Originally Posted by
islandclimber
The content is less impressive because language has changed? Because there are abbreviations, slang, and swearing? How much of the modern literary canon have you read? It seems little from this statement.
Regardless of what you have read, a writer of the earlier period in question, Joyce: is his prose less impressive because Ulysses is full of colloquialisms? Because Finnegan's Wake is likely incomprehensible to the average reader? Laurence Sterne and Rabelais wrote bawdy masterpieces of essentially vulgar toilet humour in this more impressive past...
Have you read Pynchon, DFW, Nabokov, Krasznahorkai, Nądas, Burroughs, McElroy, Carter, Beckett, Gass, Gaddis, Barnes,Barth, Vollmann, Kirino, Perec, Bolano, Ducornet, Ackers, Burgess, Murakami, Smith, Federmen, Queneau, Delillo, Roth, Ballard, Borges, Llosa, etc etc etc? If not, how can you qualify such a statement about content being less impressive?