Why we do not have giant literary writers today?

[blazeofglory]

Literature demands of us devotion and perseverance. That is why we cannot be great writers when we are too much with the world simultaneously. We have to part with everything else and corner ourselves to concentrate on literary persuasions if we want to emerge as a legendary figure. Shakespeare, Milton, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Wordsworth, to name a few had little time for pursuing other goals in life. They gloried in writing and the world recognized their creativity immensely.

Today when it comes to writing it does not get preference. There are other gains I choose to cash in on. Glamors like wealth creation, romancing, socialization, career building, family, position come first. Money seconds writing. Writers are not trendsetters or manufacturers of great social and human values as they were half a century ago.

Writing is a terminus destination and least prioritized and never comes first on list of agendas. While other things busy me so much and I cannot profit from writing though it has not ceased romanticizing us

Passion is great in me no doubt for literary persuasions and the thrill is undoubtedly incomparable; yet I am too much with worldly affairs. I have a profession that assures me of higher living standards, greater social recognitions, wealth and professional gratifications and I cannot choose writing as a chosen profession since it cannot feed me and settle me in family or in society or cannot enhance my personal development though in the long term I can grow and glow.

The writing career is not a promising destination and there are more possibilities of failures and to compete with or surpass both the few living writers or equal the gloried past writers is a herculean task. Life is too short for all these pursuits and of course I cannot gratify in all these domains at the same time.

Today we live in a world of information and the Internet connects us with the rest of the world. It lays before us so many other quick fixes or instant gains

That is why I have little time for writing. I was a dreamer and am still one and I look at the world with wonder and things boil within me and when they are brimful they want outflows through creative means - writings and yet I am compelled to defer the dreams.

I think the Great Writer is dead.

[dfloyd]

however, the first reason for not having great writers is that we don't have great readers. You must first read extensively before you learn to write. Even relatively uneducated men such as Hemingway were great readers. Many do not read because their friends and contemporaries do not read. People who watch too much tv or talk extensively on cell phones usually don't read much.

People are always amazed when I tell them I haven't watched tv for more ten years except for some made-from-tv (Masterpiece Theatre) dvds.

[blazeofglory]

however, the first reason for not having great writers is that we don't have great readers. You must first read extensively before you learn to write. Even relatively uneducated men such as Hemingway were great readers. Many do not read because their friends and contemporaries do not read. People who watch too much tv or talk extensively on cell phones usually don't read much.

People are always amazed when I tell them I haven't watched tv for more ten years except for some made-from-tv (Masterpiece Theatre) dvds.

You are right but not to watch TVs for ten years is simply unthinkable in my case.While I enjoy reading great works if I have time enough yet not reading newspapers, magazines and journals are something I find unsound ideas since things happen so fast and if our works cannot reflect our social, economic and political events, happenings make us regressive. I always want to be contemporaneous and do not want to mirror through my writings what my ancestors did and I want to express the goings-on in my society and around the world. That is why as a writer I cannot afford to be un-contemporary.

Of course great poems like Wordsworth's Shelley are time honored yet if I write like them I will find no readers to read them.

Therefore I engage in watching TVs, Soap operas, serials, commercials,specials and the like together with my fellow beings. I read great classics to hone my writing skills and to build vocabulary but for themes and materials I look to my own society and epoch.

[arrytus]

Even relatively uneducated men such as Hemingway were great readers.

Didn't Hemingway study provisionally under his father to become a doctor? Didn't he then go to school for journalism and edit his school newspaper? Didn't he speak 5 languages? I'm not the biggest Hemingway fan but the guy was educated. Not Ezra Pound/T.S. Eliot educated but he did apply himself to his studies until his early twenties.

[blazeofglory]

There are of course many selfmade or self studied writers and though they lacked university degrees they studied hungrily

[mortalterror]

I think we do alright even without these so called giants. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8W4DEMUSeM

1996 Infinite Jest by William Foster Wallace
1992 The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Jose Saramago
1991 Angels in America by Tony Kushner
1990 Omeros by Derek Walcott
1987 Beloved by Toni Morrison
1985 Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
1985 The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
1981 Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
1980 The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
1979 If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino
1975 Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror by John Ashberry
1974 The Envoy of Mr. Cogito by Zbigniew Herbert
1973 The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
1973 The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
1970 The Temple of Dawn by Yukio Mishima
1969 Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
1969 Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
1967 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
1966 The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
1966 Death of a Naturalist by Seamus Heaney
1965 The Green House by Mario Vargas Llosa
1964 The Homecoming by Harold Pinter
1963 Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar
1962 Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee
1962 The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes
1961 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
1961 A House For Mr Biswas by V.S. Naipaul
1959 The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass
1958 The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
1957 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
1957 On the Road by Jack Kerouac
1957 Mihyar of Damascus: His Songs by Adonis
1956 Seize the Day by Saul Bellow
1956 Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill
1956 The Devil to Pay in the Backlands by Joao Guimaraes Rosa
1955 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
1955 The Emperor of Ice Cream by Wallace Stevens
1955 Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo
1954 Sunstone by Octavio Paz
1954 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
1953 Gimpel, the Fool by Isaac Bashevis Singer
1953 Waiting For Godot by Samuel Beckett
1952 The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
1952 The Shield of Achilles by W.H. Auden
1952 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
1952 The Financial Expert by R.K. Narayan
1951 Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas
1951 The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
1951 Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar
1950 Canto General by Pablo Neruda
1950 The Bald Soprano by Eugene Ionesco
1949 1984 by George Orwell
1949 Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
1948 The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki
1948 The Caucasian Chalk Circle by Bertolt Brecht
1948 A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
1948 Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata
1948 Death Fugue by Paul Celan
1947 Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
1945 Rescue by Czeslaw Milosz
1944 No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre
1944 Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
1944 The Dwarf by Par Lagerkvist
1942 The Stranger by Albert Camus
1942 Antigone by Jean Anouilh
1940 Requiem by Anna Akhmatova
1939 The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
1938 The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel by Nikos Kazantzakis
1937 Out of Africa by Isak Dineson
1934 Message by Fernando Pessoa
1933 Man's Fate by Andre Malraux
1932 Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine
1932 The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil
1929 The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
1928 Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence
1928 Gypsy Ballads by Federico Garcia Lorca
1927 Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse
1926 Capital of Pain by Paul Eluard
1925 Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
1925 The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
1925 Cuttlefish Bones by Eugenio Montale
1924 The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
1924 Anabase by Saint-John Perse
1923 The True Story of Ah Q by Lu Xun
1923 The Prophet by Khalil Gibran
1923 Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo
1922 The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot
1922 In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
1922 In a Grove by Ryunosuke Akutagawa
1922 Duino Elegies by Ranier Maria Rilke
1921 Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello
1920 Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
1920 Hugh Selwyn Mauberley by Ezra Pound
1919 The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats
1918 Ulysses by James Joyce
1918 The Black Heralds by Cesar Vallejo
1917 The Young Fate by Paul Valery
1915 The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
1915 The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford
1915 Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
1914 Kokoro by Natsume Soseki
1914 Mending Wall by Robert Frost
1913 Alcohol by Guillaume Apollinaire
1911 Ithaca by Constantine P. Cavafy
1910 Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore
1910 Peruvian Traditions by Ricardo Palma
1907 The Ghost Sonata by August Strindberg
1906 Spring Awakening by Frank Wedekind
1905 Songs of Life and Hope by Ruben Dario
1904 The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov
1903 Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw
1903 The Call of the Wild by Jack London
1903 The Ambassadors by Henry James
1902 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
1902 The Immoralist by Andre Gide
1902 The Lower Depths by Maxim Gorky
1902 The Rain in the Pinewood by Gabriele D'Annunzio
1901 Kim by Rudyard Kipling
1900 La Ronde by Arthur Schnitzler

I'm probably leaving a lot of the more recent guys off, because contemporary lit isn't really my thing. In the next two decades, I'm expecting to hear about a few major twentieth century authors that went unnoticed at the time because they were in some quiet backwater, the way Dostoyevski and Tolstoy were, at least for people in the states. Asia, Africa, and the Middle East is my guess.

I'm sure there are major writers, major artists, and major musicians out there, since we have major filmmaking talents: Scorsese, Zhang, and television has never been as good: Sopranos, The Wire, The Best of Youth, Band of Brothers, Deadwood, Mad Men, Brideshead Revisited. I just don't know where to look for them.

[JCamilo]

And unlike said, Shakespeare had quite a busy life besides writting, he was a sucessful busines men, Dostoievisky worked a lot out of writting, editing newspaper and having political life... Giants like Chekhov would claim medicine was his wife, literature his mistress because his bigger dedication to the first one, Goethe did a hundred things besides writting... the list is giantic, no single writter was not dedicated only to literature or had no distractions from his mundane life.

[kiki1982]

Otherwise, literature would be pretty boring. No life experience, is no inspiration, is dull stories.

[Emil Miller]

Otherwise, literature would be pretty boring. No life experience, is no inspiration, is dull stories.

I think this is true. If we read biographies of writers we can often see how their own experiences have been used in their writing. I have just completed my third novel and many of the characters and locations mentioned are based on people I have known and places I have visited. I don't think I could have written the books without that experience.

[stlukesguild]

Literature demands of us devotion and perseverance. That is why we cannot be great writers when we are too much with the world simultaneously. We have to part with everything else and corner ourselves to concentrate on literary persuasions if we want to emerge as a legendary figure. Shakespeare, Milton, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Wordsworth, to name a few had little time for pursuing other goals in life. They gloried in writing and the world recognized their creativity immensely.

Today when it comes to writing it does not get preference. There are other gains I choose to cash in on. Glamors like wealth creation, romancing, socialization, career building, family, position come first. Money seconds writing. Writers are not trendsetters or manufacturers of great social and human values as they were half a century ago.

Nonsense. Shakespeare most certainly wrote for fame and fortune... and was well compensated. His attention must have been divided between a family far removed, the demands of his acting profession and maintaining a theatrical troupe, his financial investments, as well as his writing. As great of a writer as he was, almost no one would have thought of him as equal to Dante or Homer or Virgil during his own lifetime. No one living at the time spoke of the "age of Shakespeare".

Less than 100 years after the fact we already accept the idea that Proust, T.S. Eliot, Kafka, J.L. Borges and several other writers almost certainly deserve to be mentioned along side the greatest writers of the past. Undoubtedly, we have such writers walking amongst us today... but the closer an artist is to us, the less consensus there is as to their worth for the simple reason that there has not yet been enough time for their vocabulary... that which they bring to the dialog which is new and challenging... to be absorbed. Just off the top of my head I suspect Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, Gunter Grass, Jose Saramago, Alejo Carpentier, Mario Vargas Llosa, Cormac McCarthy, Yves Bonnefoy, Umberto Eco, Anne Carson, Seamus Heaney, Philip Roth, and any number of other writers may actually be among the voices of our time that will survive.

[Mr.lucifer]

Speaking of shakespeare, wasn't he criticized as being a mere popular dramatist during his lifetime? StLukesguild is on the nail about shakespeare writing for money. His historical plays are great on their own but are inaccurate and had romanticized potrayal sof the british kings.

Macbeth being a prime example, a great story no doubt, but exaggerated how bad of a king the real macbeth was and glorified banquo. All this because he wrote it from King James. But who can blame for wanting good pay? He didn't sacrifice quality for cash and its simply human to want to earn a fortune for your hard work.

[MystyrMystyry]

That's perhaps what the Booker is - and various other prizes are - for: not just to draw attention to the winner, but all contenders

It's good to keep informed of who's who on the current (alive) scene -
read some work of the nominations this year and twenty years past, and discover why they were/are praised


(And then come back to Litnet and tell us all about it ;) )

[JCamilo]

Speaking of shakespeare, wasn't he criticized as being a mere popular dramatist during his lifetime? StLukesguild is on the nail about shakespeare writing for money. His historical plays are great on their own but are inaccurate and had romanticized potrayal sof the british kings.


Yes, he was. Albeit, a failure of this thread is the romantization of past writers lifes. The status of great writer was not so easily to achive neither was so important. Shakespeare himself was aware of that, drama was his "work", poetry his "art". Obviously, both are differently, but the mundane world certainly didnt gave him enough freedom to be dedicated exclusively to art. Even because until XVIII, an artist is a work, a mundane occupation, dealing with a word of application and creation.

Of all giants, Cervantes and Camoes had militar careers that even cost them small bits of their bodies, Dante's politcal life cost him a banishment, Chaucer's had to travel a bit, Ovid was banned, Villon life was quite mundane and he almost got hanged, Voltaire became rich manipulating funds and receiving money from the french crowd...

And a guy like Keats, who was poor, but wanted to dedicated to his writing only, had to live with help of his friends and this was distressful enough in his relationship to Fanny Brawne.




Macbeth being a prime example, a great story no doubt, but exaggerated how bad of a king the real macbeth was and glorified banquo. All this because he wrote it from King James. But who can blame for wanting good pay? He didn't sacrifice quality for cash and its simply human to want to earn a fortune for your hard work.

Well, it was a paid job. Shakespeare taught quite well Hollywood, how it is possible to please the powers to be and the powers that just are. Great philosophers are also under the wings of powerful people, needed them to do "their work" and the idea that a king cannt be a *****, demanding changes, attention and what else is just funny. And it was in all arts, Michelangelo Sistine and his relationship with the Pope is a prime example. He would not abandon a good client, no matter how "ambicious" he was.

Adding that our perception of today is flawed. But about 20-30 years ago we still had Borges, Becket, Nabokov, Drummond, Cortazar and a few others of true greats. 20-30 is almost nothing in Time, It is not even a generation.

[mal4mac]

Chekhov was a doctor, Tolstoy spent a lot of time running his 'farm', Dickens was a working journalist and a child factory worker(!), Dostoevsky trained as an engineer... many of the greats were not full-time writers and had "day jobs", at least at the beginning of their careers...

[kenoi]

It's a huge cultural shift to a lower set of standards, where most of today's people care very little about inner qualities, and way too much about external influences.

Contrast this to the times of old, when writers were focused on creating a work of excellence, with high standards.

I'm sure there are writers who still write for quality today, but their stories are not heard, due to this enormous cultural disorientation in the world...

I just hope that one day people get bored of seeing things that have no value, and start focusing on quality again. I hope it happens soon - the sooner, the better - before we drift even further from our values and virtues of ages.

[Mr.lucifer]

The literary stars of today will go on to become legends. José Saramago,Toni morrison, Gabriel García Márquez, Umberto Eco, and others WILL still be well regarded in the future. Besides,the literary fields in other countries have been blooming for the past century.

[kenoi]

This is relevant:


"Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day."

Ernest Hemingway

[stlukesguild]

Even because until XVIII, an artist is a work, a mundane occupation, dealing with a word of application and creation.

My guess, JCamillo, is that there are more than a few younger members who who most certainly have grabbed on to the Romantic illusions of what art is and what an artist's life is like. There are more than a few working artists... especially in the visual arts... who would gladly change places with the 18th century or 15th century artist who was seen as a mere skilled laborer. At least there was an assurance of a decent income to be earned from one's art. Certainly artists have the freedom today to create as they see fit... but the trade-off, as several others have noted, is the need for a "day job" that eats away at the time one has to actually create.

20-30 years ago we still had Borges, Becket, Nabokov, Drummond, Cortazar and a few others of true greats. 20-30 is almost nothing in Time, It is not even a generation.

Exactly.

It's a huge cultural shift to a lower set of standards, where most of today's people care very little about inner qualities, and way too much about external influences.

Nonsense! Again this sounds like the crap espoused by the stereotypical old-timers: "In the good old days things were so much better..." It's nothing more than a romanticized image of the way things never were. 95%+ of all art has always been mediocre at best, with far more truly bad art than good... let alone great. Looking at the art of the past most of us read only that which has survived... that which was the strongest and best art of the time. Any student who has majored in a given historical period such as Renaissance England or fin de siecle Paris can tell you that for each Shakespeare or Donne or Baudelaire or Mallarme there were hundreds and thousands of mediocre and even bad writers. Time has filtered these out for us... something which has not happened in contemporary art which is why it is so much more difficult to approach contemporary art. The good and the great have not been isolated from the real schlock.

I just hope that one day people get bored of seeing things that have no value, and start focusing on quality again. I hope it happens soon - the sooner, the better - before we drift even further from our values and virtues of ages.

I'm uncertain where to begin with this. Art changes over time and there are better and worse periods of creativity. Often one art will prove quite productive during a given period, while another produces little of real merit. But art does not evolve like science. Science builds upon the past qualitatively in such a way that the mere science student of today has a far greater grasp of the realities of physics or biology than the greatest scientist 500 years ago. Art also builds upon the past... but not in a qualitative manner. The art of the present is not better nor worse than the art of the past. It is merely different. It is different because the realities of the time as experienced by the artist have changed. Our reality today... living in a world of TVs, personal computers, cars, international air travel, the internet, international terrorism, space exploration, micro-robotics, modern medicine, etc... is vastly different than the experiences of an artist living 100 or 200 years ago... in spite of the fact that the artist still deals with certain never-changing realities: love, hate, sex, death, birth, envy, war, etc... You surely don't imagine that the artist can create art in the same way as he or she might have 100 or 200 years ago?

As for values and virtues? What are these values and virtues of which you speak? Do you honestly believe that the whole of the great art of the past was rooted in some idealistic notion of virtues, values, and morality? This is but the naive pedant's approach to art. Artists are individual human beings no different than anybody else. They have no monopoly upon virtue and values. They can be just as shallow, petty, and immoral as anyone else. They have one special ability... that of giving their perceptions an artistic form that is memorable and resonates with an audience over time.

Once again I'll turn to Oscar Wilde's Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray:

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.

The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.

No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.

Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless.

I highlighted a few of the comments most pertinent to this dialog. Art may indeed express values and virtues... but whose values and virtues? Do you assume that a work of art is a failure if it does not mirror your own values and virtues... your own likes and dislikes. Personally, I do not look to art to reinforce my own values, virtues, likes, dislikes, beliefs, preferences, and prejudices. I look to art as a means of communing with other highly creative individuals from different times and places who have experienced things I have never experienced and embraced things I have never embraced.

[arrytus]

Otherwise, literature would be pretty boring. No life experience, is no inspiration, is dull stories.

What a detestable state of imagination if this be inviolably true. I might point out that poetry more often than not eschews such a premise as do fairy tales. Realism is a nominal portion of literature and experience in life is overrated and to my mind a quaint modern ethos of the Mcluhanian global village. I wonder if people- just one off the top of my head for instance- like Tim O'Brien would rather not have been in the Vietnam war more than he prides himself on his experience and the books in which it culminated. But if your point is that many if not all writers find ways to work in their perspective or scenes from their lives I will agree, just not that literature would be boring without it.

[JCamilo]

Even because until XVIII, an artist is a work, a mundane occupation, dealing with a word of application and creation.

My guess, JCamillo, is that there are more than a few younger members who who most certainly have grabbed on to the Romantic illusions of what art is and what an artist's life is like. There are more than a few working artists... especially in the visual arts... who would gladly change places with the 18th century or 15th century artist who was seen as a mere skilled laborer. At least there was an assurance of a decent income to be earned from one's art. Certainly artists have the freedom today to create as they see fit... but the trade-off, as several others have noted, is the need for a "day job" that eats away at the time one has to actually create.


And we cann't even say that was really what the poets of romantic age really considered. Pampered Lords like Byron are exceptions (and even him did a lot to deal with mundane :D )... Coleridge - an elistist thinker - has a considerable amount of trouble in his life due to money lack, Blake worked much more with illustration than produced his literature and was not well seen during his time because he was "crazy", Keats had a clear ressentment from the lack of "luck" of his fate compared to the intelectual circles that he had no access, and Shelley, who was a bit more lucky, was keen enough to know very well the politics of the world and pay direct interest on that.
Even Shelley misquote (the poets are the true legislators) is not even an attempt to put poets in power of the world, but in his defense he clear separate the discuss of poetry from all other forms of discuss and is pointing to the poet access to a world of expression which was becoming apart with the industrial revolution and progressive thinking and is taking the poet back to this mundane world. Not saying poets should live apart from it to produce their work. And of course, Germans - who are most than anyone, great romantics - are building an empire with the romantic ideals. They apply everything to a pratical side...

People certainly mix Wordsworth state of isolation when you are writting to be his entire social life. Poets are the true geeks of the world!

[Mr.lucifer]

I really doubt the quality of arts has lowered. Even george orwell was complaining about how much crap there was back. For exampl,ethe movie industry hasn't gotten worse, its crap has reincarnated into different trends. Before we had action blockbusters, we had adventure serials. Before we had chick flicks, we had melodramatic romances. Before we had sex comedies, we had slapstick. Remakes have existed since the 40's, the maltese falcon was adapted to screen three times for example.

Even the junkon tv has always been there. Before we had gimmicky reality shows, we had gimmicky game shows. Before we had comedies aimed at the lowest common denominator, we still had comedies aimed at the lowest common denominator. I could go with other forms of media.

[JCamilo]

Meh, Orwell?
It is mythical the belief that society loses "quality" or short and would eventually meet their own downfall or apokalipis. The greeks had the golden, iron, silver, etc ages circles for example.

There is an obvious selection from memory that make us pick the good past momments and forget they are surrounded by mediocre momments (not even sad, just mediocre), the same occurs with society. It is self-help... Almost as if we are telling our children will suffer in a worst world. Much because most societies are conservative, they do not see what is new as good, and what is old.

[stlukesguild]

Much because most societies are conservative, they do not see what is new as good, and what is old.

Which has political ramifications as conservatives and neo-cons rush to attack anything new (immigrants from Latin America, social safety nets as exist in Europe, egalitarian funding for education, etc... and rush instead into the imagined solid, conservative values of our founding fathers... who were anything but conservative. But that's another tale... or is it? It still is a romanticized narrative of the "The Way We Were"

cue Barbara Streisand..............

[Mr.lucifer]

Much because most societies are conservative, they do not see what is new as good, and what is old.

Which has political ramifications as conservatives and neo-cons rush to attack anything new (immigrants from Latin America, social safety nets as exist in Europe, egalitarian funding for education, etc... and rush instead into the imagined solid, conservative values of our founding fathers... who were anything but conservative. But that's another tale... or is it? It still is a romanticized narrative of the "The Way We Were"

cue Barbara Streisand..............

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XV4E9VUe3JE

If we're going to say that today's literature is subpar, we might as well as say that literature has been on a downward spiral since shakespeare.

[Seasider]

Here is a list.
I know there are people in this forum who are serious scholars and critics of literature in many of the world's languages and cultures.
May I ask you to identify...without referring to Wikipedia or other reference sources, on or off line, college notes, other people's memories, only dredging your own minds and memories.... some/any of the people on this list with reference to their works and if possible to their date, life and times? And why are they in this list?

Christian Mommsen
Bjornstjerne Bjornson
Henryk Sienkiwicz
Giosue Carducci
Rudolf Euken
Paul Heyse
Gerhard Hauptmann
Carl von Heidenstam
Karl Jellerup
Henryk Pontopiddan
Jacinta Benavate
Grazia Deladda
Sigrid Undset
Erik Karlfeldt
Frans Sillanpaa
Roger Martin du Gard.

Chevalier d'Honneur of OLN for the winner

[cyberbob]

Nostalgia has nothing to do with being conservative or liberal.

"Social safety nets" were opposed by Classical Liberals like Ludwig Von Mises and Milton Friedman.

And "egalitarian funding of education" has been present in the U.S. since the Massachusettes Bay colony.

It's only been in this century that limited government views have been called conservative, which they're not.

And I don't think immigration reform is xenophobic but about national security. I'm Mexican American and live in a border town and have Mexican relatives who take advantage of birthright citizenship by crossing to give birth and then going back so their children are technically U.S. citizens and enjoy its benefits but who don't live here.

[OrphanPip]

Stlukes use of conservative is correct. Liberalism is not the opposite of conservatism, this use of the term only persists because Liberals were the progressives in opposition to, at the time, conservative values of royal and aristocratic power. Any political ideology that makes reference to the value of tradition and maintaining status quo is conservative.

Liberalism is the dominant political ideology of both the Republicans and the Democrats in the US, it's pretty much unopposed, the dividing lines between the parties end up along issues of Republicans being more about classical liberalism and Democrats more influenced by social liberalism.

[stlukesguild]

Christian Mommsen
Bjornstjerne Bjornson
Henryk Sienkiwicz
Giosue Carducci
Rudolf Euken
Paul Heyse
Gerhard Hauptmann
Carl von Heidenstam
Karl Jellerup
Henryk Pontopiddan
Jacinta Benavate
Grazia Deladda
Sigrid Undset
Erik Karlfeldt
Frans Sillanpaa
Roger Martin du Gard.

Honestly, I'm familiar with but four:

Henryk Sienkiewicz was the Polish author of Quo Vadis
Giosue Carducci was an Italian poet who wrote the Barbarian Odes and Hymns to Satan
Gerhard Hauptmann was a German playwright who wrote The Weavers
Sigrid Undset was a Scandinavian writer who wrote a triology of historical novels set in Scandinavia (no idea of the title without cheating).

I know that Undset and Sienkiewicz both won the Nobel Prize for literature (I have a copy of Quo Vadis) so I'll assume that is what all have in common.

If your point is to draw attention to the mediocrities that surrounded the best writers of the time, I'm not certain you succeed here. These four writers, at least, were certainly not bad... indeed if they had written in English we might actually be quite as familiar with them as we are with many English and American minor classics.

But yes... the greatest writers were not always recognized with awards (Tolstoy, Proust, Joyce, and Borges never won the Nobel)... but there were certainly far less talented writers also writing and outselling far greater writers. Take for example Johanna Spyri (who?) Her novel Heidi's Years of Wandering and Learning from the 1880s sold over 50-million copies. Ellen G. White's Steps to Christ (1892) sold over 60 million copies. Of course all one need to do is read Alexander Pope's Duciad in which the poet satirizes the wealth of mediocrity and pure incompetence that dominated English letters during his life time.

[Jozanny]

Part of the reason I lose patience with this forum is due to the laziness of its critical thinking, and good critical thinking doesn't simply bow before literary achievement as if it was divine revelation. Critics look at what Shakespeare does, and they place him as a man of his time so that we can then understand him out of time, and there are writers living today, or recently deceased, who will remain respected a hundred years from now.

In his day, Shakespeare was disparaged, one of his most noted critics being Ben Jonson. Grow up people. This ranking system so popular in the LNF stunts your growth and maturity, diminishes your ability to think.

[cyberbob]

I disagree that Republicans are Classical Liberals, they're mostly neo-cons as Stlukes said. Libertarians are the closest thing to Classical Liberals and are basically their spiritual heirs. Many Classical Liberals and Paleoconservatives have gone under the Republican banner because independent parties get you nowhere.

Classical Liberals are also social liberals like Democrats, where they differ is mostly in HOW to achieve social freedom. Democrats view government as a tool to achieve social freedom instead of as an obstacle but their ultimate aim is essentially the same.

I'd go into further detail and clear my statements up but this is no political thread and I'm way off topic.

Anyway I'm glad to see people recognize that it's a mistake to view in hindsight a writer's success and it also makes me happy to see there isn't a blind reverence for the past.

[Seasider]

My list was indeed Nobel Prizewinners for Literature and since a mega bibliophile like StLuke'sGuild can recognise only a small proportion it shows how yesterday's stars can be fairly quickly extinguished or perhaps how critics fail to recognise lasting worth. The Nobel Prize is supposed to be an International Prize so their having written in a language other than English should not have lessened their chances with the Nobel Committee. The fact that Tolstoy of all people didn't win simply beggars belief. So maybe some of today's apparently underrated writers will close in on the finishing straight, whenever that will be.

[blazeofglory]

My list was indeed Nobel Prizewinners for Literature and since a mega bibliophile like StLuke'sGuild can recognise only a small proportion it shows how yesterday's stars can be fairly quickly extinguished or perhaps how critics fail to recognise lasting worth. The Nobel Prize is supposed to be an International Prize so their having written in a language other than English should not have lessened their chances with the Nobel Committee. The fact that Tolstoy of all people didn't win simply beggars belief. So maybe some of today's apparently underrated writers will close in on the finishing straight, whenever that will be.

You have rasied a very interesting question.

The noble prize for literature is a lie and that the writers getting it are the greatest or trendiest is a blunder and those who just write in English are superior is a one-sided perspective. Today most of noble laureates crop up in the western soil and they have to write in English. There are really greater writers written in other languages and the Swedish Nobel Committee is a group of people who have no access to the great literary pieces that are created elsewhere and they cannot see that and their scope or eyesight is dimmed and their approaches limited.

I do not read a book just because it just got the applauses of the few who are institutionally or politically directed. I do not read most of new western noble laureates since they are judged by the dimwitted few prejudiced judges

[Seasider]

Part of the reason I lose patience with this forum is due to the laziness of its critical thinking, and good critical thinking doesn't simply bow before literary achievement as if it was divine revelation.

In his day, Shakespeare was disparaged, one of his most noted critics being Ben Jonson. Grow up people. This ranking system so popular in the LNF stunts your growth and maturity, diminishes your ability to think.


Here are a few lines from Ben Jonson's poem about Shakespeare which he called

To the Memory of my Beloved William Shakespeare And What He Hath Left Us

....
Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show
To whom all Scenes of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age, but for all time !
And all the Muses still were in their prime,
When, like Apollo, he came forth to warm
Our ears, or like a Mercury to charm !
Nature herself was proud of his designs,
And joyed to wear the dressing of his lines !
Which were so richly spun, and woven so fit,
As, since, she will vouchsafe no other wit.
The merry Greek, tart Aristophanes,
Neat Terence, witty Plautus, now not please ;
But antiquated and deserted lie,
As they were not of Nature's family.......

Some disparagement!!

Comment is Free but Facts are Sacred!

[JCamilo]

The nobel argument is a considerable failure - Stlukes is not by any means an authority on XX writers, he would be the first to tell you that someone like Harold Bloom would probally reckonize all those names.

Check the list of Poet Laureate. Except Tennynson, Wordsworth, Spencer, Johnson, Dryden and the husband of Plath, do anyone here is trully familiar with all other names? The poetry of Colley Cibber is remembered by whom? And then we can say Milton, Pope, Chapman, Donne, Shakespeare himself, Coleridge, Keats, Byron, Blake, Shelley, Brownings, etc never got the "award" and some could easily rejoyce the extra coin. It would in the end just show the natural idiosyncrasy of awards, who must be all means react to the momment, deal with political influences and the constant hindsight of a democratic election.


I disagree that Republicans are Classical Liberals, they're mostly neo-cons as Stlukes said. Libertarians are the closest thing to Classical Liberals and are basically their spiritual heirs. Many Classical Liberals and Paleoconservatives have gone under the Republican banner because independent parties get you nowhere.

Classical Liberals are also social liberals like Democrats, where they differ is mostly in HOW to achieve social freedom. Democrats view government as a tool to achieve social freedom instead of as an obstacle but their ultimate aim is essentially the same.

I'd go into further detail and clear my statements up but this is no political thread and I'm way off topic.

Anyway I'm glad to see people recognize that it's a mistake to view in hindsight a writer's success and it also makes me happy to see there isn't a blind reverence for the past.

The use of conservative by me or Stlukes had nothing to do with republics or democratics or any special political group, but a general behaviour of society. Even the word conservative didnt had any specific tie to a political system, we are talking about something that happened over centuries and Stlukes just linked to some circunstances that repeat today.

[Seasider]

]
You have rasied a very interesting question.

The noble prize for literature is a lie and that the writers getting it are the greatest or trendiest is a blunder and those who just write in English are superior is a one-sided perspective. Today most of noble laureates crop up in the western soil and they have to write in English. There are really greater writers written in other languages and the Swedish Nobel Committee is a group of people who have no access to the great literary pieces that are created elsewhere and they cannot see that and their scope or eyesight is dimmed and their approaches limited.

I do not read a book just because it just got the applauses of the few who are institutionally or politically directed. I do not read most of new western noble laureates since they are judged by the dimwitted few prejudiced judges

It is not true that the candidates for the Nobel Prize have to write in English. Of the 105 prizes that have been awarded only 26 have been to writers writing in English.
Of course all writers will have their detractors as well as their fans. But I assume that the Literature Committee Judges are chosen for their expertise in the field in the same way as judges of scientific awards are.
My point in bringing up the award winners was not to say that they were not considered good in their time, but merely that posterity has not confirmed the committee's choice.

Come writers and critics who prophesize with your pens
And keep your eyes wide, the chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon, for the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no telling who that it’s naming
For the loser now will be later to win
For the times, they are a-changin’


Bob Dylan

And if I ever get invited onto the Nobel Literature Committee that's who I'll vote for. :smilewinkgrin:

[JBI]

]

It is not true that the candidates for the Nobel Prize have to write in English. Of the 105 prizes that have been awarded only 26 have been to works written in English.
Of course all writers will have their detractors as well as their fans. But I assume that the Literature Committee Judges are chosen for their expertise in the field in the same way as judges of scientific awards are.
My point in bringing up the award winners was not to say that they were not considered good in their time, but that merely posterity has not confirmed the committee's choice.

Come writers and critics who prophesize with your pens
And keep your eyes wide, the chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon, for the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no telling who that it’s naming
For the loser now will be later to win
For the times, they are a-changin’


Bob Dylan

And if I ever get invited onto the Nobel Literature Committee that's who I'll vote for. :smilewinkgrin:

Abba would likely win over Dylan :p

[Seasider]

A chacun (et chacune:)) son gout.
If there are symbols available I can't find them

[Sancho]

This ranking system so popular in the LNF stunts your growth and maturity, diminishes your ability to think.

Hallelujah! Somebody finally said it, and said it well. You can’t rank order literature – it’s not linear.

[Alexander III]

Grow up people. This ranking system so popular in the LNF stunts your growth and maturity, diminishes your ability to think.

That's like saying going out drinking and partying or playing sports, stunts your growth and maturity and diminishes your ability to think.

I mean the rankings we do on here are simply for fun, a game if you will allow them to be so called. No one takes them to be more serious than they are. Well no one, hopefully takes them more seriously than they are.

[B. Laumness]

I was going to say something on the recognition of the great writers, but Leopardi wrote it much better in his Operette Moralli (and elsewhere). Read the part on Parini and glory, you’ll have matter to think.

[cyberbob]

My post on Classical Liberals was a response to OrphanPip saying the difference between Republicans and Democrats was that they were Classical and social liberals respectively, which is why I mentioned political parties.

[Jozanny]

That's like saying going out drinking and partying or playing sports, stunts your growth and maturity and diminishes your ability to think.

I mean the rankings we do on here are simply for fun, a game if you will allow them to be so called. No one takes them to be more serious than they are. Well no one, hopefully takes them more seriously than they are.

And so your pm to me with your tongue hanging out of your mouth desperate for a critique was equally fun and games, and treated as such, since I never responded, and get paid for what I do.

But to my larger point, putting aside the slaughter of innocents, is that the comparative tendencies of the common reader can limit what we see if we don't choose to look. It is far easier to say "Shakespeare is the greatest writer in English," or "David Foster Wallace is a fraud," as to appropriately contextualizing either, and this is my sin as well. I don't have the time to be a better teacher, and it grieves me, as I'm a good one.

In the future, you might try asking for help instead of imposing yourself on strangers with little or no introduction beforehand.

[stlukesguild]

The noble prize for literature is a lie and that the writers getting it are the greatest or trendiest is a blunder and those who just write in English are superior is a one-sided perspective. Today most of noble laureates crop up in the western soil and they have to write in English. There are really greater writers written in other languages and the Swedish Nobel Committee is a group of people who have no access to the great literary pieces that are created elsewhere and they cannot see that and their scope or eyesight is dimmed and their approaches limited.

Hmmm... let me see... the Nobel Committee takes nominations from 600-700 qualified individuals consisting of:

1. Members of the Swedish Academy and of other academies, institutions and societies which are similar to it in construction and purpose

2. Professors of literature and of linguistics at universities and university colleges

3. Previous Nobel Laureates in Literature

4. Presidents of those societies of authors that are representative of the literary production in their respective countries.

and institutions from around the world. The committee then hones the list down to a smaller list of names... and eventually to a mere 5 authors. The committee then reads the works of these five before coming to its final decision.

The original vision of Alfred Nobel must be kept in mind: "the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction."

As such the Nobel Prize often has political and/or social overtones to it.

Nobel Laureates include writers from around the world, but naturally favor those writing within the Western literary tradition as the Nobel Committee is a Western institution.

Perhaps there are writers who were sadly overlooked, and certainly there are laureates who we may question, but the selections are really rather sound:

Mario Vargas Llosa
Harold Pinter
John M. Coetzee
Gao Xingjian
Günter Grass
José Saramago
Wislawa Szymborska
Seamus Heaney
Kenzaburo Oe
Toni Morrison
Derek Walcott
Octavio Paz
Naguib Mahfouz
Joseph Brodsky
Jaroslav Seifert
William Golding
Gabriel García Márquez
Elias Canetti
Czeslaw Milosz
Odysseus Elytis
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Vicente Aleixandre
Saul Bellow
Eugenio Montale
Heinrich Böll
Pablo Neruda
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
Samuel Beckett
Yasunari Kawabata
Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Nelly Sachs
Jean-Paul Sartre
Giorgos Seferis
John Steinbeck
Ivo Andric
Saint-John Perse
Salvatore Quasimodo
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak
Albert Camus
Juan Ramón Jiménez
Ernest Miller Hemingway
François Mauriac
Pär Fabian Lagerkvist
William Faulkner
Thomas Stearns Eliot
André Paul Guillaume Gide
Hermann Hesse
Gabriela Mistral
Luigi Pirandello
Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin
Sinclair Lewis
Thomas Mann
Sigrid Undset
George Bernard Shaw
William Butler Yeats
Anatole France
Knut Pedersen Hamsun
Rabindranath Tagore
Rudyard Kipling
Giosuè Carducci
Henryk Sienkiewicz
Sully Prudhomme

Seriously, which of these writers was not deserving of recognition... not as the "greatest living writer" but for producing a body of "outstanding work in an ideal direction"?

[stlukesguild]

But to my larger point, putting aside the slaughter of innocents, is that the comparative tendencies of the common reader can limit what we see if we don't choose to look. It is far easier to say "Shakespeare is the greatest writer in English," or "David Foster Wallace is a fraud," as to appropriately contextualizing either, and this is my sin as well. I don't have the time to be a better teacher, and it grieves me, as I'm a good one.

O course JoZ, you know as well as I that maintaining a better critical dialog... a discussion of the actual poems or novels that goes beyond "good", "bad" and "better" or "worse than" demands much engagement on our part. Whether here or elsewhere these more in depth discussions (such as the poetry clubs that spring up every now and then) demand someone to put forth the effort to get the ball rolling... and then often peter out rapidly as members get caught up with other things. Mindless banter among a group with a similar passion for reading is far less demanding than serious analysis. ranking MacBeth is easy... discussing it in depth almost certainly requires that I read it again... maybe a few more times. Of course a good number of us are always open to such dialog... if the time's right... if I don't have too many other pressing commitments... if the book chosen interests me enough... if... if... if...:rolleyes:

[Jozanny]

I am reading Mahfouz now, and as usual, no one pays attention to what perceptive writers see right in front of their noses, including the danger of a sense of inadequacy that pervades an entire society.

**
I know luke; I left to get my act together, and if I want better depth in online interaction ought to apply myself, but I was rising in 2005 and fell off the train, and I'm still sticking my fingers in too many spokes, and I am at an age now where being *palsied* means red flags.

[mortalterror]

Admittedly, I haven't read the works of every Nobel laureate, but I think better candidates could have been found to give the award to than Pinter, Xingjian, Heaney, Morrison, Mahfouz, Kawabata, and Sienkiewicz.

Pinter is overrated. Tom Stoppard writes better, but he doesn't have the anti-war activist credit. Xingjian, I doubt he's even one of the best Chinese writers of recent times. Heaney has the style of a first rate poet without any truly first rate poems. Where is his Wasteland, Shield of Achilles, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Mending Wall, The Second Coming, The Bridge, or Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird? If he were a baseball player he would have a lot of hits but no home runs. He's the best living poet in the English language, sure. But that's not saying much these days. Morrison and Mahfouz are both good writers but not particularly great. They are like Updike or Rushdie. Kawabata was a good 20th century Japanese writer, but not as good as Akutagawa, Soseki, Mishima, or Tanizaki. As for Sienkiewicz, I like Roman epics but even I couldn't get into Quo Vadis (movie or novel). He's one of those writers who knows a lot about the classical world, but who doesn't understand why modern men love it so much. I'd class his novel with Broch's Death of Virgil, rather than the more enjoyable Last Days of Pompeii, or Memoirs of Hadrian.

[Jozanny]

mortal, it is an award, perhaps the best honor we have to bestow upon various disciplines, but it is not a ticket to sainthood. I am only just discovering Mahfouz, with two of his shorter titles, but I think he captures the problem of an ancient civilization that is essentially a modern non-entity, or at best, a vassal state beholden to more modern interests, a gateway country in an otherwise badly governed land mass, caught between Africa and the east, little brother to western hegemony. I don't think he was a bad pick, as a writer caught in the middle of various cultures. The commitee enjoys these ferrets, and sometimes hits the mark; they are not always going to be prescient.

But the OP's question is basically moot; with a little effort we could all easily think of twenty giants living today whose work will remain important later, like Gunter Grass, Toni Morrison, and so on. Ellison passed away in my lifetime, and I cut out his picture and posted it on my door in my inner city days before I ever read Invisible Man. It was not a talisman that kept me particularly safe.

[JBI]

Admittedly, I haven't read the works of every Nobel laureate, but I think better candidates could have been found to give the award to than Pinter, Xingjian, Heaney, Morrison, Mahfouz, Kawabata, and Sienkiewicz.

Pinter is overrated. Tom Stoppard writes better, but he doesn't have the anti-war activist credit. Xingjian, I doubt he's even one of the best Chinese writers of recent times. Heaney has the style of a first rate poet without any truly first rate poems. Where is his Wasteland, Shield of Achilles, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Mending Wall, The Second Coming, The Bridge, or Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird? If he were a baseball player he would have a lot of hits but no home runs. He's the best living poet in the English language, sure. But that's not saying much these days. Morrison and Mahfouz are both good writers but not particularly great. They are like Updike or Rushdie. Kawabata was a good 20th century Japanese writer, but not as good as Akutagawa, Soseki, Mishima, or Tanizaki. As for Sienkiewicz, I like Roman epics but even I couldn't get into Quo Vadis (movie or novel). He's one of those writers who knows a lot about the classical world, but who doesn't understand why modern men love it so much. I'd class his novel with Broch's Death of Virgil, rather than the more enjoyable Last Days of Pompeii, or Memoirs of Hadrian.

You do know his last name isn't Xingjian right, which attests to something, we all cannot be so versed in all of the writers who won, simply by reading them in translation.

That being said, Gao Xingjian isn't to me a great writer, merely a lucky one. But then again, I have not read him in Chinese (good luck finding a copy here) though he isn't significant. I hear he is good as an artist, but I did not understand his artwork when I looked at it online.

In general though, the Western imagination seems to conceptualize all literature within its own conception of fiction, or art. A writer like Yu Hua or Jin Yong will not win, simply because they are more relevant to those who do not hand out awards. There is a penchant for readers to only want to read things close to them, as I have mentioned before, proven by the popularity of Mishima over Soseki, even though in Japan it is the total opposite.

Likewise, Gao's fiction is written with a Western audience in mind, since he does not appeal at all to Chinese audience's aesthetics. Someone like Zhang Yimou, the film maker would be a good example of someone who can transcend things, but lets face it, the weird sex scene at the end of House of Flying Daggers may appeal to Chinese audiences, who are depraved of good sex scenes, but to someone like me, it felt like a grotesque mutilation (plus Zhang Ziyi has way too skinny a body, which made the scene look like necrophilia).

Zhang though is able to appeal to both audiences, and be famous in both senses, whereas other Chinese filmmakers are not. The film Wind Blast, from what I understand has not made it to the Western World yet, despite being a good film.


As for modern authors, there are plenty of excellent ones, one just needs to look, and to sift, since the sifting work that has surrounded classic authors has not yet occurred with contemporary ones.

[_Shannon_]

Haven't yet read the whole thread, but I think the whole premise is flawed. We have people like Cormac McCarthy and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison as well as many others. Whether or not you like their writing, I don't think we can say anything except that they are literary giants in our time. And that's just fiction, there are more if we extend the discussion to poetry.

[mortalterror]

You do know his last name isn't Xingjian right, which attests to something, we all cannot be so versed in all of the writers who won, simply by reading them in translation.

I can never tell which name goes first with Chinese writers. I think I'll just call him Johnny Zang, for convenience sake.


There is a penchant for readers to only want to read things close to them, as I have mentioned before, proven by the popularity of Mishima over Soseki, even though in Japan it is the total opposite.

Are you sure about that? I know a lot of people who've studied Japanese and they all have spoken highly of Mishima and not at all about Soseki. Granted, I can tell they are both very excellent writers, from the little of theirs I have read. I actually find Soseki quite a bit easier to digest because he doesn't have Mishima's obsession with kinky sex type things.


Someone like Zhang Yimou, the film maker would be a good example of someone who can transcend things, but lets face it, the weird sex scene at the end of House of Flying Daggers may appeal to Chinese audiences, who are depraved of good sex scenes, but to someone like me, it felt like a grotesque mutilation (plus Zhang Ziyi has way too skinny a body, which made the scene look like necrophilia).

Zhang though is able to appeal to both audiences, and be famous in both senses, whereas other Chinese filmmakers are not. The film Wind Blast, from what I understand has not made it to the Western World yet, despite being a good film.

I haven't seen Wind Blast, and I've only seen part of House of Flying Daggers. But having seen To Live, Raise the Red Lantern, Shanghai Triad, and Hero, I must admit he is the peer of Scorsese or Kurosawa. However, he is not exactly the first Chinese filmmaker to be popular in the west. Don't forget that Bruce Lee came here in the early 70s to great success. John Woo, Chow Yun Fat, Jet Li, Ang Lee, and Jackie Chan have all had stellar careers. Even the artsy Wong Kar Wai has broken through with a handful of hits. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon grossed something like 135 million domestic, and Lust, Caution was up for an Academy Award. I remember, back when I was still in school, there was some furor around A Chinese Ghost Story, and Farewell My Concubine.

[Alexander III]

And so your pm to me with your tongue hanging out of your mouth desperate for a critique was equally fun and games, and treated as such, since I never responded, and get paid for what I do.

But to my larger point, putting aside the slaughter of innocents, is that the comparative tendencies of the common reader can limit what we see if we don't choose to look. It is far easier to say "Shakespeare is the greatest writer in English," or "David Foster Wallace is a fraud," as to appropriately contextualizing either, and this is my sin as well. I don't have the time to be a better teacher, and it grieves me, as I'm a good one.

In the future, you might try asking for help instead of imposing yourself on strangers with little or no introduction beforehand.


Let's face it, I responded to your earlier statement by using common sense and therefore ridiculing it. As any man should, at all occasions when a flawed statement is made; one should try to expose the flaw rather than sit back and leave the statement unchallenged. Hence the appropriate term of forums.

Either way after having poked a whole in your statement, you could find no answer to disprove or counter my logic, so instead you took the low road and gave a mild personal response/inflammation.

I know that this is an online site but I would expect more maturity than your average video-game forum. Normally I would not mention this but the irony must be noted that your initial comment was lamenting the lack of maturity here.

Either way, now I shall hold my peace and no longer comment unless it has to do with the thread tittle.

( and yes I know that by making this comment I too have joined you on the low road - but hey, I never claimed to have a preference for the high road.

[Ecurb]

Personally, I blame the modern fitness craze. Writers with the impressive girth of G.K. Chesterton are rare, these days. Some recent writers are tall -- Roald Dahl is 6'6" (that's 2 meters to you Europeans). But he lacks the poundage (kilogrammatry) of a true giant.

[gruntingslime]

I have been contemplating writing now for years, by this I don't mean that I've come to any great conclusion, in fact I've lost myself in confusion. I have pondered this, as I have now devoted my life to writing, among small other small arts, and especially devoted myself to frequent long and impossible daydreams. As a writer who is struggling to find meaning in anything, I do see that it plays a definite tole on my work. As much as I would like to distance myself from it, even writing two words and a few scribbles sends me into a fit of untranscribed thought, and most of those thoughts are very searching, very lost in myself.

Its difficult to look on anything with complete assurance. I don't mean to lose you hear, but I think its because everything is so specific.

I sometimes convince myself that there must not be enough thought going into most major work, but I don't really know, perhaps it is only me that is not working enough.

There might be a portion of fear in it, to truly express yourself. There is probably a part of me that is dulled by culture, definitely by impatience and unrestfulness. It seems to me that art usually flows from a calm within one and paints beauty in one form or another.

Its laziness too, definitely apathy at times, much feeling of utter confusion... It simply dulls the senses. In the best period when I was writing, this is judged for myself by the way I felt doing it, and about life, I felt a greater degree of ability to use my mind in general, to not take every idea as fixed, not that I produced the best writing then... I was pretty young, and a lot of it is actually dreadful in theme and content...

There is definitely a sense of feeling closed off in the world too, much learning and experience comes through computers and television or other images, but you can learn intricate details of things far and wide you need never actually see, and so vividly too sometimes that you believe you know it all, though its completely different to actually experience such things.

It feels to me, and sometimes I wonder if I've stayed cooped up too long, rotted my brain and become unrealistic and delirious with obsessional fantasies and daydreams, like a sense of adventure is partly missing from the world, or possibly it is my spirit.

I deposit this as an example of what possibly might be happening, if only to one person, who chooses to write.

[cyberbob]

^ Have you tried Adderall?

[Mr. Pedantic]

The Great Writer isn't dead. He's just asleep. Maybe the times are too good for a great novel to be written. Perhaps if the economy gets worse we'll have another Charles Dickens.

[Emil Miller]

Haven't yet read the whole thread, but I think the whole premise is flawed. We have people like Cormac McCarthy and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison as well as many others. Whether or not you like their writing, I don't think we can say anything except that they are literary giants in our time. And that's just fiction, there are more if we extend the discussion to poetry.

They may be big fish but the barrel is a lot smaller.

[Alexander III]

They may be big fish but the barrel is a lot smaller.

No, the barrel is the same as always, your perception of the barrel is smaller. The same way 100 years from now a guy shall state that in our times we had great geniuses and that his era has nothing. It is time which turns the great writer into the genius.

[jmnixon95]

My theory is this:
People just don't read as much.

[Emil Miller]

No, the barrel is the same as always, your perception of the barrel is smaller. The same way 100 years from now a guy shall state that in our times we had great geniuses and that his era has nothing. It is time which turns the great writer into the genius.

In a world where pop singers and footballers are routinely described as geniuses, in a 100 years time the word will be even less true than it is today; there will, nevertheless, be those who believe it.

[Alexander III]

In a world where pop singers and footballers are routinely described as geniuses, in a 100 years time the word will be even less true than it is today; there will, nevertheless, be those who believe it.

What you are describing is the masses, and they have always been idiots, from rome till now and beyond.

[JBI]

I can never tell which name goes first with Chinese writers. I think I'll just call him Johnny Zang, for convenience sake.



Are you sure about that? I know a lot of people who've studied Japanese and they all have spoken highly of Mishima and not at all about Soseki. Granted, I can tell they are both very excellent writers, from the little of theirs I have read. I actually find Soseki quite a bit easier to digest because he doesn't have Mishima's obsession with kinky sex type things.



I haven't seen Wind Blast, and I've only seen part of House of Flying Daggers. But having seen To Live, Raise the Red Lantern, Shanghai Triad, and Hero, I must admit he is the peer of Scorsese or Kurosawa. However, he is not exactly the first Chinese filmmaker to be popular in the west. Don't forget that Bruce Lee came here in the early 70s to great success. John Woo, Chow Yun Fat, Jet Li, Ang Lee, and Jackie Chan have all had stellar careers. Even the artsy Wong Kar Wai has broken through with a handful of hits. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon grossed something like 135 million domestic, and Lust, Caution was up for an Academy Award. I remember, back when I was still in school, there was some furor around A Chinese Ghost Story, and Farewell My Concubine.

None of those people besides Jet Li, who is a mediocre actor at best, were born in China (with perhaps Ang Lee arguably being born in China, though being from Taiwan) (on technicality, as Hong Kong, which operates on a total different system and language than the mainland and was not part of China until being returned after those filmmakers birth). Nor do they keep with Chinese film in general - Jet Li is more American than anything else in his films, his first major role being in Lethal Weapon 4 - from what I can gather, the one transcended star in all spheres is Jackie Chan, who is Mr. Endorsement and has his head on everything here.

As for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, well, that film isn't part of Chinese cinema really anyway, as it is a mix of Hong Kong and Taiwanese crew with only one lead actually from the mainland - as such, the film was thought to have been made for western audiences, and as such perhaps fits in the tradition of Shaw Brother's films rather than Mainland war films about patriotism (which the film Hero would belong to more strongly).

Even so, if you speak to Japanese people who grew up in Japan, they will all know Soseki, as his Kokoro is required reading in high school. Don't get me wrong, I like Mishima more, but Soseki to Japanese fiction holds a similar spot to Dickens in English fiction - he brought the language of prose to a new level, when the language of Japanese was developing into a written vernacular - he also marks a transition point in Japanese thought, and as such has become central to identity - Mishima is to us great, because well, he is great to us - aesthetically he keeps with western tastes well, and his topics are easy for western audiences to understand and take minimal historical or cultural knowledge - to Japan he perhaps is great too, but cannot offer what Soseki offers.

My point was on the range of reading though, and the question of borders.

[JBI]

My theory is this:
People just don't read as much.

Than when? Literacy was not widespread in the world until recently - certain places, namely those with the biggest populations in the world, are reading more than ever - literacy in China has skyrocketed in the last 50 years, as I am sure it has in India, and elsewhere where there is a huge population - I am not an authority, but I would assume the literary culture in the middle east has never been as vibrant - are people really reading less than, lets say, 150 years ago when the cost of a book was a month's wage for most people, most of whom could not read? Or 200 years ago when virtually no poor or female people could read, or 1000 years ago when almost nobody but churchmen could read in the west, or 2500 years ago when...

Simply put, Western culture in general has never really promoted widespread literacy - various Asian cultures, such as cultures influenced by Confucianism have to certain degrees, but even there literacy is a relatively new thing for the masses.

[mortalterror]

None of those people besides Jet Li, who is a mediocre actor at best, were born in China (with perhaps Ang Lee arguably being born in China, though being from Taiwan) (on technicality, as Hong Kong, which operates on a total different system and language than the mainland and was not part of China until being returned after those filmmakers birth).

Taiwan and Hong Kong are 98 and 95 percent ethnically Chinese. They speak Mandarin and Cantonese there, have for centuries. Culturally, geographically, that's what they are.

Besides, Jet Li isn't really a bad actor. He has screen presence like Marilyn Monroe, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and John Wayne. Within the narrow range of his talent he's very effective, and he has a physical grace which is arresting to watch like Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly. Acting is more than just the ability to inhabit a character or speak lines like a Brando, DeNiro, Olivier, or Newman.



Nor do they keep with Chinese film in general - Jet Li is more American than anything else in his films, his first major role being in Lethal Weapon 4 - from what I can gather, the one transcended star in all spheres is Jackie Chan, who is Mr. Endorsement and has his head on everything here.

Actually, Jet Li popped back in '91 off of Once Upon a Time in China, and then two years before Lethal Weapon 4 with Black Mask. Though you are right, Jackie Chan is the more versatile star. He's the Charlie Chaplin of our age.


As for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, well, that film isn't part of Chinese cinema really anyway, as it is a mix of Hong Kong and Taiwanese crew with only one lead actually from the mainland - as such, the film was thought to have been made for western audiences, and as such perhaps fits in the tradition of Shaw Brother's films rather than Mainland war films about patriotism (which the film Hero would belong to more strongly).

But it did alright at the box office.

[Emil Miller]

What you are describing is the masses, and they have always been idiots, from rome till now and beyond.

I'm going to have plead the 5th amendment on that.

[Alexander III]

I'm going to have plead the 5th amendment on that.

I am not american so I am not familiar with the context and particulars of the fifth amendment. But quick google search gave me this

"No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation"

I believe to get the general gist of what the amendment is saying, and thereby by pleading the fifth amendment what you are saying is:

Only the masses can prove that the masses are idiots

Is that it?

In which case I re direct you to your previous statement

"In a world where pop singers and footballers are routinely described as geniuses"

You ascribed that as the opinion of the masses, hence the masses have proved that the masses are idiots. They did it unintentionally but they did it.


I suppose I could also respond with the countless historical examples of how religion and politics have been used to guide the masses into doing what the people in control - or fat-cats of the day if you will - want.

[cyberbob]

Pleading the 5th means that you refuse to answer a question because the answer can be used against you.

Like if your GF asks you: "Do you think my best friend has a hot body?"

You can say I plead the 5th and avoid the trick question that puts you in the doghouse.

[Mr.lucifer]

Where did you get the impression that pop stars are considered geniuses? No-one has ever described people like justin bieber and lady gaga as geniuses. Most popstars are considered generic even by the masses. Half of the masses can't even stand your typical popstar. Your common man isn't that stupid. Foot-ballers on the other hand are considered geniuses at what they do. It takes talent to get famous in the sports world.

Don't get me wrong, I think half of the people of the world are idiots. Btw, today's literary stars aren't even read by the masses. Did you think the man on the street has even heard of roth,morrison,murakami, etc.?

[Alexander III]

Pleading the 5th means that you refuse to answer a question because the answer can be used against you.

Like if your GF asks you: "Do you think my best friend has a hot body?"

You can say I plead the 5th and avoid the trick question that puts you in the doghouse.

Ahh ok, like I said I am not American so was not quite sure of the context.


Your common man isn't that stupid.

Don't get me wrong, I think half of the people of the world are idiots.


dare I say tis a paradox

[Emil Miller]

Where did you get the impression that pop stars are considered geniuses? No-one has ever described people like justin bieber and lady gaga as geniuses. Most popstars are considered generic even by the masses. Half of the masses can't even stand your typical popstar. Your common man isn't that stupid. Foot-ballers on the other hand are considered geniuses at what they do. It takes talent to get famous in the sports world.

Don't get me wrong, I think half of the people of the world are idiots. Btw, today's literary stars aren't even read by the masses. Did you think the man on the street has even heard of roth,morrison,murakami, etc.?

I have heard of certain pop singers/groups referred to as geniuses but I'll mention no names to avoid upsetting the delicate sensibilities of those who have been foolish enough to believe it.
Nevertheless, I think many people would agree that the word has been increasingly misapplied for some years: often for monetary gain. Here's the afterword to the summary on the back of my most recent book:

Set in the 1970s this story may be as much about its readers as the characters in the story, for a large part of humanity was sold mechanically processed sub-musical rubbish before and after the decade. How this was done is at the heart of this satire on the psychology of deceit and mass manipulation.

As for footballers, the hyperbole that surrounds pop music has, in the UK, been extended to football, which has now become part of show business as much as a sporting activity.

[JBI]

One must point to the Ancient Greek obsession with physical feats, or Roman Gladiator worship, or Medieval Tournament culture, or Western shooting obsession to note that the worship of those of physical excellence, or sporting excellence is as old if not older than the worship of literary icons. Your argument to me only seems to read as a realization that people like to see people who are good at things physical - such as footballers, or boxers.

As for me, I think certain pop-singers are quite smart, Madonna for instance, I would think is a remarkably intelligent woman. Some arguably are not, like all people.

[JCamilo]

Not to mention calling Generals and other militar leaders as Genius, the medieval obssession with saints, etc.

[Emil Miller]

One must point to the Ancient Greek obsession with physical feats, or Roman Gladiator worship, or Medieval Tournament culture, or Western shooting obsession to note that the worship of those of physical excellence, or sporting excellence is as old if not older than the worship of literary icons. Your argument to me only seems to read as a realization that people like to see people who are good at things physical - such as footballers, or boxers.

As for me, I think certain pop-singers are quite smart, Madonna for instance, I would think is a remarkably intelligent woman. Some arguably are not, like all people.

Obviously many people like to watch footballers or boxers. In the case of footballers, however,the ludicrous hype surrounding their activities off field has nothing to do with their prowess on field; it is, as I said, more relevant to show business than sport. I am speaking here about the UK but I doubt that, even in the USA, there would be such a corny TV series as Footballers Wives.
As for the pop singer Madonna, she may be smart but not nearly as smart as the money men who were able to sell her. If the word genius is to applied it is they who are probably more worthy of the epithet.

[iswarya]

that's basically because most of us lack originality and we are all very bad victims of self- criticism. when we cannot appreciate our own work, even when it is good, we fail to expose it to people, who may actually have different perceptions about it. this is an age of torrential competitions where quantity is infinitely more than the quality.

[joelavine]

A just and sweet nostalgia blinds itself to the glories of the present.

It is tempting to reel off our own era's literary giants, but to me it is self-evident that they are legion. To name just a few would only seem to forget their many equals.

[jocky]

Could it not be that the great authors of the past had to actually really work for it ? Having a rich patron as Will had in the Earl of Southampton could not have come easily. His position in life was totally dependent on a wealthy patron who could have washed his hands of him at any time. In my opinion great writing is always a poduct of striving for self preservation and recognition which does not exist in the modern world. I know, some of you will argue that Jane Austen was not in that position, to which I can only reply she was a crap writer of meaningless drivel, much the same as J K Rowling, or whatever her name is.

Shakespeare, Machiavelli, Hobbes, were literally writing for their lives, patronage and families. Now I am fully aware that there are countless examples which contradict my hypothesis, and no doubt they will be fully aired, but I will stick to the main point of the discussion and conclude by pointing out that the great writers have vanished simply because they can always do something else to survive. Maybe the new literatti come from the Third World countries where starvation is always a fact of life.

[mal4mac]

Could it not be that the great authors of the past had to actually really work for it ? Having a rich patron as Will had in the Earl of Southampton could not have come easily. His position in life was totally dependent on a wealthy patron who could have washed his hands of him at any time.

Where do you get the idea that Shakespeare was totally dependent on the Earl of Southampton? I thought he made most of his money from (i) part ownership of the leading theatre company in London & the Globe theatre (ii) clever property investments.

[My2cents]

Could it not be that the great authors of the past had to actually really work for it ? Having a rich patron as Will had in the Earl of Southampton could not have come easily. His position in life was totally dependent on a wealthy patron who could have washed his hands of him at any time. In my opinion great writing is always a poduct of striving for self preservation and recognition which does not exist in the modern world. I know, some of you will argue that Jane Austen was not in that position, to which I can only reply she was a crap writer of meaningless drivel, much the same as J K Rowling, or whatever her name is.

Shakespeare, Machiavelli, Hobbes, were literally writing for their lives, patronage and families. Now I am fully aware that there are countless examples which contradict my hypothesis, and no doubt they will be fully aired, but I will stick to the main point of the discussion and conclude by pointing out that the great writers have vanished simply because they can always do something else to survive. Maybe the new literatti come from the Third World countries where starvation is always a fact of life.

It's probably true that there's more drivel being written now than ever before just based on the fact that there are more people writing now than ever before. But that would also mean, just based on mathematical probability, that there's more writing that's of exceedingly high quality than ever before. And you would know this is true if you were in tune with the publishing industry as it relates to the small, independent, university presses as opposed to believing that the big, commercial, well known publishing firms is the be all and end all of contemporary writing.

[ralfyman]

TV and other forms of mass entertainment will remain only as long as we can continue the current global capitalist system which is heavily dependent on oil and other resources. But there is now a threat of a drop in global oil production soon, and that problem may be coupled with chronic economic problems (due to increasing debt) and the long-term effects of climate change.

In which case, reading may actually return, but for reasons that we do not want.

[joelavine]

I could complain a great deal about what passes for great writing today - The Kite Runner and The Line of Beauty come to mind (I respect that each has a strong following; I remain a dissenting voice). But there are wonderful books as well. I recently read Kent Haruf's Eventide and Julia Glass's Three Junes. Both are superb.

And there are a great many literary giants. We have, after all, lived in the age of Toni Morrison, Tony Kushner, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, August Wilson, Joan Didion, Carlos Fuentes, Salman Rushdie, Philip Roth, Athol Fugard, Brian Friel, Ingmar Bergman, E.L. Doctorow, Mario Vargas Llosa, Harold Pinter, Roberto Bolano, Anita Brookner, Ursula K. Leguin, Tom Stoppard, Peter Schaffer, to name just a few.

I don't see that we have a great deal to carp about.

[Mr.lucifer]

I don't see how the literary stars of today are crap when they're highly repected by scholars and continue to be.

[TurquoiseSunset]

Man, this thread is going south...

[Vautrin]

Why we do not have giant literary writers today?

http://scophy.files.wordpress.com/2007/12/02_cardiff_library.jpg


Well, clearly because we're running out of places to put their books!

[virgo27]

Looks like the bookshelf at the church rummage sale or was that the local library?

I wonder myself sometimes why I can't find really good books written by decent writers at the library. I often come across 10 books by the same mystery writer. People love to read books that are in a series, but they don't want to read something that may actually challenge them to think a little bit.

[JCamilo]

Could it not be that the great authors of the past had to actually really work for it ? Having a rich patron as Will had in the Earl of Southampton could not have come easily. His position in life was totally dependent on a wealthy patron who could have washed his hands of him at any time. In my opinion great writing is always a poduct of striving for self preservation and recognition which does not exist in the modern world. I know, some of you will argue that Jane Austen was not in that position, to which I can only reply she was a crap writer of meaningless drivel, much the same as J K Rowling, or whatever her name is.

Shakespeare, Machiavelli, Hobbes, were literally writing for their lives, patronage and families. Now I am fully aware that there are countless examples which contradict my hypothesis, and no doubt they will be fully aired, but I will stick to the main point of the discussion and conclude by pointing out that the great writers have vanished simply because they can always do something else to survive. Maybe the new literatti come from the Third World countries where starvation is always a fact of life.

Ack. From where you got that in "third world" countries where people has no money to eat, they would receive education and pay for writers and not some other avaliable job? How ilogical, a country would develop great writers if they die without food and nobody read, but eat their pages.

And frankly, most of those guys weren't really professional writers. Today you have it and I sure, the list of people who get paid like anyone else to write and pay their montly bills is imense.