Jim Collins (2)Critiques

This is a pretty neat analysis of how Booker-winning novels about bibliophiles, Miramax costume dramas, chick lit, big business booksellers, and the Oprah Book Club peddle literature as self-help guide and status marker. For an academic text, it was fun and accessible, and I was deeply amused by Collins' analysis of the Booker-winner bibliophile novels as *category* fiction on the same level as westerns or sword-and-sorcery fantasy novels.

Questions remain: is the emergence of feel-good, consumerist literary culture really new? What remains of literary culture that doesn't fit into the Oprah/Booker/Book Lust mold? What about the formative effect of high school English class on literary reading? Do readers of genre fiction relate to books in a different way than devotees of the literary or faux-literary? And where does gender fit into all this (fluffy chick lit versus serious Booker winner as gendered categories)? I wish Collins had posed these questions explicitly, but as it was, I was left with plenty of food for thought.