1. Can the Twilight books really be considered literature? How?

2. Why should anyone bother to examine Twilight from a literary perspective?

These are the questions I will be dealing with in the next two posts. By its very nature, it’s pretty basic material. Still, I hope it’s informative as well as somewhat interesting to anyone who’s curious about the purpose of this site. (I also have a similar discussion in the About section of the site, for anyone who’s curious.)

To anyone who finds this topic kind of dry, worry not! The really interesting stuff is yet to come (i.e. the vampires and the romance and so on).

With all that said, let’s get to it! This post will attempt to answer the first question…

1. Can the Twilight books really be considered literature? How?

I’ve been familiar with Twilight for over a year now. I read the first three books just before the media frenzy about the first movie started. Still, Stephenie Meyer was already famous at that point, and soon, just about everyone had heard of the series. After that, it didn’t take long for me to start hearing all kinds of opinions about these books, from the fanatically devoted to the genuinely antagonistic.

Last year was also my senior year in college as an English literature major. Now, literature students and professors are fun people, and I love hanging out with them. But the second you mention Twilight around them, the reaction tends to look something like this:

Why? Well, the answer is pretty simple. Literature students are expected to have “good” taste in literature… Which means that we’re all supposed to read Shakespeare and Melville and Hemingway in our free time, because we’re just that nerdy. In literary circles, it’s cool to say that you’re reading Leo Tolstoy for fun.

It is not cool, however, to say that you are reading a bestselling Young Adult novel like Twilight.

This is because Twilight falls under the category of “commercial” literature. In today’s market, commercial bestsellers are often stereotyped by literary types as “shallow” and “meaningless.” Unfortunately, literature elitists tend to assume that if the general public likes it, it must be some sort of frivolous, escapist fantasy that has no real meaning. Therefore, they say, such books should not be called literature, and they certainly shouldn’t be studied as literature, especially not in a classroom setting.

The funny thing about this is that it’s all a matter of opinion. If you really think about it, there’s no such thing as “good” or “bad” literature in and of itself. In fact, the field of literary criticism (which is really just a fancy way of saying the study of literature) started because Aristotle wanted to try to explain what makes a “good” play, well, good.

Ever since then, literary critics have argued back and forth about the issue, and they’ve never come up with a decisive answer. No one has been able to decide on objective criteria that can determine whether a book is “good” or “bad.” That’s because it’s a subjective issue.

Let me repeat that, because it’s really important:

The issue of “good” versus “bad” literature is entirely subjective. Whether a book is considered “good” or “bad” depends upon the views of the person reading it.

No matter what academic elitists tell you, there is no universal standard for determining what good literature is.

It’s a lot like ice cream. I may think that chocolate is the epitome of everything that is good and pure in this world (and I do, believe me). But you may think that vanilla is oh so much more sophisticated and takes a refined palate to truly appreciate and understand. Still, no matter how passionate we are about ice cream, it’s really just a matter of personal opinion.

So it’s not possible to say that one work of literature is better than another, at least not objectively. There may be a lot of people who think so, but it’s still just an opinion.

Now, hold on a second … What makes a book “literature” in the first place?

Most of the time, we tend to think of literature as the kind of books that are taught in English class. That’s because this opinion is generally accepted by everyone. No one would argue that a book like Moby Dick isn’t literature.

There are plenty of people, however, who would say that Twilight isn’t literature, because it’s too “commercial” or “poorly written” or “pointless.” The idea that commercial books shouldn’t be considered literature is a common view held by many people, not just academic elitists.

However, this view is outdated and problematic. Why? Well, this is the kind of thinking that has resulted in many important books being excluded from what students call the “literary canon.” The “canon” includes all the works of literature that are considered to be truly essential and worthy of study in the literary community. In other words, when a teacher sits down to decide which books to assign for class, he or she is generally expected to pick works from the canon because they are considered “great.”

You may notice that I put quotes around the term “great.” Why? Well, it’s not because I think that Shakespeare and Mark Twain and all the rest of the canonical authors aren’t great. (In fact, I love them as much as the next literature student!) It’s because the term “great” is misleading. It sounds like a fact, when it’s an opinion. Granted, it’s an opinion that was created by the academic elite, but it’s still an opinion. “Great,” like “good,” is an entirely subjective word.

Fortunately, these days, college students are taught to question the canon. That’s because it has been proven that the canon was created primarily by old, dead white guys. Naturally, being old, dead white guys, they picked the literature which appealed to them the most, and then they decided that these works were the greatest.

Unfortunately, literature that was valued by women and other minorities was usually excluded from the canon, because these groups didn’t have a say in the matter. Today, this is (correctly) regarded as a bad thing, because it excluded a lot of interesting works from the canon… Not to mention the fact that it ignored the opinions and values of huge groups of people.

So, if we can’t determine a work’s literary value by whether it’s in the canon or not, how can we determine what counts as “literature”?

The answer is that it’s pretty much impossible, if you’re trying to exclude anything from the list. Sometimes, people try to say that a book is literature if it’s meaningful. The problem is that I might find a certain book meaningful, but another person might not. And who can say which opinion is better? The book had meaning for me, so it’s a meaningful book, at least for one person.

In other words, every book could be meaningful to somebody, so by that standard, all books are literature.

Personally, this is the standard that I use. I consider all books to be literature, because it’s not my place to decide what is “meaningful” or “significant.” A certain book may not be these things from my perspective, but somewhere out there, someone probably disagrees with me. Therefore, it’s still literature.

Obviously, this is why I consider Twilight to be literature. Millions of people love this book series. I’m not going to sit here and say they shouldn’t love it because it isn’t “good” literature. That’s not my decision to make for them, nor is it anyone else’s.

Twilight, just like any other “commercial” book, has the potential to be literature, as long as anyone out there considers it significant or meaningful.

In case anyone thinks I’m just making this up, I would like to quote from one of my favorite textbooks. This is from a book called Literary Theory: An Introduction by Terry Eagleton, which is considered a significant text in the study of literature and literary criticism:

“With this reservation, the suggestion that ‘literature’ is a highly valued kind of writing is an illuminating one. But it has one fairly devastating consequence. It means that we can drop once and for all the illusion that the category ‘literature’ is ‘objective,’ in the sense of being eternally given and immutable. Anything can be literature, and anything which is regarded as unalterably and unquestionably literature – Shakespeare, for example – can cease to be literature” (p.9)

So, there you have it: the term “literature” is not an objective one, as long as we’re defining literature as a work which is valuable. Furthermore:

“The so-called ‘literary canon’, the unquestioned ‘great tradition’ of the ‘national literature’, has to be recognized as a construct, fashioned by particular people for particular reasons at a certain time. There is no such thing as a literary work or tradition which is valuable in itself, regardless of what anyone might have said or come to say about it. ‘Value’ is a transitive term” (p.10).

Again, the canon of decades past was determined by a specific group of people (usually the academic elite), based on what was important and valuable to them. But why should their opinions be the only ones that matter? I believe it’s pointless (and wrong) to exclude the opinions of others just because they’re not members of an elite group.

This is why any work that is valuable to anyone, anywhere, for any reason can be called literature. It just depends on the point of view of the person who’s saying it.

So from my point of view, Twilight is literature. Of course, there are plenty of people out there who would disagree with me, and that’s one of the main points of this post. Whether Twilight is literature or not is a matter of opinion, and everyone is entitled to their opinion.

Literature. There, I said it.

Still, this means that Twilight certainly can be considered literature, in the same way that any other book can. It just depends on the criteria of the people evaluating it.

Now, as for why Twilight should be examined as literature, that’s another question entirely. You can find my answer to that one in the next post.