/lit/ - Literature

I want to share some fragments from Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. A best source would be Terry Eagleton's book Literary Theory, but I don't have it near at the moment.

>What theorists have done is to reflect on literature as a historical and ideological category, on the social and political functions that something called ‘literature’ has been thought to perform. In nineteenth-century England, literature emerged as an extremely important idea, a special kind of writing charged with several functions. Made a subject of instruction in the colonies of the British Empire, it was charged with giving the natives an appreciation of the greatness of England and engaging them as grateful participants in a historic civilizing enterprise. At home it would counter the selfishness and materialism fostered by the new capitalist economy, offering the middle classes and the aristocrats alternative values and giving the workers a stake in the culture that, materially, relegated them to a subordinate position. It would at once teach disinterested appreciation, provide a sense of national greatness, create fellow feeling among the classes, and ultimately, function as a replacement for religion, which seemed no longer to be able to hold society together.

>Recent theoretical discussions have, not surprisingly, been critical of this conception of literature, and have focused above all on the mystification that seeks to distract workers from the misery of their condition by offering them access to this ‘higher region’ – throwing the workers a few novels to keep them from throwing up a few barricades, as Terry Eagleton puts it.

So I mostly agree with >>19320800. The "Elite" doesn't care about what you read, as long as this read doesn't take you to be part of a movement that leads to overthrow the power-structure in which they're at the top. What this Elite wants is to either keep you entertained and therefore not disrupting the system (read novels purely for entertainment, watch Netlix, Youtube, use social networks), or work towards becoming part of the system (an economic system designed to create the illusion that your success is above all related to your skills and will power, and if you aren't successful is because you're not good enough or you haven't tried good enough, not because the system is inherently corrupt).