Thanks for Doing This

I look forward to reading your posts and adding my own thoughts to the discussion, but this first one is mostly intended to thank you (Kim) for establishing this blog and everybody else for agreeing to participate in it as part of your honors work. I'm excited about all it will offer. So what's literature? Imaginative writing works as a shorthand definition in some people's minds, although where's the place for nonfiction prose - essays, travel writing, memorable speeches - in that definition? And is all imaginative writing, even really bad imaginative writing, literature? 'Seems to me it's both a matter of the nature of the work and some judgement about the quality of its presentation. But then there's the whole "who decides what's good/" question comes in the room. Truman Capote said of Jack Kerouac's ON THE ROAD, "That's not writing. That's typing." (ouch) There's another way of looking at literature that puts the premium on how the texts are read. Easy example: courses titled The Bible as Literature look at Scripture through a particular lens, one different, certainly, than a religion/ theology class would although both classes are reading the same pages. So maybe it's like the Supreme Court def. of pornography: "I don't know what it is but I know when I see it."