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Can The Hunger Games be considered as literature?


marauder7

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So I figured I'd take a break from reviewing for History by doing some critical thinking... LOL. WARNING, some boring ass airy fairy grade A philosophized bullsh*t headed your way. I decided to think and ponder on the question and just type whatever came out without really editing a lot, so this is probably going to read very incoherently and maybe even contradictorily.

Anyway, personally I have a very broad definition of literature. The definition of literature I subscribe to is that literature is a compilation of text that defamiliarizes us from the mundane or adds meaning to it. Based on that really vague definition I just gave, yes I consider the Hunger Games to be literature. I came to this conclusion by thinking of two questions.

1) Does the Hunger Games have literary value?

2) Does something need literary value to be considered literature?

1) I think if there is any "literary value" in the Hunger Games, it would stem from the fact that it is based on an extremely brutal, grim and dark premise that is normally based in adult fiction, but is packaged and framed in such a way that it becomes palatable to children (hence, its designation as a children's book in many websites and bookstores)

2) Even if you think this is utter BS because the part of me that was watching the Blade movies as a 7 year old totally thinks so, I don't think it matters because I believe that literature unintuitively doesn't need to have literary value to be considered literature. This because literature is a social construct. Honestly, most of the books that we say have "literary value" only have said "literary value" because our culture/society has arbitrarily assigned a level of value to those works. That's completely tautological, but that's just how things work around here (like how we say that those colored pieces of money are equivalent in value to cool things like laptops and video games because we somehow tie that paper to some gold sitting in some vault somewhere which for some reason is valuable). "Literary value" is so vague and loosely defined because it doesn't truly exist. Just like how there really isn't such a thing as literature in the natural world, but because we believe in literature, we have the freedom to arbitrarily define what literature is. Thus, the Hunger Games is literature. Because according to me, it is. At the same time, it isn't literature if you don't think so.

I'll just stop procrastinating now and go back to studying haha...

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Am I the only one who sees this question as ridiculous..? How can a wholly new definition of literature suddenly have come into effect since books like Twilight and The Hunger Games were published? Yeah, they aren't examples of fine literature, or of well-written literature necessarily (though I thought the Hunger Games was fairly well structured in a cliché kinda way), but fundamentally they are still literature. They were written, by an author, to be read by other people - whatever the intention of the book (to sell, to persuade, to enlighten), I'd class anything that falls under that category as literature.

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Yeah the definition of literature is slightly sketchy, but I think when people in this thread mean "literature" they classic literature, books that will transcend generations, cultures, languages. Simply as yourself is the piece under consideration well written enough not only to be popular, but can it withstand time and stay popular for many years to come. In that case I don;t think the hunger Games will, decently well written, but nothing revolutionary, a new skin on an old tale, come a few decades a new more popular skin will cloak the same plot.

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I tried to read Hunger Games but it's just not my cup of tea, so I'd probably biased if I was to give my opinion on your question.

I'm wondering though what English teachers would say about Neil Gaiman's American Gods. That's the top of creativity a writer can put into words.

I wanted to write my EE on how Gaiman and Dan Brown portray the iconoclasm of religion in American Gods or either the da Vinci code or Angels and Demons but did History instead :( It would have been very interesting piece to write but difficult too. Then again I wanted to compare the presentation of vampires in Dracula and Interview with the Vampire too. I had so many good ideas for English EEs but chickened out and did History. bleurgh. You could potentially do a nice comparison between 1984 and Hunger Games and look at totalitarianism's presentation in the novels.

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What counts as literature? I define literature as creative writing with some sort of artistic value so I would say that The Hunger Games is a piece of literature--whether or not it has long-lasting influence on society or the literary world.

My teacher thinks it has some literary qualities, but argued convincingly that it is not literature with a capital L as she put it. It has merit, and is appropriate for study in lower classes, but not at all appropriate for the IB. One student in our class wanted to do her EE on it, and there was a long debate. Finally it was sort of agreed she could only do it if she pairs it with another dystopian novel. We were all quite divided on the topic, but as she pointed out, we don't analyse and read Holes either. I loved Holes! So I guess while it has some literary qualities, it is not IB appropriate.

Actually, my school studies (or at least they used to study) Holes, although not in the IB program.

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