Lip Lit: When Twilight is on your Uni reading list…
Without wanting to be presumptuous or arrogant, when I first received my reading list for a university subject I’ll be undertaking this coming semester, Popular Fiction, there were many choices I disagreed with. I understood the unit aims to provide a broad examination of various types of popular fiction throughout different time periods, but I felt as though if nobody I knew had heard of a text or its author, including myself, it probably wasn’t as popular as imagined. Personal gripes about the inclusions and exclusions of “popular fiction” put aside, I was apprehensive about a lot of the texts by sheer virtue of the fact that they would be a pain in my ass.
Lord of the Rings? Nice knowing you, holidays. (At least this is something I’ve always intended to get around to reading on my own time.) Mills and Boon? Nice knowing you, self-respect and bookstore street cred. (At least this will make for fantastic material as we perform dramatic readings in the uni bar after class).
Nothing, though, could prepare me for seeing Twilight sitting in that list. I’d heard rumours there was a literature unit at my university that studied Twilight, but I suppose I just relegated that information to the back of my mind where all other Twilight-related nuggets of information are stored. So maybe I shouldn’t have been so surprised, it’s just you never think these things are going to happen to you.
As someone who tentatively plans on one day teaching literature myself, the prospect fills me with dread on another level. Will I be forced to give a lecture one day about this pivotal piece of Pop, powerpoint included? Will I be judged as I find myself judging my own lecturers? Will I find myself having to answer to my own question, namely – If we’re talking about the cult-like power of fiction and its affect on modern society, surely Harry Potter is a more…humane expenditure of everyone’s time?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not one for mindlessly knocking things without trying them. I have actually read the Twilight series, years ago. I actually sort of enjoyed the first one, in the way you find yourself watching ten minutes of a crappy tv show when nothing else is on and become somewhat invested in the storyline, and then realise two months later that you’ve just somehow followed half of series without realising it.
It’s just that I feel as though we perhaps have better things to be doing with our time as university students of literature than studying a book that has zero literary merit and espouses abusive relationships, sexism, worthless female leads with singular and dubious defining character traits (such as “clumsiness”) that are later stripped of them altogether, and sticks a glittery “it’s all okay because it’s totally romantic” sticker on top of the whole shebang.
That being said, I gather the point of the course is to provide some sort of context and explanation for the way a wide range of texts can influence and become significant parts of our culture. The subject itself sounds interesting and to prematurely decide I know better than those educating me would be a discredit to both of us. At this stage I can only wait and see. Twilight is assigned first out of the set readings and I can’t help but suspect that this is an attempt by the unit co-ordinator to get it out of the way immediately. It won’t be long, then, until I emerge from that lecture hall, possibly defeated, probably weary. Will I have learnt something after all? Will there be a communal burning of everyone’s texts afterwards? Only time will tell.
I can kind of understand if analysing Twilight in terms of pop culture and seeing how it has functioned as a fad, like many fads have affected a demographic sociologically. In terms of studying the text for its ‘literary merit’? That’s hilarious 😀