That's a really insightful point that you've communicated well. I had no idea people thought of things like that and I now feel much more informed on the topic.
Or, no, wait, you're missing the point that all art is shit. Nothing has changed since Artaud said "all writing is garbage. People who come out of nowhere to try to put into words any part of what goes in in their minds are pigs. The whole literary scene is a pigpen, especially today."
Literary history isn't just people writing great work but people telling other people that it's great work. If you think you somehow exist outside of that, you're dead wrong and need to spend more time thinking about why you're reading the books that you're reading. You're not reading them because they are inherently of worth and you inherently know that but because someone else told you so.
You can judge a book based on whatever you want but you're seriously fucking up the order of operations if your response to "more diversity please" is "nope, only aesthetic worth." Your goal in a university classroom isn't to judge books but to read them and trying to learn something.
You seem to think literary studies are about finding the best of the best and sending everyone else the universally and objectively correct Top 10 list. No, literary study can be just as valid (and arguably even more important) when it focuses on bad texts or ones of little aesthetic worth.
Here's the point you missed while you were caught up in your bad literary studies: when you're trying to make the claim that you read purely on aesthetic concerns and that the writer's identity makes no difference to you, you cannot at the same time say "here's a black guy to back up my point." You look incredibly silly when you point out he didn't like being referred to as a black writer and then insist on referring to him exclusively as one.
It also looks incredibly silly when you say "I just like work of aesthetic worth and it's an outrage that you're trying to get me to read more women and brown people." If it's only books of aesthetic worth, does that mean every book you read had better be of more worth than the last? I mean, what's the point otherwise, right? We're just judging solely on aesthetic worth and we can only read the cream of the crop so that we can better organize the Top 10 list so that nobody wonders anymore what books are good and what books aren't. Hell, we should probably start burning all the books that we already know aren't going to make the cut. Bye-bye, 50 Shades.
If you're just in it for the plot and storytelling, why do you care what other criteria might go into picking books? If you had a room full of all of the best books in history and knew both that they were all literary the best books ever written and that you could only read a finite number of them, what would be the argument against reading only the ones that had blue covers? Or only the ones that are in the Realist mode? Or only books that are shorter than 300 pages? Or only the ones by women? Or only the ones by men? Why is one of these options okay but the rest are utterly unacceptable for a reading list?
Most people read based on aesthetics. And yet somehow we've ended up with a literary history and canon that predominantly celebrates white males. Maybe, somehow, that's not a coincidence? For example, maybe white males aren't the only ones to create texts of aesthetic worth but are mostly the only ones? Sounds reasonable.
After all, we're only reading books of aesthetic worth and it's mostly white men, and any argument that we should we read more women or brown people is met with the outrage and shouting about only reading books based on aesthetic worth. Or is that too much inductive logic?
Even if you walked into a library without having ever seen a book or read a word or heard someone talk about western literature in your entire life, pulled a random book off the shelf, and said "hey, have you guys heard about this Shakespeare guy? He seems pretty cool," you would still be within the context of a library which has limited funds to acquire books and thus will naturally acquire books that someone at some point decided were of value to others. If you're in a bookstore, someone thought it would sell or otherwise had the money to make sure it's printed.
You are not absent from the literary tradition that said, first, that women were not intelligent enough to write, and, later, that, okay, maybe they can write (even though they should not have been educated enough to put together that many words and sentences), but it's just not aesthetically pleasing and that has nothing to do with their genitalia. Or, else you say that the genre that is predominantly female is of little literary value despite being culturally dangerous. You don't need to pick one, you can pick a few because it's a grab-bag.
Jane Eyre actually gets a shout-out on the cover of Joanna Russ' How to Suppress Women's Writing. Here's a gem from Wikipedia regarding the androgynous penname Jane Eyre was originally published under:
Speculation about the identity and gender of the mysterious Currer Bell heightened with the publication of Wuthering Heights by Ellis Bell (Emily) and Agnes Grey by Acton Bell (Anne).[12] Accompanying the speculation was a change in the critical reaction to Charlotte's work, as accusations were made that the writing was "coarse",[13] a judgement more readily made once it was suspected that Currer Bell was a woman.[14]
Do you know what happens when a Victorian publisher thinks your writing is too coarse and/or unlikely to get carried by Mudie's? You don't get published, even if you wrote what would be acknowledge as the best novel in English history. Or maybe you publish under a name like George Eliot so that people won't be looking to define your work based on your genitals.
This is probably the most autistic thread on 4Chan right now.
