The XX Factor: What women really think.

• « Prev | Main | Next »

  
  

  There's Just No Such Thing as "Bestest Writer Ever"

  Posted Wednesday, March 04, 2009 2:27 PM | By E.J. Graff

  No yawning allowed? Noreen, I'd like to see you enforce that. It'll take a lot of IV-delivered caffeine. Sure, maybe it's easier for me to yawn at the literary canon now that I've switched over to journalism and no longer hope for prizes in fiction and poetry. And as far as your argument that same-sex marriage and equal pay depend on equal representation in literature ... well,  I'm sorry, but I switched over because I don't actually believe literature is all that influential. As Ezra Pound wrote, "poetry makes nothing happen." Nothing is very important, the Buddha would tell you. And yes, I do want more women's imaginations and tastes recognized. But I don't think it has to happen by forcing men to like The House of Mirth more than Brideshead Revisited (although I'll pick Wharton first any time, thank you). Literature is just too subjective for that.

  Which is my point. I think I'm suggesting a proliferation of lists and prizes precisely because I don't respect the ones that exist; prize committees include a carousel of people handing out back-pats to their friends and back-stabs to their enemies. We don't have to pretend that there really is a Best Writer or a List of Best Books or a Bestest and Most Sophisticated Literary Sensibility that can Best Detect the Platonic Best Novel. That concept always makes me think of that movie that made Jack Black famous—can anyone remember what it was called?—in which a bunch of loser dudes who work in a music store are constantly making lists about such things as the five best bass guitar lines in a rock album ever. Oh, please. Yes, I believe in being transported by literature and art; I survived adolescence because of Tolstoy, picked up girls by reciting poetry from memory (Shakespeare sonnets and Japanese tankas ... the practical benefits of an MFA degree!), and regularly worship at MOMA. But I want more lists, more prizes, less pretense that we can definitively declare the Best One Ever and more reality-checking about how different our tastes all are, shaped by our varied experiences.

  P.S. I remember the movie now! It was High Fidelity.

   

  Filed under: literature, women writers, great american novel, jack black

About E.J. Graff

• E.J. Graff is associate director and senior researcher at Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, where she directs the Gender & Justice Project. She is a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center. As a journalist and author, her work has appeared in such venues as The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy magazine, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, Columbia Journalism Review, Good Housekeeping, The Nation, The New Republic, and in more than a dozen anthologies. She collaborated on former Massachusetts Lt. Governor Evelyn Murphy's book Getting Even: Why Women Don't Get Paid Like Men--and What To Do About It (Simon & Schuster, 2005). Her first book, What Is Marriage For? The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution, has been widely cited in legal journals, reprinted for academic use, entered as courtroom exhibits, and quoted by government policymaking bodies.

PRINT DISCUSS