HL - A Dangerous Question

It is a little risky to ask you to voice your opinion about whether or not a play is a great work of literature. The reason I am doing it with Our Town is because it is one of the few readings we do this year that we have the luxury of evaluating this way. The only way to determine for certain if a writing is literature is to see if it survives the test of time. I would never ask you whether The Iliad should be considered literature, because generations of scholars have decided that it was. If you tell me that you read it and you do not consider it a great work, then I would say that you are not putting enough effort into understanding the greatness of it.

With Our Town, the case is a little different. It was written in the middle of the last century, so it has not stood the test of time. Contemporary literary critics are divided as to whether it is a great work or not. It is not like The Old Man and the Sea, which seems definitely to be on its way to being an accepted book in the Western Canon.

If you decide that Our Town is a great work of literature, you have to realize that it is great a new way. Aristotle would never see a book about common people leading ordinary lives as a great work. There are those who see Our Town as introducing a new, American standard of greatness. The question really is, do you accept this assessment or not?