Weblog 4

A couple people today brought up the fact that Twain wrote Fennimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses after Cooper had already died and was not able to offend himself, especially when some of the claims Twain made about his stories were stretching the truth pretty far. I feel like this reflects more on Twain as a person than it does on Cooper as a writer. Though I have liked Twain since beginning this class (the only other piece of his work I’ve read prior to English 481 was A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court and I really didn’t like it too terribly much) this latest one was my least favorite. That isn’t to say that it wasn’t funny, because I was laughing as hard as I could at certain parts. I just don’t connect much with someone who takes to critiquing other people’s work like Twain did in Fennimore Cooper. Dr. Campbell acknowledged in class that no one approached any of Twains pieces as harshly as he did Coopers, so maybe he didn’t know what it would feel like. I’m sure there are people who do not feel fondly about Twain, but they are not picking his writing apart and masking it under humor.
I feel at some point the war between these ‘labels’ of literature, like the war between realism and romanticism, takes away from the art. I’m not so sure how important it is to try and classify a piece a literature or to analyze what makes it fit under which genre or something James wrote is better than something Hawthorne wrote. At some point, maybe these critics were paying to much attention to fighting about the ‘isms’ and not enough time just letting people chose what they like to read without insulting the writers.