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Originally Posted by onesnowyowl
You're comparing apples and oranges. Chinua Achebe's novel, "Things Fall Apart" is brilliant for what it is. Attempting to compare it to "Pride and Prejudice" and "Hamlet" is doing "Things Fall Apart" a great disservice, as all of those works are the product of their time and place. "Things Fall Apart" is a good commentary on the consequences of colonialism. Consider that it was published in 1958.
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That is precisely the sort of relativism I am rejecting. There are no novels that are immune to (or simply should not undergo) comparisons to the classics. It is, of course, obvious that the circumstances surrounding "Things Fall Apart" are different than those of Shakespeare, eg. But that consideration is not relevant to determining its value as literature. While it is admittedly difficult to state precisely what makes for a great novel, the circumstances surrounding the writing and publication of a particular book are not relevent considerations: African literature should not be accepted into the canon through what essentially amounts of affirmative action - books and books and some are better than others.
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Originally Posted by onesnowyowl
We're still discovering works that are worthwhile by women and people of color. While some of them aren't brilliant works of literature ala Shakespeare, something like Mary Rowlandson gives us a further understanding of what it was like to be there then, and to be a woman in the time she lived. The same applies to works by people of color: reading Frederick Douglass' biography lets us see the world from his eyes. To me, that's what I love about literature: the ability to step into someone else's shoes. And I like to step into shoes that don't always belong to white males.
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One component of literature is the opportunity to step into someone else's shoes. However, this characteristic alone does not a great novel make.
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The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. ~John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
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