Why is a baroque style so out of fashion in literary fiction?

[theorange]

All the literary journals these days laud minimalism and realism. The typical New Yorker story (and of course MFA writing generally) tries to be just like Raymond Carver. Show, don't tell, be spare in your sentences, and all that crap. Why? Apropos of a recent thread on flowery language, the great writers of the past used incredibly complex and gorgeous styles and had no hesitation with "telling" in great detail.

See Faulkner, Melville, Proust, Woolf, Ruskin, Emerson, William James, Thomas Hardy, and on and on.

And current writers of literary fiction seem often to have barely even read these people. That lack of erudition plays itself out in the extraordinarily boring "realism" of their work, which is in fact anything but real.

Why is contemporary literary fiction so thin and deprived, so ignorant of our literary past?

And why don't MFA programs teach the real classics (not fake ones like Infinite Jest or whatever)?

Anyone else think this is pathetic?

[Danik 2016]

Just a question. You probably mean the writer Henry James. William James was his brother, the psychologist.
I agree with you about the old masters. But ours is an age of survival. Pictures and selfies have become so important because they are a kind of survival.There is not much place for any kind of refinement any more I think.

[JCamilo]

Show, dont tell is damage done by those shepherds trying to make ll writers be the same thing (and make money out of it).

Now, most writers do not apply the "show, don't tell" that well. They simplify for the sake of dumbing down the reader, not because they are searching for precision. While we live in an age the medium asks for fast reading, it is a visual age. Quite suited for baroque and you have names like Pynchon who are more on this side of heaven.

[EmptySeraph]

Education went on a downhill. It truly was only to be expected that the style of writing should have gone on a descending line too. People have jobs. People earn money. They buy food, have sex and children and buy coffins. They are no longer willing to pay attention to art, to the most demanding form of art that is writing. They want it to be done swift and effortlessly. New writers just don't possess the required erudition to craft phrases like Joyce, Proust, James, Woolf, Pater, Ruskin or De Quincey, they no longer know how to put things together, more ofthen than not actual prse writers have no notion of poetry and they can't bring any rhytm or sonority to their text, they don't know how to put together words, how to form a string, how to link them, how to give their mass of words cohesion. And, of course, the novel kind of readers would't be able to read anything better than this kind of anti-intelectualism, frothy and cursory slapdash claptrap.

[JCamilo]

Baroque is just one style of art. Someone disliking it has nothing to do with education, it has to do with affinity. I mean, Voltaire is not baroque at all, was he uneducated?