Book of the Month

The Book of the month club initiated large scale debate over literary authority, cultural capital, and literary value. The movement was warned by critics as the usurpment of the public sphere through the massification of critical capital, previously held by the individual. It was believed that masses were coerced into submitting to the authority of a specialised few, who judged the value texts and then distributed them under the pretence of being ‘valuable’. This ‘value’ was dictated by a texts ability to transcend personal taste, meaning that if a majority embraced a certain work, it was because the work held some form of intrinsic rightness that transcended personal values. To me the suggestion here seems to be that value can be seen as objective. In other words texts contain a truth and value independent of subjective values. However it seems misguided to think then, based on the idea of intrinsic truth, that people on any scale can assign and judge any texts to be valuable or true. If a majority find a specific work valuable because of its intrinsic value, then the assumption is that the minorities’ reaction to the text is just incorrect. But surely the same could then be said in the other direction, because the opinions of the people exist independently of a texts value. Putting this aside, the issue of authority is also raised. In a way, mass distribution of texts is an illusion of freedom. It is fair to say that a reader has the right to be highly critical of any text, to form their own opinions in infinite different ways, so in this way receiving a book and actively engaging in it is still an exercise of free will. However in the case of mass distribution, that text has been chosen for us, a limit has already been placed upon us as readers. When the text is distributed to us under the pretence of being the ‘best’, then already that has helped to shape an opinion. So our free response is not so free, in that the sphere in which we can act has already been decided.