I feel like we as a society are too quick to call something literature because everybody else calls it literature and too quick to tear something else down because no one else calls it literature.
No one can argue that Shakespeare has not written some of the greatest plays ever written in the English language. They are rightly read in high school English classrooms and have graduate courses in college designed around them. However, I feel like Shakespeare himself would be appalled at students reading his works out of a textbook, struggling with the archaic wording in an attempt to discern the 'deep' meaning. They are plays, meant to be seen, and written to be enjoyed and make the theater money. Dickens was writing for pay. Is he a great writer? Assuredly, but his lasting legacy is grounded in the fact that he was in fact a very good storyteller who wrote engaging, complex dramas set primarily in Victorian London. Literature with a capital L, the kind that gets assigned in college classes, were once very well written stories that people wrote hoping others would like and maybe get something out of, reminiscent of the Emerson quote about great philosophers having once been boys in libraries studying philosophy.

Is Sanderson on that level? is he a great writer? No, but he is a good writer with some powerful themes underlying his plots and characters. I don't understand why there are "novels", at which people tend to turn up their nose, and "Literature", over which people tend to fawn regardless of content. Why are there not simply stories, some better than others, the best of them powerful , engaging works?

Anyway that's my two cents. Sorry for the rant.