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From the ridiculous to the sublime….
Trevor Butterworth, a writer for Forbes, has an article out today called “The Power of Twilight”. The last portion of it just blew me away. Take a look:
But when Twilight can rival and supplant Jane Austen on the nightstand of professional, highly educated women, something more than a reshaping of a genre appears to be at work. The saga seems to have distilled the formative anxieties and agonies of womanhood into a meta-narrative to accompany the real, and often less fantastic, narrative yearning of life.
It is this tension that makes the phenomenon of Twilight so powerful: It is beyond the reach of serious criticism, the “aristocratic” way of reading advocated by that indisputably homme sérieux, Roland Barthes and the “difficulty” prized by the aristocratic T.S. Eliot as the hallmark of a genuine literary experience. And yet Twilight is being endlessly, critically dissected and discussed by those who read it and watch its cinematic rendition. It may be aimed at young adults, and it may have found a mass market audience, but that gives it a force high art seems to no longer possess. One can only wonder how the Farsi version will be read in Tehran.
This all makes the Twilight saga not just the first great Mormon work of literature (pace Orson Scott Card), but the first great cultural product of the 21st century. It’s a fusion of word and film that has taken the interior life of a teenage girl, and a small town on the Western edge of the United States, and placed them at the center of the world.
High praise for our beloved story!
Do you think Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga is the “first great cultural product of the 21st century”?
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