Thread by @AlexandraErin

Counterpoint: You will never have a "full understanding" of anything, much less something as broad, amorphous, and multifaceted as a genre.

Prioritizing what aspects of what parts of the genre you will seek to understand is also your finite coin to spend however you like.

https://twitter.com/BookishCauldron/status/1495309133553311747

Also, classics are classics for several reasons, only one of which is, sometimes, "This is pretty good."

A far more prevalent reason that classics are classics is generations of dingdongs going, "You gotta to read this. You just gotta."

https://twitter.com/BookishCauldron/status/1495309135709196290

And several of the reasons are racism.

You know what I've noticed? Romance Twitter is never, as a whole, going "You can't claim to understand romance if you don't read The Canon. You have to go back to the roots to understand what we're doing here today."

They just ask you to read what they're doing today. Or not!

And maybe that's just setting the bar low because asking people to read A Single Modern Romance before elaborately sharing their opinions about "bodice-rippers" and whatnot is received as though they had asked for the sun and the moon and the sky.

Anyway, if you look past the cultural biases and assume a level playing field, then the main factors that make a work "a classic in the field", for any field, are going to be happenstance and inertia.

I mean, I guess maybe the work in question had to be some minimum level of Good Enough to be in a position to be noticed at the right time by the right people and then have both work and reputation survive till today for us to call it a classic.

But there was never a moment when somebody lined up all the works of an age and weighed them objectively on their merits, determining "These are the best. These are the ones we're sending to the next seventeen generations of English-language school children."

There were a lot of little moments where some people, people who were definitely possessed of cultural biases, lined up some of the works that were in front of them at the moment and judged them on a variety of criteria, including but not limited to (subjective) quality.

And all of those moments plus a ton of random chance, coincidence, and still more cultural biases add up to what works survive today with a surviving reputation to make them "classics".

I'm not trying to minimize the racism, sexism, classism, or other biases inherent in the idea of The Western Canon, in any genre of literature. Those things exist and they matter.

But separate from and in addition to them? It's a crapshoot. It's mostly happenstance and inertia.

Hardest of hard disagrees. It might be wise for someone who wishes to write military sci-fi in a specifically post-Heinlein mode to read Heinlein, but it's a richer literary world if there are no "every writer has read this one" foundational texts.

https://twitter.com/sdowney/status/1495509683200827396

Like, if you want to write something in conscious conversation with Heinlein, then read Heinlein. That's as basic as if you are going to position your book as a rebuttal to modern romance, read some modern romance first.

(And yet...)

And if you're writing something that's *not* in conscious conversation with Heinlein but involves themes that will make people who have read Heinlein read it in conversation with him... I mean, maybe that will affect how they read it? But that's neither inherently good nor bad.