Literature has always fallen victim to the publishing industry's greatest priority: its bottom line. Yet somehow the art of writing manages to keep rising -- all the way to the heart and brain, where intelligent, sensitive readers seek more than just entertaining plots to kill time. That wasn't particularly obvious in the July issue of
The Atlantic Monthly, when B. R. Meyers published an essay called "A Reader's Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness of American Literary Prose." Meyers' pedestrian assault on writers who strive to reshape language to reflect a particular aspect of the world in essence called for an across-the-board dumbing-down of fiction. But a two-part column called "A Critic's Manifesto" (July 29 and August 5, 2001), by
The Kansas City Star books editor John Mark Eberhart, proved that some critics, when challenged, can defend literature's greatest benefit: to illuminate the world and readers' lives in that world. Eberhart noted that, for him, mere plot "just isn't that important anymore" and that some of his favorite stories are "those in which very little seems to happen at all." Although he unfortunately did not acknowledge that his own priorities -- atmosphere, mood and setting -- are often created through inventive language, he eloquently recognized that "It isn't 'what happened' to us -- but rather how we happened to view the things that did" that matters the most in literature.
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