Word: opalized
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...will not be re-released, and that Viswanathan’s two-book contract has been cancelled. In a statement released today, the publisher of Little, Brown, and Company, Michael Pietsch ’78, said: "Little, Brown and Company will not be publishing a revised edition of `How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life' by Kaavya Viswanathan, nor will we publish the second book under contract.” The Crimson reported late last month that Viswanathan’s novel contained striking similarities to two earlier books by Megan F. McCafferty. The New York...
...Opal Mehta” may very well be inauthentic, literarily-bankrupt, profit-driven pop-culture fluff. But before we begin smugly and self-righteously to debate which circle of hell Viswanathan should be cast into for her transgression (the eighth), I ask that we pause for a moment and empathize with our embattled classmate. It should not be very difficult to do so if we honestly consider our own intellectual and cultural position. As a community, Harvard is more than complicit in the production of inauthentic chick lit, that regrettably pervasive genre of packaged pop culture easily digested by teenage...
Certainly “Opal Mehta” is the product and responsibility of a single individual (well, maybe not single...), but we are all implicated in its creation. We collectively form a system which prizes ambition and performance and calls these things superiority. When the publication of “Opal Mehta” first became known, the $500,000 advance dominated conversation and stimulated admiration and jealousy. The fact that the novel is unabashed chick lit inspired, at most, smiling pseudo-mockery. Harvard turned an indulging blind eye on bad literature and saw only an example of precocious...
...return to my original question: Do we dare denounce Opal Mehta? The answer must be yes. Not a resounding self-righteous yes, for we are not much superior to what we would condemn. Our denunciation must instead arise out of our own embarrassment; it must be in part a self-condemnation and a recognition that we are now not so much a community of intellectuals but accomplices to a literary and cultural travesty. Right now, Opal Mehta is the face of Harvard, and rightfully so. In rejecting that image, we promise to reinvent ourselves...
...transferred here from another university because I recognized Harvard as the source of our society’s intellectual leadership. Now, inside these walls, I do not think that I was wrong: The world does look to us. But right now, we are not leading. Only by rejecting Opal Mehta and all that it represents can we exert our power and assume our intellectual responsibility...