Of course you're allowed to call it literature. I was giving an argument as to why I don't think it is, in the hopes that perhaps people would read what I said and change how they think about literature in turn.

It's possible to determine aesthetic quality, but no measure is by any means accurate. However, aesthetic is absolutely present. The easiest way is to determine how things sound when spoken aloud. There's no "formula" to it. It's entirely a matter of personal taste. However, Steve Yegge is not somebody who writes for the sound of his language. He writes to express ideas. Is it worth reading him? Yes. Does his writing have aesthetic merit? No, and he doesn't care, and swombat probably doesn't either. As I first said: I didn't post that to try and be a writing nazi. It was just something stewing in my mind, and I wrote it down as a response to something small that swombat wrote. I upvoted both swombat and the story itself: this was not meant to be an assault on either.

If you don't think there's a such thing as aesthetic in writing: read Joyce. Read Nabakov. Absolutely read Beckett. All three are writers with immediately identifiable styles, and each one certainly has a powerful aesthetic about his writing. "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins." There's a coupling of ideas (light/fire, life/loins). There's the name Lolita itself, which Nabakov expands himself in the story's opening paragraph. It flows. It spikes in the beginning, stretches out in the second and third phrases. These are all things that you can discuss. Compare that to "I write a column for computer programmers called "Stevey's Blog Rants." The second is informative without any styling whatsoever. And there's nothing wrong with that. It just isn't literature.

Narnia almost certainly is better written than Harry Potter. Don't take my word for it: read both. Narnia focuses on its language much more than Harry Potter. That's not saying Rowling writes without meaning: I wrote a minor dissertation about the first line in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone once, because I thought it was interesting and because I like picking things apart. Harry Potter has moments where it sounds beautiful, but those moments are few and far between, and Rowling does resort to clichés rather often. That doesn't make Harry Potter bad: I think that it defined a generation, my generation, and that the final 200 pages of the final book move me like very few things in writing do - that despite its lack of emphasis on beautiful language.

My credentials? I write. I've written since the sixth grade. I've gone to programs where I learn how to write. As such, I've developed informed opinions on things. My opinions are better than many people's opinions, because I've taken time to think about what I mean when I say things about literature. Most people don't think about how they define the term. I do. Therefore, I already know what I think about this.

I'm certain other people have other opinions, but they haven't responded yet. Why would you call Yegge's article literature, if you do? We could talk about that, and chances are both of us would learn something new in the process. I don't want to dictate literature and its definition: I only wanted to start a discussion.