Bestsellers to Blockbusters:
Life of Pi and the Rise of Popular Literary Culture
In his book Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture, Jim Collins, as the title suggests, examines how literature has changed from a private, print-based experience, to a social experience open to a much wider audience. He argues that infrastructural changes (such as superstores, blockbuster film adaptations, and television book clubs) and cultural changes (such as the devaluation of traditional taste brokers) have resulted in a flourishing reading public comprised of more amateur readers. Indeed, Collins suggests that “the notion that refined taste, or the information needed to enjoy sophisticated cultural pleasures, is now …show more content…
As Florence Stratton says, Life of Pi is “organized around a philosophical debate about the modern world’s privileging of reason over imagination, science over religion, materialism over idealism, fact over fiction or story” (6). At every point in Pi’s journey, he needs both knowledge and hope to survive, and Pi acquires them mostly from stories, literature, and reading. In the first part of the book, Pi talks about his childhood growing up in a zoo. “It was paradise on earth,” he says (14), “designed and run according to the most modern, biologically sound principles” (12). This Eden, built according to science, allows Pi to develop knowledge of animal behaviour, in particular animal habitats and social hierarchies, which he uses to survive 227 days on the lifeboat with Richard Parker, the tiger. While this knowledge is scientific, at this stage in his life Pi has not formally studied zoology. His information must come from other sources, such as his father the zookeeper and the “workday talk of running a zoo” (10). The effect of having Pi narrate the novel in first person emphasises oral storytelling, and Pi’s references to things people “commonly say in the trade” and “the zoo business” (29; 89) suggest this knowledge is passed through discussion (indeed, this is how the author, and the reader, encounter it). In particular, Pi’s anecdotes about escaped animals seem like the sorts of stories passed through word of mouth and journalism. But adrift on the lifeboat, Pi must eat and drink too. This further life-saving knowledge comes from the survival manual, which has information on what types of fish avoid, weather to watch out for, and staying sheltered. It has instructions for fishing and describes how to catch and kill turtles (166-7, 201). The practical knowledge
Life of Pi and the Rise of Popular Literary Culture
In his book Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture, Jim Collins, as the title suggests, examines how literature has changed from a private, print-based experience, to a social experience open to a much wider audience. He argues that infrastructural changes (such as superstores, blockbuster film adaptations, and television book clubs) and cultural changes (such as the devaluation of traditional taste brokers) have resulted in a flourishing reading public comprised of more amateur readers. Indeed, Collins suggests that “the notion that refined taste, or the information needed to enjoy sophisticated cultural pleasures, is now …show more content…
As Florence Stratton says, Life of Pi is “organized around a philosophical debate about the modern world’s privileging of reason over imagination, science over religion, materialism over idealism, fact over fiction or story” (6). At every point in Pi’s journey, he needs both knowledge and hope to survive, and Pi acquires them mostly from stories, literature, and reading. In the first part of the book, Pi talks about his childhood growing up in a zoo. “It was paradise on earth,” he says (14), “designed and run according to the most modern, biologically sound principles” (12). This Eden, built according to science, allows Pi to develop knowledge of animal behaviour, in particular animal habitats and social hierarchies, which he uses to survive 227 days on the lifeboat with Richard Parker, the tiger. While this knowledge is scientific, at this stage in his life Pi has not formally studied zoology. His information must come from other sources, such as his father the zookeeper and the “workday talk of running a zoo” (10). The effect of having Pi narrate the novel in first person emphasises oral storytelling, and Pi’s references to things people “commonly say in the trade” and “the zoo business” (29; 89) suggest this knowledge is passed through discussion (indeed, this is how the author, and the reader, encounter it). In particular, Pi’s anecdotes about escaped animals seem like the sorts of stories passed through word of mouth and journalism. But adrift on the lifeboat, Pi must eat and drink too. This further life-saving knowledge comes from the survival manual, which has information on what types of fish avoid, weather to watch out for, and staying sheltered. It has instructions for fishing and describes how to catch and kill turtles (166-7, 201). The practical knowledge