to purely reception and become characteristics of certain types of reading and methods of aesthetic experience.
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We recently published two beautiful books by Anthony Susan Baitt. Prose of Baittt - in all characteristics not just a high shelf, but its upper row is a refined university prose. All Baitt’s books are thinking about how we, reading, influence the content of what we read and how the meanings spelled out in history form us. Baitt, sorry, reflects on the basic principles of hermeneutics. But her “Book for Datey” is perfectly read as the history of three bohemian families on the eve and after the First World War, soap opera literally. And “obsession”, I apologize, is an affair novel, where two modern scientists expose the secret love relations of writers of the past. Baittt is popular and at the same time does not cease to be a high shelf.
I remembered two Baitt books no coincidence. They were transferred by Yaroslav Strha. In one of the interviews, the translator just reflected on how to position the prose of a high shelf in Ukraine, her opinion is important for me: “We don’t have so many books right from a high shelf so that a person who reads only high prose can completely. Therefore, more than in other literature, books go from shelves to shelf. If you want to read, give up snobbery " We have talking about a high shelf all the time. They say that there are not enough such books acutely. The book market in Ukraine, as in other countries, is segmented, but not every niche has so many publications annually to satisfy the reader. Therefore, from time to time there are complaints about the absence of, say, horror or intellectual prose. The more niches, the wider the liter process, the more often such requests sound.
Just recently, the prose of Yevgeny Pashkovsky, one of the key authors of the 1990s, “Vovcha Zorya”, “Osin for the Angel”, “Shchdodenniy Coars” was “. Under Early Andrukhovich, the prose of the gear, the violent flowering of prose Zabuzhko (not the simplest reading), the texts of Pashkovsky were considered super -complex. They are objectively complicated, the language is saturated, the syntactic structures are overloaded, the plot is floating. And now I am now observing the confused reaction of readers (I judge by reviews in reader publics): how to read it and what it was? We have many translated books for reading: Don Dello, Dylan Thomas, Paul Oster, Thomas Pincon - Postmodernists, their difficulty game, we can read it. But Pashkovsky's complexity is seriously. This is the complexity of Herman Bloch, who, despite the brilliant translation of the Death Vergilia, has not become particularly relevant. The problem is that the work of the 1990s, which already has its place in our actual canon, as a laboratory where new meanings are created, is an extremely difficult task. It seems not a new book, but for some reason it shocking novelty. And what it was?
When we are talking about the complexity of elitist prose, this is a difficulty that is realized immediately at three levels. This is what we cannot interpret. This is that which is not relevant to us in our psychological and biographical experience. This is what we do not need in reader experience. But to all this your consciousness has such a pretty chip - gives additional meanings and difficulties. What is difficult for us, it seems to us to be significant.
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Since under such conditions to distinguish a high shelf from the mass poult? Do not think that I'm joking, but - on the covers. It is publishing practice that breeds these two segments very clearly. But you need to hurry. From the 1990s, from the crazy success of Garri Potter, the practice of publishing books in two types of bindings-colorful serial and gray university. The pleasure of reading the same book is received by both snobs and democrats.
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