Please bear with me while I finish posting my school stuff...just want to keep safe (hmm...I wonder if "safe" and li.ru can be used in one sentence?) all the "creations" that have caused me so much headache during last 4 months in case something happens to my computer.

We’ve spent a lot of time this session reading pieces that are considered classic LITERATURE. Going beyond the boundaries of our textbook, what example from popular culture would you point to as literary? (It might be a popular novel, a movie, a TV show, a music album, etc.) What leads you to choose this work as something that rises above other examples of popular culture to be truly outstanding?

There are hardly many people out there who would not agree that today’s world is overabundant with information. Every single day, at any time of day and night, one can turn on a computer and learn about the latest news, gossip, music albums, or a new novel that has popped out of nowhere on the bestseller list. The creators and distributors of this information, however, seem to have stopped caring a while ago whether the material printed, recorded on video, or CD is worth paper, tape, and discs wasted. A significant number of contemporary books, for example, are written in a great hurry, which, especially in case with projects that require extensive research or deal with technical subjects, leads to numerous mistakes, hundreds of which get later listed on the errata pages of the creators of these books. Nevertheless, few publishers and authors seem to remember or care that writing a book should not take as little time as reading it: 432 pages in three months – this is pretty much the only “rogue” thing about one of the latest bestselling authors.

The rant above is not, however, to say that no decent books get published today. There are hundreds of works by many authors that offer interesting plots and good writing. But, even taking this into consideration, it is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine that any of these books will ever be able to replace or even to join the ranks of classics of the previous centuries. This has to do with the fact that testing boundaries of readers’ imagination is the main and only concern of the majority of popular contemporary authors (more vampires, anyone?). Appealing to people’s emotions in not a cheap tear jerking way, challenging the society and its norms by raising meaningful questions, and creating characters that are so complete that they almost jump off the pages seems to be a thing of a distant past. Taking into consideration how different the definitions of “pop culture” and “literature” are, it seems that these words simply cannot be used in one sentence without creating an oxymoron. More often than not, a work of literature is not what crowds the top spots of bestseller lists; it is something that is reserved for a selected group of people who look beyond bright covers and smart add campaigns; it something that cannot and should not be described in a 140 words tweet.