Which philosophy shapes today's literature?

[blazeofglory]

Every piece of literature is built around a philosophy like classicism, neoclassicism, romanticism, modernism, existentialism, post modernism, Marxism, Objectivism, Freudian philosophy and the like.

Today I am really confused about what philosophy I must base my ideas on while writing literary pieces. Today we have great communication tools unthinkable just a couple of decades only.; The most effective one is the Internet. I feel connected to the rest of the world and by virtue of this strong and powerful communication means I can communicate across large political, socioeconomic, geographical sections to a larger audience. Now we use English as a second language. Though many of us abhor the idea of using English because of its colonial link and history, we are compelled to learn it for economic, commercial and scientific reasons.

I use English when it comes to communicating to a larger mass across the globe yet I have to admit to all that I cannot use it with the vigor I can do with Nepali since I am never comfortable with its slang.

I wonder whereto we are heading today as a writer and globalization is a keyword that defines our philosophy and guides our course.

I may sound rather unclear and so is today's literary journey and I just invite people to air their views

[Theunderground]

I dont feel you have to have a rigorously defined or intellectual philosophy to write. Its just reductionism to say X writes from the marxist point of view or has a colonialist perspective (unless they freely admit they do or it is absolutely obvious.)
Im sure many write for mixed reasons such as money and enjoyment.
Literature that is didactic or has a questionable agenda i dont even bother reading. I find modern literature is relatively free of this with the exceptions of journalism and non fiction.
Us Modern consumers wont put up with being preached to,we can think for ourselves and make our own mistakes thank you very much!!!

[Cunninglinguist]

I don't think every piece of literature has to be based on one strict philosophy. I find the best writers don't confine themselves to one mode of expression, or way of categorizing the world, but pick and choose as they see fit. The "philosophy" is a categorical bucket and tends to hinder expressive capacity while making the expression itself easier.

Since you're always expressing what you're trying to express in the same way, and since the reader already knows how you're going to express it, the philosophy takes away subtlety. On the other hand, if you throw them a curve ball, then you present the reader with a problem and inconsistent mode of expression to reconcile, which keeps the reader entertained. Moreover, it presents the the possibility that a thing could have two or more meanings, depending on which mode of expression (e.g. literal vs. figurative) you're analyzing it as. This presents the capacity for multiple interpretations, which any good work of art has.

[blazeofglory]

These are illuminating ideas. All of us are in fact trying to express what we see around us and yet there is a certain technique we choose to hang on to when it comes to giving expressions to social phenomena. Today for instance few poets write the way Wordsworth or Milton wrote since values are redefined and our understanding of nature has undergone great transformations. We are invaded by technological advancement and there are environmental issues we cannot keep quite about as writers. That is why modern literature is more complex than what it used to be a few decades ago. There are more numbers of broken homes and single mothers. We are stormed with harder realities than what our ancestors were. Globalization is a burgeoning theme and economics and commerce have been gone through great sifts. Therefore literature is not an isolated domain and it is an expression of society and as such what we write becomes reflective of what we perceive or experienced in a particular socioeconomic or political realm.

Literature is therefore redefined and ideas repackaged and styles reengineered. We have to customize our products taking care of the society we are writing about. If what we write cannot speak of what we come across in our day today affairs the piece cannot be a good writing. It must reverberate what it hears. Today's writers therefore were not escapists the way those in the romantic era were. They write about the now and here

We have Salmon Rushdie and a critic like Darrida who make frames for us and we follow in their shoes now.
I want to write differently, however and though I cannot undo what I have learned so easily yet I will have to make endeavors to outdo them to shine among where my predecessors shone and my contemporaries are shining now

[Cunninglinguist]

Frame is a good word for it. The critical theories are frames of reference through which we categorize and understand the elements in a piece of literature.

Each philosophy is a frame whereby emphasis is added to different elements in the world, and then the rest of the world is categorized (through reason) in terms of these emphasized elements; but the emphasis is a human creation and tends to vary with personal preference. The different philosophies, more or less, give merely different perspectives of the same thing (though, to use the terminology of Berkeley, many extrapolate notions, improvable, that do not necessarily agree with the notions of another philosophy). Thus we can call a philosophy (or, more generally, any way through which we can explain the world and denote the relations of its elements) a frame, or, as I like to call it, a categorical bucket. That said, sometimes different buckets are appropriate at different times; we're still hard-pressed to explain art in terms of neurobiology and vice versa (though the former has a bit more hope here). So it will be convenient to adopt different buckets/frames when approaching different things.



I think you have to establish how you want to write differently. Do you want to build a new bucket, or do you want to adopt as many of the old buckets as possible in order to maximize your expressive capacity? Or perhaps both?

[blazeofglory]

In fact I want always to put what I want to put differently from what I see put in the literature I always come across. I have a store of observations and the judgments of what I see around me or the events I have bumped into in my life. In fact I am always confused about value judgments and cannot discriminate between things or good and bad. I see only gray.

I want to dip into the cores of what makes man, the macabre subconscious of him. We are in a cloak of what we appear to be to the rest who see us in our walks of life and the real me is somewhere else still unexplored, something dirty and savage and yet in our wakefulness we choose to reject that ghoulish part of us.

I agree with you immensely that "the different philosophies, more or less, give merely different perspectives of the same thing". What I want to put forth is delimited by the lack of words and the acceptance of the society I am in. I have to sell my products, that is, my articles and I need a market and there are market players and I am likely to be outplayed by those market makers.

That is why I reluctantly trying to contain myself in a frame though my ideas are brimming and the bucket is too small for me

[Theunderground]

No offense,but your writing is quite obscure and over-conceptual.
Im not sure,but i think the market likes literature which is quite clear cut and leaves me in little doubt as to what you are trying to say.
Derrida,these 'death of the author' guys and those who view everything through a theoretical dogma really have a lot to answer for and seem to have created a lot of confused literary critics.

[Cunninglinguist]

No offense,but your writing is quite obscure and over-conceptual.
Im not sure,but i think the market likes literature which is quite clear cut and leaves me in little doubt as to what you are trying to say.
Derrida,these 'death of the author' guys and those who view everything through a theoretical dogma really have a lot to answer for and seem to have created a lot of confused literary critics.

If the method doesn't suit your predisposed way of thinking then don't adopt it. The market, no doubt, enjoys "clear cut" tangible literature that explains things in terms of specifications rather than abstractions. I think the vast majority of philosophical thinkers realize that people find abstractions abstruse; yet, just because they are unpopular doesn't mean they are dispensable. At any rate, I don't think that the market should define our standard of success here.

I also don't think that philosophers have fostered the confusion. The people that have mistaken them have. A prime example, I would argue, is David Hilbert's interpretation of Kant, whereon was Hilbert's premise for "Hilbert's Program." In short, he thought that how we conduct our inferential affairs was based on preference, which is far from what Kant argues. The problem, more or less, is that people don't think for themselves, constantly and willingly referring to authorities to guide them while lacking a comprehensive understanding of the authorities in the first place. Anyways, I suspect that without them people would act like feral sheep.

[Theunderground]

The more that people refer to 'authorities' as authoritive the more people will not think for themselves.
There is nowt wrong with 'feral' as long as a next man can understand it.

I feel a good writer should be skilled enough to get his point across to any general reader and not just a philosophy professor/literary theorist. Its no good blaming readers for writers who cant write clearly.
Writing is an expressive medium for communication of ideas,thoughts etc,not an exercise in obfuscation and self indulgent praise of a select few. (or maybe it is to some 'elites'.)

Hope i have made myself clear...:p

[Cunninglinguist]

I feel a good writer should be skilled enough to get his point across to any general reader and not just a philosophy professor/literary theorist. Its no good blaming readers for writers who cant write clearly.
Writing is an expressive medium for communication of ideas,thoughts etc,not an exercise in obfuscation and self indulgent praise of a select few. (or maybe it is to some 'elites'.)

I don't know about that. Going back to Kant, I think if he had tried to tailor his writing so that the general public could have read it, he would not have been able to properly articulate his ideas. If Kant had simply given up because he did not have that capacity 19th, 20th, and 21st century philosophy would be quite barren. Perhaps then we shouldn't expect philosophers to be "good writers" and to tailor their work to a layman demographic. I don't think the philosophers are trying to be elitist; simply, I think that the philosophers prefer a mode of thinking that common people find obscure. On the other hand, saying that one mode of thinking and one mode of writing are better than any other sounds elitist to me.

[Theunderground]

Well,one reason why philosophers like Kant write obscurely is the obscure 'ideas' which they are trying to get across. I appreciate that sometimes 'new ideas' may be hard to digest even for well read peoples but surely a writer is supposed to be skilled in getting even difficult concepts over by means of clear prose? I mean a guy like Hume has some very ground shattering ideas but at least he expresses them in a way that you understand what he is getting at linguistically.
A writer can use many different modes of writing,and may use poetry,metaphor,prose but the bottom line is he needs to be able to get his point across generally,unless he is specifically writing for a narrow field of people and using 'jargon' which everybody in that field is familiar with,capiche?

[Cunninglinguist]

Well,one reason why philosophers like Kant write obscurely is the obscure 'ideas' which they are trying to get across. I appreciate that sometimes 'new ideas' may be hard to digest even for well read peoples but surely a writer is supposed to be skilled in getting even difficult concepts over by means of clear prose? I mean a guy like Hume has some very ground shattering ideas but at least he expresses them in a way that you understand what he is getting at linguistically.
A writer can use many different modes of writing,and may use poetry,metaphor,prose but the bottom line is he needs to be able to get his point across generally,unless he is specifically writing for a narrow field of people and using 'jargon' which everybody in that field is familiar with,capiche?

Once again, it ultimately comes down to the fact that the writer cannot be held accountable for the reader's stupidity. Hume lacks technical precision, which is why he did not go as far as Kant. While his lack of technical precision makes him more approachable, it is the very thing that undermines his capacity as a writer of philosophy. Now Kant had the precision, but with it abstruseness; thus, while he went farther people are more prone to misunderstand, but we can't blame Kant for that. Moreover, if you don't know German, of course Hume is that much easier to read. It's not translated.

Anyways, you're belying what you've already said: "I feel a good writer should be skilled enough to get his point across to any general reader and not just a philosophy professor/literary theorist." then, "the bottom line is he needs to be able to get his point across generally, unless he is specifically writing for..." The first statement is an unconditional description; the second statement admits an exception. What makes a piece of writing good principally depends on who you are writing for. Since, apparently, you do not prefer conceptual thinking, my original post was not for you; for that, I do not think you are justified in calling it overly-conceptualized and bad writing. That's simply imposing your preference as an absolute standard of value.

Going back to the original point of contention, however; it's the people that willingly reference the 'authorities' in the first place. The confusion that the authorities have "seemed" to make generally result from misinterpretations and misunderstandings on the part of the reader, not the other way around. And, while the reader does not have the intelligence to even interpret properly, how do you expect him to get along without anything to refer to at all?

[Theunderground]

Well,i know from this response that humes 'reason should be the slave of passions' coupled with Nietzsches point about philosophers aggrandising their prejudices is all too true!!!
I will also resort to Sterne and early Wittgenstein to illustrate the gap between 'words' and what they purport to refer to.(AKA slippage of language.)
My bottom line (and dont take it as a metaphysical absolute fella.) is that i think most people prefer clear prose,and it doesnt mean the more obscure the greater 'intellect' or truth of any given writer . It may just mean Kant is a verbose gentleman with conceptual OCD...
But interpret my words as you wish...:p

[rajeevrnair]

I dont know which particular philosophy suggests this but self improvement and self help is the order of the day. I dont know any particular philosophy that suggests this. Though all books of religion and philosophy encourage some kind of self reliance and self improvement...the emphasis these days is on a kind of fortification...its as if people are fortifying themselves to become virtually immune to the stress around them.

This is an excerpt from what I read about Descartes and the senses:

o further demonstrate the limitations of the senses, Descartes proceeds with what is known as the Wax Argument. He considers a piece of wax; his senses inform him that it has certain characteristics, such as shape, texture, size, color, smell, and so forth. When he brings the wax towards a flame, these characteristics change completely. However, it seems that it is still the same thing: it is still the same piece of wax, even though the data of the senses inform him that all of its characteristics are different. Therefore, in order to properly grasp the nature of the wax, he should put aside the senses. He must use his mind. Descartes concludes:“ And so something which I thought I was seeing with my eyes is in fact grasped solely by the faculty of judgment which is in my mind. ”


In this manner, Descartes proceeds to construct a system of knowledge, discarding perception as unreliable and instead admitting only deduction as a method

Quite simply put one cannot make an assumption based on ones senses alone. This any way not possible for any person who has time to contemplate or think about his actions. But most people these days lack the time to combat the stress and the speed. So they are unable to analyse what they observe with their mind, which will actually then give them an inaccurate answer. In other words for them the same wax now appears different...and so on and so forth with everything around them..when it is the same thing again an again.

[Plummet]

Blazeofglory, I would like to hear from you about Nepali writers and if you see yourself as having the potential to develop your own philosophy based on your home and mother tongue. I agree with your remarks about colonial influences but wonder if you are trying to find a way of literature based on your culture.

[rajeevrnair]

Blazeofglory, I would like to hear from you about Nepali writers and if you see yourself as having the potential to develop your own philosophy based on your home and mother tongue. I agree with your remarks about colonial influences but wonder if you are trying to find a way of literature based on your culture.

I am not a person who seeks to speak in particular for anyone but I feel that anyone who presents a point of view no matter how constrained presents atleast an opportunity for other 'broadminded' people as yourself to let them know what you think of it.

I do believe that perhaps the concerns aired are genuine..yes many people are forced to learn English because it is a Universally accepted language and the fact that it is for some reason appealing really dont know why perhaps it is because I myself am Indian..I think my name doesnt lie.Trust me also if I tell you that I might be an alien in many other aspects as well.I think the internet is a safe place to understand different people if we do so at a good distance..which there is. Personally I think these forums are good. I posted a question and recieved a brilliant answer from someone named bill..thank you again.. i am happy that people actually take time to think here

But the fact on the other hand is that so many terms have come into the English language itself from other places..and even if you do overlook the terms that have come in..let us look at other influences that have affected philosophy..many greek and roman..though European..there was a time when England itself was a roman colony..vampires from Transylvania..yoga from india...meditation from the far east...ninja and sushi and zen from japan and maybe korea as well...the idea of holy war and crusades from the Arab world...you have to admit that has affected philosophy too...though none of the above except the roman can be classified as a colonial influence..and of course there is the inherent german influence..the angles and the saxons.And yet during the second world war..the royal family in England (being of purely german origin) was even addressed by some rebels as barbarians from the east...a term used by the Romans to address most unconquered germans..a result of an unconquered emotion on their part.:nonod:

So the English language is a great language for study and I do not see it as a problem if only there is a wide variety of philosophy to choose from for everyone though we also do unfortunately do also get the 'English green tea and Victorian hats'

[Judas130]

Blaze, many of those categories you noted are anachronisms applied after the fact, words that label a canon constructed for some purpose - be it nationalistic or simply to offer some order to the chaos of texts out there. Furthermore, many philosophies such as that of Marx or Freud have been used only as critical approaches to texts which were not cognisant of such theory. Feminism came about as a critical theory in the minds of middle class white women long after Mary Wollstonecraft considered writing a polemic in the 1790s that expressed what we now consider as Feminist in concern. Only as late as Byron, Shelley and De Quincey was 'Romanticism' a self-reflexive ideology.

Read, learn, research - use what you believe works for you like choosing paint from a pallet - but these sorts of intellectual gains should not have to limit your work.

Among Japanese horror fiction and the science fiction of writers like J.G. Ballard is a commentary on urban decay - seen especially with modern post-apocalyptic texts (e.g. McCarthy's The Road). Eco-Criticism is all to eager to take such texts in to their canon: We see Leopold, Lovelock, etc.

[G L Wilson]

Humanism informs quite a few modern texts, the rest are informed by feeling.
For postmodern texts - Oink, Oink, Oink: A Savage Modern Fable by Eric Yoshiaki Dando is quite excellent and highly recommended.