Sometimes I wonder what will become classics with time. Any thoughts?
Printable View
Sometimes I wonder what will become classics with time. Any thoughts?
One book that deserves to become a classic is The Curious Case of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon as it such a fantastic story told in a brilliant way. Not sure about the rest of his work, but that one is certainly a winner
Also in this category I would put the 3 K-Pax books by Gene Brewer, Human Traces by Sebastian Faulkes and The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster. I don't read a lot of 'modern' fiction, but these few certainly maintain my hope in the writers of today.
I liked The Curious Dog but I don't think it's a classic; it's funny and endearing but not encompassing or deep enough to last generations. I think Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace is a classic which will poured over in 20, 30 years by lovers of literature, but not by the average person.
The books that will last will not necessarily be the best written or deepest (is it possible to get down deeper than Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky etc? Hasn't it all be said already?). The works being written today which will still be read 100 years from now are those which best capture the time in which we are living. Some argue that, in time, every writer (with VERY few exceptions) is forgotten. There is some truth to that, but then again no future writer will ever be able to describe life as a down and out in Paris and London in the 1920s as well as Orwell. There will be future writers with far more talent who may try, but we will still turn to Orwell for this simple reason: he was there. If I want to know what life was like in the trenches during WW1 I won't read Birdsong, I'll read Robert Graves' Goodbye to all that or Sassoon.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dixie Chick
I do sometimes wonder if anything we now regard as genius and classic will still be read 500 years from now. How about 1000 years from now or 4000 years from now? Will even Shakespeare and Homer still be being read? Maybe civilisation and humanity will have changed so much that they'll have less and less to say to us.
Haruki Murakami is busy writing classics as we speak. David Sedaris has been around for a while, and his stuff from the 80's is still just as hilarious now as is it was then. That's all I have for now.
They'll still have the same to say but whether anyone will be interested in listening is a different matter.Quote:
I do sometimes wonder if anything we now regard as genius and classic will still be read 500 years from now. How about 1000 years from now or 4000 years from now? Will even Shakespeare and Homer still be being read? Maybe civilisation and humanity will have changed so much that they'll have less and less to say to us.
Agreed. However I really wonder if Infinite Jest will hold up in future generations. It's a great work but I don't see it holding up like say Blood Meridian (weird example I know) does. I just finished it and loved it and have a few more Wallace books to get through now but for some reason I just can't see it being a classic 25, 50 years down the road.Quote:
Originally Posted by Catamite
Life of Pi (dammit) and the works of Chuck Palahniuk.
Perhaps some of Kazuo Ishiguro's books.
And John Updike (though he recently died--2009-- so I guess he is not currently writing)
I imagine Thomas Pynchon will be read for a good long while to come. But other than him..?
I suspect the form of novel is near exhaustion - nothing of late seems to be particularly developmental, so therefore anything particularly canonical will probably exist in a niched section of a specific canon.
That being said, Autobiography of Red, but that is somewhat old now.
I am not so sure about Pynchon, but Mccarthy and Marquez I would place money on as sure things.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lokasenna
While the first half of 20th century was undoubtedly dominated and stered by american writers, the second half has most of its great stars from south america.
Agreed. I forgot about Marquez! And definitely some other SA authors like Llosa...Quote:
Originally Posted by Alexander III
I forgot both Pynchon and Marquez, I think people will read them in later years if only for the grandiose of their vision. One Hundred Years of Solitude can be frustrating but it's alternate reality means that, in a sense, it is 'timeless'. I think by its language alone it will be read in the future, which is the most significant factor in old works.
Salman Rushdie - Midnight's Children and Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red.Both are innovative and quirky.
I think that the four living writers that Harold Bloom referred to as the best - Pynchon, Roth, DeLillo, and McCarthy - all stand a good chance of holding up.
Of course, I'm sure that there are some very good novelists out there working right now who won't start to receive acclaim until after they've passed on.
Going outside of the realm of novels...If I were to give my honest opinion, I'd say that the figure working today with the best chance of being poured over by English students and professors for years to come (and I'm sure that not many people will agree with me, and that's ok) is this guy:
http://i923.photobucket.com/albums/a.../BobDylan7.jpg
Really?! If you asked a neutral academic to list the great books of the first half of the 20th century it would certainly include American writers, poets etc but it would not be "undoubtedly dominated" by them. A list of the top 10 most important novels of the first half of the 20th century would have to find room for Proust (French), Joyce's Ulysses and possibly Portrait of the Artist (Irish), Huxley's Brave New World (English-British), Orwell's 1984 (English-British), Virginia Woolf (English-British), D H Lawrence's Sons and Lovers or Women in Love (English-British)...and what about Thomas Mann, Kafka, Joseph Conrad...? The only American novels in the top 10 would be Lolita (written by an upper class Russian who'd moved to the USA) and The Great Gatsby.Quote:
Originally Posted by Alexander III
It is even more ridiculous to claim that the literature of the second half of the 20th century has been dominated by South American writers.
Pynchon - I doubt it, seems to weird a gimmicky to last.Quote:
Originally Posted by Desolation
Roth, maybe up until the 90s, but he has gone way downhill in the past while writing weirder, more shallower works.
DeLillo, I think he has already faded to relative obscurity, at least in Canada, and he is no longer part of any real curriculum,
McCarthy, probably. Of the four he seems the most likely to me, and probably the most interesting of the lot. Pynchon is way to gimmick, Roth way to weird and perverted, DeLillo way to synthetic.
That being said, I have enjoyed books by all these authors, but in terms of longevity it is hard to think those as the most likely. Certainly Toni Morrison would be a more likely living author, especially her text Beloved. Likewise we need to factor in more genre into the works, as those works probably have the highest shelf-life for novels these days.
The real international problem is dealing with genre. Poetry is the major genre in many places of the world, whereas in the English speaking, and French speaking world, novel is still the dominant form. Likewise, for novels, there are many types, and the gimmick of post-modernity was experienced differently everywhere.Quote:
Originally Posted by WICKES
At the same time, exposure and timing are so strange. Much of the best Latin American fiction was written around mid-century, far before the books themselves were widely available to the wider English audience.
Chinese fiction was also in a ripe age in the early 20th century, as was Chinese poetry to an extent - this lasted well until mid-century. Nobody seems to mention that in modernism, nor Japan as modernism (which existed) or Korea, or...
Anyone who talks of domination is probably just full of themselves. Every country has contributed if they have been read by enough people. The hardest thing to sell would be Estonian Modernist Literature or something of the like.
People know American post-modernism, and 20th century in literature simply because they are probably anglophone, or speak English. That is the main reason for the apparent dominance. I think it is hardly fitting.
What I am waiting for is the emergence of a Norton Arabic Poetry, but I think I will be waiting for a while.
DeLillo, I think he has already faded to relative obscurity, at least in Canada, and he is no longer part of any real curriculum,
And we all know that Canada is the center of the literary world where the canon is made or broken.:rolleyes:
I think, among living authors, Toni Morrison definitely has the best chance of being read far into the future. Hell, she's already practically a part of the canon.
Aside from her, I think McCarthy has the best chance. Pynchon seems impossible to predict--I say his chances of remembrance are 50/50. I've yet to read Franzen, Roth, or Delilo.
And I agree that the novel as an art form has been exhausted. It's not like they're read or talked about anymore.
Anyone who talks of domination is probably just full of themselves. Every country has contributed if they have been read by enough people.
This is true to an extent... but you know as well as anyone that the "canon" is defined by those nations that are the greatest economic/military/cultural powers. This more true of literature than the visual art or music... because of the limitations of language. If the Anglo-American texts "dominate" the discourse in the twentieth century and Canadian literature is ignored, it is because Canada is irrelevant as an economic/military/cultural power. British, French, American, German, Russian... and the a lesser extent Italian, Spanish, and Latin-American (thanks to their ties with the United States) were the major players in the last century in the international discourse of literature. Japan and China and India and the Middle East are now beginning to be heard. Will the Czech Republic or Estonia or Albania or Australia or Canada become major players in the future. That's somewhat doubtful. Of course in no way can that be taken as a value judgment... in terms of "good" or "bad". These terms are wholly subjective... while it is influence and continued relevance more than anything that defines what survives.
And I agree that the novel as an art form has been exhausted. It's not like they're read or talked about anymore.
I don't buy into that. I don't buy the notion that any art form can be "exhausted" except in the minds of those who cannot see further possibilities themselves. There's a great quote in one of John Barth's "Friday" books (collected essays) in which an author bemoans the fact that he was born so late that all the great narratives, all the great poems, all the great literary innovations have already occurred... and it is impossible for the writer to achieve anything new. The author of the quote was an Egyptian several centuries BC!:shocked:
In all reality it not like the novel has been replaced by a great resurgence of interest in poetry or drama or essay, etc...
Predicting which contemporaries will survive is always a fool's game. How many of us can honestly admit to having done little more than skimmed the surface of what writing is out there... in all languages? I suspect Gabriel García Márquez, Yves Bonnefoy, Jose Saramago, Anne Carson, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, among others may survive. Will their oeuvre as a whole survive... or rather will they be known for a single iconic book (McCarthy's Blood Meridian)?
At other times, I suspect that Hermann Hesse was something of the visionary when he wrote The Glassbead Game in which he foresaw a world in which there is no new art, but rather the art of the past is rediscovered, restructured, and repackaged. I think how we as a a culture have more access to the whole of cultural/artistic achievements of the whole of history and across cultures to unlike any other culture in history. I can sit here before my computer and put my music library on "shuffle" and be serenades by a Beethoven symphony followed by a Gregorian chant followed by Miles Davis, George Gershwin, the Beatles, Johnny Cash, Japanese Shakuhachi flute, and Indian ragas. In other words... the music/culture of "our time" is the music/culture of all time. Discoveries of "lost" or "ignored" composers of the past may be as important if not more-so than the innovations of new music. I suspect something similar is underway in literature and painting. The "discovery" of the Shanameh and the great "forgotten" works of literature of Persia, the Arabs, India, China, Japan, and the rest of Asia may be as important or more important than the new literature of here and now. I don't think this is wholly unique if we consider how the rediscovery of Greek culture during the Romantic age may have been more important than many of the innovations of the time.
Or not... just musing after a couple of martinis and an espresso laced with Frangelico.:cheers2:
Military power never was a sign of artistic power. The Greek models haunted their Roman conquerors.
Either way, my point was not that the US was so great or whatever, but that other countries are ignored because people love to yell about how great the US is.
As for me commenting on Canada, you just love to jump on the bandwagon and bash, since I dared to comment on where I was judging from - maybe you should say that perhaps the US is not the be all and end all, and your own critical perspective is biased due to your local.
As for the novel, of course narrative as a form is not done, I meant the novel as a genre. The same way that dominating forms fade into obscurity over time. The Shi moves into the Sao, the Sao into the Fu, the Fu into the Yue Fu, the Yue Fu into the regulated Shi, the Regulated Shi into the Ci, the Ci into the Qu, the Qu into the Open Form. None of the forms died (except for the Fu and Sao really) but they got exhausted and faded into obscurity, as a new dominant form emerged. Very few people were writing Yue Fu when the Qu was in its height.
Take the Nouveau Roman as an example, the form itself saw the exhaustion of the 19th century model, and adapted a new genre of composition.
Take then our novels today - very different than Pamela, or Walter Scott's or even Joseph Conrad's who is the forerunner of modernism.
It is very possible than genres may be exhausted and move out of favor. That is what traditionally tends to happen as trends change. By me claiming that novels as inventive would pose a problem is a fair criticism - it is proving difficult these days to see such genre stretching, the same way it was shown that modernism really redefined genre, so too will novel be redefined in my time, into something else.
Besides which, this doesn't imply that nobody will write novels, merely as a dominant discourse in high literature, they have passed their glory days.
Military power never was a sign of artistic power. The Greek models haunted their Roman conquerors.
But then were the Greeks not military powerhouses as well? I'm not suggesting that military strength alone is any assurance of artistic merit. In many ways the Roman/Greek dichotomy has been applied to Europe and the US with the Europeans as the Greeks... a culture that has seen its military dominance pass into the hands of a younger, dynamic nation that in many ways envies... is haunted by their older and richer culture. But I assume Mortal will be here momentarily to take you to task for underestimating Roman culture (although I tend to prefer the Greeks myself).
What I am suggesting is that there is a link between money and power and art. Art has always flourished where it was supported. There is also a link between art and an influx of outside ideas. Athens, Rome, Constantinople, Venice, Florence, Paris, London, New York, Los Angeles... the major cultural cities have long benefited from the influx of foreigners and foreign ideas and art as a result of trade, immigration, and military conquest. If we look at the history of California we cannot help but recognize just how influential the influx of ideas and individuals from outside were to the evolution and growth of something as powerful as Hollywood and the American film industry.
As for the novel, of course narrative as a form is not done, I meant the novel as a genre. The same way that dominating forms fade into obscurity over time. The Shi moves into the Sao, the Sao into the Fu, the Fu into the Yue Fu, the Yue Fu into the regulated Shi, the Regulated Shi into the Ci, the Ci into the Qu, the Qu into the Open Form. None of the forms died (except for the Fu and Sao really) but they got exhausted and faded into obscurity, as a new dominant form emerged. Very few people were writing Yue Fu when the Qu was in its height.
...your own critical perspective is biased due to your local.
As is your own. Do you honestly believe that anyone here has the least idea just what WTF you are talking about when you start citing all these Chinese poets and movements... or cares? I have been accused of being pedantic... as have most of us who have read obsessively, but really, JBI, do you honestly imagine you can make a point by alluding to a body of knowledge that is as esoteric as this is to the majority here? Or is your point merely to impress others?
Take the Nouveau Roman as an example, the form itself saw the exhaustion of the 19th century model, and adapted a new genre of composition.
Take then our novels today - very different than Pamela, or Walter Scott's or even Joseph Conrad's who is the forerunner of modernism.
It is very possible than genres may be exhausted and move out of favor. That is what traditionally tends to happen as trends change. By me claiming that novels as inventive would pose a problem is a fair criticism - it is proving difficult these days to see such genre stretching, the same way it was shown that modernism really redefined genre, so too will novel be redefined in my time, into something else.
What is intriguing is that some of the elements of artifice that were so obviously played up in the early "novels"... Don Quixote or Tristram Sterne... seem more related to Modern and Post-Modern approaches to the novel than they do to the older, "naturalistic" approach to the novel.
Again... my question to you... as you are placing yourself as the discerning critic... what do you see replacing the novel as we know it? certainly I see alternatives in Donald Barthleme, J.L. Borges, Italo Calvino, Homero Aridjis" and Anne Carson's blurring of novel and poem, W.S. Merwin's "prose", etc... but I'm not certain I see any clear heir to the position of the novel as we know it.
Online Literature?
McCarthy and Marquez are locks in my opinion to go down as great authors, some of their works as classics, comparable to any ever written.
Oh yeah, Atwood too. She's so ancient I forget that she's still alive. She's very unilateral but I think that a few of her works have staying power, especially among feminists.
I'm pretty sure Mutatis was being sarcastic, we're talking about novels right now.Quote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
Is that so? Here's how I see the score:Quote:
Originally Posted by WICKES
1996 Infinite Jest by William Foster Wallace (USA)
1992 The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Jose Saramago (Portugal)
1991 Angels in America by Tony Kushner (USA)
1990 Omeros by Derek Walcott (Saint Lucia)
1987 Beloved by Toni Morrison (USA)
1985 Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (USA)
1985 The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (Canada)
1981 Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (India)
1980 The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (Italy)
1979 If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino (Italy)
1974 The Envoy of Mr. Cogito by Zbigniew Herbert (Poland)
1973 The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (Russia)
1973 The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Russia)
1970 The Temple of Dawn by Yukio Mishima (Japan)
1969 Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth (USA)
1969 Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (USA)
1967 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Columbia)
1966 The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon (USA)
1966 Death of a Naturalist by Seamus Heaney (Ireland)
1965 Closely Watched Trains Bohumil Hrabal (Czechoslovakia)
1965 The Green House by Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru)
1964 The Homecoming by Harold Pinter (Britain)
1963 Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar (Argentina)
1962 Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee (USA)
1962 The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes (Mexico)
1961 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (USA)
1961 A House For Mr Biswas by V.S. Naipaul (India)
1959 The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass (Germany)
1958 The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (Italy)
1957 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak (Russia)
1957 On the Road by Jack Kerouac (USA)
1957 Mihyar of Damascus: His Songs by Adonis (Syria)
1956 Seize the Day by Saul Bellow (USA)
1956 Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill (USA)
1956 The Devil to Pay in the Backlands by Joao Guimaraes Rosa (Brazil)
1955 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (Russia)
1955 The Emperor of Ice Cream by Wallace Stevens (USA)
1955 Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo (Mexico)
1954 Sunstone by Octavio Paz (Mexico)
1954 Lord of the Flies by William Golding (Britain)
1953 Gimpel, the Fool by Isaac Bashevis Singer (Poland)
1953 Waiting For Godot by Samuel Beckett (Ireland)
1952 The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (USA)
1952 The Shield of Achilles by W.H. Auden (Britain)
1952 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (USA)
1952 The Financial Expert by R.K. Narayan (India)
1951 Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas (Britain)
1951 The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (USA)
1951 Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar (France)
1950 Canto General by Pablo Neruda (Chile)
1950 The Bald Soprano by Eugene Ionesco (Romania)
1949 1984 by George Orwell (Britain)
1949 Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller (USA)
1948 The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki (Japan)
1948 The Caucasian Chalk Circle by Bertolt Brecht (Germany)
1948 A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams (USA)
1948 Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata (Japan)
1948 Death Fugue by Paul Celan (Romania)
1947 Fortress Besieged Qian Zhongshu (China)
1945 Rescue by Czeslaw Milosz (Poland)
1944 No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre (France)
1944 Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina)
1944 The Dwarf by Par Lagerkvist (Sweden)
1942 The Stranger by Albert Camus (France)
1942 Antigone by Jean Anouilh (France)
1940 Requiem by Anna Akhmatova (Russia)
1939 The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (USA)
1938 The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel by Nikos Kazantzakis (Greece)
1937 Out of Africa by Isak Dineson (Denmark)
1937 The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat (Iran)
1935 Wings of Gabriel by Muhammad Iqbal (India)
1935 Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias by Federico Garcia Lorca (Spain)
1934 Message by Fernando Pessoa (Portugal)
1933 Man's Fate by Andre Malraux (France)
1932 Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine (France)
1932 The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil (Austria)
1929 The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (USA)
1928 Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence (Britain)
1927 Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse (Germany)
1926 Capital of Pain by Paul Eluard (France)
1925 Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (Britain)
1925 The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (USA)
1925 Cuttlefish Bones by Eugenio Montale (Italy)
1924 The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (Germany)
1924 Anabase by Saint-John Perse (France)
1923 The True Story of Ah Q by Lu Xun (China)
1923 The Prophet by Khalil Gibran (Lebanon)
1923 Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo (Italy)
1922 The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot (USA)
1922 In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (France)
1922 Duino Elegies by Ranier Maria Rilke (Germany)
1921 Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello (Italy)
1920 Main Street by Sinclair Lewis (USA)
1920 Hugh Selwyn Mauberley by Ezra Pound (USA)
1919 The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats (Ireland)
1918 Ulysses by James Joyce (Ireland)
1918 The Hellscreen by Ryunosuke Akutagawa (Japan)
1918 The Black Heralds by Cesar Vallejo (Peru)
1917 The Young Fate by Paul Valery (France)
1915 The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (Czechoslovakia)
1915 The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford (Britain)
1915 Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham (Britain)
1914 Kokoro by Natsume Soseki (Japan)
1914 Mending Wall by Robert Frost (USA)
1913 Alcohol by Guillaume Apollinaire (France)
1911 Ithaca by Constantine P. Cavafy (Greece)
1910 Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore (India)
1910 Peruvian Traditions by Ricardo Palma (Peru)
1907 The Ghost Sonata by August Strindberg (Sweden)
1907 The Travels of Lao Ts'an by Liu E (China)
1906 Spring Awakening by Frank Wedekind (Germany)
1905 Songs of Life and Hope by Ruben Dario (Nicaragua)
1904 The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov (Russia)
1903 Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw (Ireland)
1903 The Call of the Wild by Jack London (USA)
1903 The Ambassadors by Henry James (USA)
1902 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (Britain)
1902 The Immoralist by Andre Gide (France)
1902 The Lower Depths by Maxim Gorky (Russia)
1902 The Rain in the Pinewood by Gabriele D'Annunzio (Italy)
1901 Kim by Rudyard Kipling (Britain)
1900 La Ronde by Arthur Schnitzler (Austria)
I think America did pretty well for herself last century. I don't think the claim could be made for any one country dominating though.
I think that during the time of the Roman Republic there was a great deal of envy for the works of Homer, and the dramatists of Greece. There were many who admired Greek painting and sculpture as well. But as the centuries piled up and Roman accomplishments did with them, they had less to envy. Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, and Statius supplied the place that Homer previously had occupied. Seneca, Terence, and Plautus took the place of Sophocles, and Aristophanes. Livy and Sallust built over Herodotus and Thucydides. And once the Forums, the Colosseum, the aqueducts, and the Baths of Diocletian cast their shadows, why would they envy the Acropolis? Cicero took over for Demosthenes. Tibullus, Propertius, Horace, and Lucretius supplied the want of Theocritus, Sappho, Hesiod, etc. Simply put, the Romans didn't stay in awe of the Greeks forever, and they did invent their own genres such as satire and mosaics.Quote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
I think that Hollywood did gain by the introduction of foreign Jews, like Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Lang, Samuel Goldwyn, and Louis B. Mayer; but I doubt it has gained as much artistically from the much larger Mexican immigration to California. As much as you love to tout an open immigration policy as the key to success, the facts suggest otherwise. I think that a handful of German scientists ie Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Werner von Braun probably did more to advance American prosperity than all the illegal aliens picking fruit in Washington. We totally ought to let in people capable of winning the Nobel Prize like Nabokov, but we have enough people to run our 7 Elevens, and we can mow our lawns ourselves.Quote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
I understood him, but then I did read up on Chinese literature last year. Perhaps you ought to do the same instead of criticizing him for being so knowledgeable. You are, after all, prone to being esoteric yourself. Or do you imagine everyone here is familiar with 10th century Persian poetry and 18th century Japanese painting?Quote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
The score?!! I'm not interested in a my country is better than yours contest. My point was that the claim that the USA dominated the first half of the 20th century was pretty shaky. Especially considering that George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh etc were all writing in the first 50 years of the last century. That is not the same as saying that the USA was irrelevant; it certainly was not.Quote:
Originally Posted by mortalterror
It is even more ridiculous to say that South America has dominated the world's literature since WW2. You could argue that the USA has dominated the english-speaking world in the last 60 years, but then that was inevitable given that the USA's population is twice the size of Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and Canada combined.
I never mentioned Americans didn't write great literature, that they "dominated" is another matter altogether. That doesn't just imply doing better than many other countries in terms of output, it implies a ridiculously disproportionate amount.
In music, I would agree.
In literature though, I remain more skeptical. The Nobel is not really a determinant either, as clearly anyone can see that most of the world is not represented.
There were many Chinese authors as worthy of the Nobel as many of the American, British, or Scandinavian ones - Lord of the Flies is a meh book and is not Prize worthy in the sense that it warrants international recognition of that sort. It won it regardless.
You cannot leave a panel of Swedes to decide what is the best in the world, clearly there will be bias, and I am saying there is. Where is Guo Moruo's Nobel? or Qian Zhongshu's? Mishima came close, but Soseki died too soon I guess. Arab authors? Well, I am waiting on Adunis. Darwish maybe could have one, and there are probably countless others as worthy as many of the American and French and Scandinavian and German and whatever else other novelists and poets and dramatists.
The world is very rich in literary culture, there are authors on every corner writing. Proportionally, in terms of literacy, Americans are neither the most well read, nor the biggest population - for instance, there are far more readers in China than in the US, and literary culture, that is, print culture, is far more prevalent. Movie culture is certainly bigger in the US, and I would argue that contributes to American film being lightyears ahead of Chinese cinema.
Genre and art are factored by more than just political power.
And Mortal, for your above post on the Roman Greece, how do you factor St. Augustine's early schoolboy days and his Greek hating into that scheme. Likewise, how do we place someone like Ovid accurately, when Hegemony probably is the root reason we lost his final works written in his native language. I think the idea of replacement is true, to an extent, except that the shadow and dominance hovers the same way Dante, and Milton would need to wrestle with both ends of the tradition later, which after all is clearly Greek in origin and form. I am sure that factored heavily into Latin culture up until the end, and I am wondering how different a Greek-lined culture, or even an Arabic-lined culture would translate into a history of classical literature.
After all, the use of Greek words even in our English makes one perhaps a little bit skeptical that the Romans ever actually succeeded in overstepping them. Plato seems the dominant philosophical mode even today, whereas no Roman thinker ever came close. Literary criticism pulls from Aristotle, not Cicero, Drama from Aeschylus. That the Romans ever vanquished or surpassed is to be skeptically taken, when the same arguments established by the Greeks are still being argued in our cultural world. The extent that can be claimed must be limited, by my understanding, from the fall of Western Rome until the Renaissance, when Greek culture was lost to Western Europe, and therefore Latin culture was the only possibility as a model, but even then, Greek culture was powerful enough to upset the middle ages and kick off a renaissance of literature - the Greek dominance in the arts never really ebbed.
I'm pinning my hopes on DeLillo - but I wouldn't stake my money on it.
What do you like about DeLillo?Quote:
Originally Posted by the facade
The list on the previous page isn't a list of Nobel Prize winners. It's my own personal assessment of the high points of 20th century literature. I make a lot of lists which can be found on my blog. For instance, you mention music. I have a brief chronicle of popular music (mostly American) where I attempted to do much the same thing. http://www.online-literature.com/for...og.php?b=11499Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI
I included Qian Zhongshu, Mishima, Soseki, and Adunis in my list. Darwish is overrated and did not make the list. However, Muhammad Iqbal did along with Sadegh Hedayat and Khalil Gibran.Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI
I don't know that I would go that far. We used to be, as you can see from my list on the best films of any given year. http://www.online-literature.com/for...og.php?b=12188 But right now Scorsese and Spielberg are probably the only two American directors capable of making top level films consistently and they are two old dudes. We aren't seeing a good crop of young talent rising up to fill their place like we used to. China has Zhang Yimou and Wong Kar Wai. South Korea has Jee Woon Kim, Chan-wook Park, and Joon-ho Bong. We aren't the only ones who can make things at the top level. Lars von Trier is somewhere off in Denmark and Guillermo del Toro only makes crappy action films when he comes to Hollywood. When he gets the urge to make an epic cinematic poem he flies off to Spain. I'm not happy at all with American movies of the last couple years.Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI
I don't remember him hating Greek. Maybe I missed something. The stuff from his schoolboy days that sticks out in my mind is all him stealing some apples he didn't really want, and his closeness with his mother, him leaving his mistress, briefly joining a communist cult, becoming a teacher of rhetoric, messing around with Manichaeism, and then finally becoming a Christian. I believe you, I just don't remember the part you are referring to.Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI
Latin was his native language and we have his final works written in that. Tristia, Fasti, Ex Ponto, and Ibis are well preserved. What is lost was the poem he wrote in Getic:Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI
And you shouldn’t marvel if my art’s defective,
since I’ve almost turned into a Getic poet.
Ah! Shameful: I’ve even written a work in Getic,
where savage words are set to Italian metres.
Ex Ponto 4.13
and that is no doubt because nobody in Rome would have known Getic to preserve it there. Besides the tribes people of that time didn't have any book copiers to preserve a work of literature even if they had any people who could read it. Usually, the biggest factor in whether a work is preserved is the number of copies and how widely distributed they are. That means whoever has the most printing presses gets his stuff passed on. Publish or perish.
The reason that books in English are the most well known is partly because of money and power and partly because of commerce. We trade with everyone around the world. It's in their interest to speak our language. China didn't trade with anyone and wouldn't let it's citizens leave to mingle with outsiders for nearly a century. It's not that they don't have hegemony. It's because they don't control publishing houses in North America, Europe, South America, and Africa. Also, they did put a stranglehold on their artists for decades where they decided what could and could not be written, whereas the west had a somewhat freer press.
All through the middle ages Latin clearly had dominance over Greek, as the works of Homer were lost and had to be re-introduced by guys like Boccaccio. Let's remember that though Dante puts him at the head of poetsQuote:
Originally Posted by JBI
Homer is he, the poets' sovran lord;
Next, Horace comes, the keen satirical;
Ovid the third; and Lucan afterward.
he hadn't actually read Homer's works. Virgil is his guide and we see Odysseus cast as a villain for his part of fraud with the Trojan horse mentioned in the Aeneid. Aeneas himself is back in limbo with the poets. Then we have the Latin poet Statius as another major guide to Dante in Purgatory. Dante was clearly far more influenced by Latin than Greek, since I'm almost certain he read one and not the other.
Milton, on the other hand seems to be struggling more with Hebrew than Greek in Paradise Lost, and his verses are often more Latin than English. It's sort of a holdover from his being the official Secretary of Foreign Tongues where he would carry out all foreign correspondence in Latin.
Latin seems to have been dominant in the West clear up through the Renaissance. You have Elizabethan theater modeled on Seneca instead of a Greek for instance. In part this is all because of the Trivium and in part this is because Latin was the language of the Catholic Church. You don't really see a preference for Greek over Latin until the Enlightenment.
We have far more words from Latin and French and German than Greek. I don't think you have to pretend that the Greeks never existed before you no longer have to feel intimidated by them.Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI
I think our current drama pulls more from Ibsen or Shakespeare at the moment.Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI
Are you absolutely certain that the Renaissance, the widespread increase in culture and knowledge across Europe, was actually caused by the re-introduction of Greek thought? I feel it was more like with the increased prosperity the Europeans already enjoyed they were finally able to dabble in Greek again along with their own new studies.Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI
I think we are too close to the present to judge it from the future. For example, Charlotte Brontë did not think very highly of Jane Austen's books. From the 20th Century, I think The Lord of the Rings will last for hundreds of years. When it first came out, only hippies were reading it. And I remember in the case of the dogs that killed a lady in a San Francisco apartment, the owners of the dogs were considered weirdos because they had The Lord of the Rings in their personal library. The problem with judging books today is that we cannot read all of them. There appear to be almost more writers than readers. Hopefully the good books will get sifted up to the top. But it may also happen that a truly great book will be entirely lost in the verbosity of our times.
I don't think the renaissance itself was rooted in Greek thought, I think the climate for literature was. Plato in particular - the religious upheavals start from the hit with Greek original texts - Erasmus puts out his works on the New Testament, Luther launches his pamphlet, and everywhere and anywhere Plato is discussed.Quote:
Originally Posted by mortalterror
Take for instance the book of the courtier, the big speech of Pietro Bembo's is pure Neo-Platonism, to Spenser's Four Hymns - the presence of Greek culture upsets the Latin trajectory of Rome which hadn't changed too much since the middle ages.
As for Chinese cinema - most of the well known Chinese films that earn praise in the Western world are not written or filmed for a Chinese audience. The bulk of major cinema in China is lightyears behind the rest of the world, as something like a movie theatre is a new, bourgeois phenomenon (the equivalent of our going to the Opera, and out of the budget of the vast majority of Chinese citizens). The rest of film is delivered online, which restricts its viewers to those with internet service - most but not all people.
The actual development of cinema in China is quite pathetic comparatively. Besides which Zhang Yimou to me is totally overrated. Either way he is a weird pervert in so many ways (every time he brings out a new starlet for his movies, the press and internet fills up with new sex scandal, his last one being 17) that one kind of wishes he would just retire already. As for American cinema in decay, well, understand that however you want, in terms of cultural capital, Chinese cinema is relatively worthless in comparison.
There are creative film makers, but the bulk of the best ones are working behind the censor - only the big budget epic movies ever get the clearing, and they are usually filled with propaganda of some form or another. What is able to be depicted in Chinese cinema has not reached the level of the film Deliverance yet, even though that would be a better projection of some realism. But how do you legally film a highly censored country where the bulk of people do not have running water in their washrooms? You basically either set it back 500 years and bring in a Western team of CGI people, or you film cityscapes and create an illusion of China, and a film which ultimately is disengaged from real society. Usually these films end with a rather cheesy, often feel good moral, or with a sad, but uplifting moralizing ending
That is not saying I believe all art should be realism, but it begs questioning to what extent film can develop. In terms of literature, the censorship is far, far more lax, which allows much greater artistic freedom. Still some things are blocked, and entire words are blocked all together (things like, Pink, warm stream) from online presses.
The real challenge to publishing and literature now is dependent on how new medium are incorporated into the distribution and creation of works. The physical text is quickly disappearing. The power of review and publishing to control what people read is fading. The production costs of a text now are virtually zero - electronic data costs no money. How do we understand that in the future of literature? What goes online, what goes on the kindle, what gets removed, or unupdated, or unscanned?
Likewise, how does literature act in the presence of television and cinema, which are becoming, if not are already more dominant medium for narration. How does the market adapt to digital formats. Where does poetry fit in?
Likewise, how does literature work over borders? What does it mean to read an English text in China, or a Chinese text in Canada, or to be a Chinese person reading an English text in Canada, or to be a Canadian reading a Chinese text in China?
These are all big questions which are more pressing than the notion of "Where". Even American cinema has had trouble promoting a central tradition anyway - just look at how scholarship runs - you cannot even be an American lit specialist, you are always a subtitle - Contemporary African American literature, or Jewish American literature, or Asian North American literature (whatever that means).
It is even more ridiculous to say that South America has dominated the world's literature since WW2.
You seem so quick to dismiss this possibility that I have to wonder if you have even looked at the wealth of writers from Latin America producing major contributions to literature since WWII:
Gabriel García Márquez
J.L. Borges
Octavio Paz
Carlos Drummond de Andrade
Nicolás Guillén
Julio Cortázar
Mario Vargas Llosa
Carlos Fuentes
José Donoso
Augusto Monterroso
Laura Esquivel
Pablo Neruda
José Emilio Pacheco
Alejo Carpentier
Homero Aridjis
Miguel Ángel Asturias
Roberto Juarroz
Nicanor Parra
Tomás Eloy Martínez
Seriously, I would be hard-pressed to come up with a body of French or German or English or American or Russian writers who could clearly surpass the contributions of the above Latin-American authors... and I have little doubt that I am barely scraping the surface here.
Though I think the best cinema today is happening in South Korea, Zhang Yimou is totally not overrated. I'd place him with Kurosawa and Scorsese in terms of greatness. To Live, Raise the Red Lantern, and Shanghai Triad were all great films. Hero and Curse of the Golden Flower were pretty good films and beautiful. I'm currently watching Riding Alone For Thousands of Miles, which doesn't look like one of his best but I'm definitely looking forward to watching everything else from this guy. I've read nothing but excellent reviews of Red Sorghum, Ju Dou, Story of Qui Ju, Not One Less, and The Road Home. I'm also looking forward to his new film that came out last month with Christian Bale The Flowers of War. 17 is a little young but it's hardly Roman Polanski territory and philandering seems par for the course when it comes to great directors. Just think of Woody Allen and Federico Fellini.Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI
Besides Chinese cinema doesn't rest on Yimou's shoulders alone. I mentioned Wong Kar Wai. His films are beautiful and artsy as they come. In The Mood For Love, Chunking Expess, 2046, Ashes of Time. He's earned a place at the table.
Then there's John Woo and nobody does action like John Woo. A Better Tomorrow 2, The Killer, Hard Boiled. He's back in Hong Kong again and his Red Cliff was a pretty huge hit there. So what if his American movies suck? So do Jackie Chan's.
Kaige Chen made Farewell My Concubine, The Emperor and the Assassin, and a couple of other films I probably should have seen as well.
Then I hear about films like Yi Yi, Beijing Bicycle, or The King of Masks and it seems like there must be a vibrant film community in China. After all, it's the same country that gave us Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and Infernal Affairs.
I worry about that too. The real culprit in the middle ages responsible for the loss of antiquity wasn't illiteracy. It was the codex. There wasn't a concerted effort to transfer everything important from scrolls to the new medium. That's why I like projects like Project Gutenberg or Archive.org. The problem with them, as I'm just finding out as I transfer files to my Nook, is that there is no good format yet for poetry on a small screen. I have to custom build a lot of my epubs to get them to look right. Then not a few of my pdfs look right either, and I don't have the necessary zoom functions. Although I guess if I rooted it and downloaded the right apps and software...Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI
The phrase dominated shouldn't be used so liberally. They have done well, and have had a very unique, developed, and aesthetically high output. Marquez in particular has had perhaps the best international success, yet the word dominate, well, lots of countries have had such great authors. I would also say that the proximity to the United States, and American military funding has also helped a great deal in making those Latin American authors really available to a larger audience - Spanish is a very important political language after all.Quote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
That is the biggest question to me, how much is actual "boom" and how much is just the emergence of attention, or translation. I am of the mind that almost every country in the world has a sizable literary output, but how much do we know about early 20th century Persian poets? As much as we do, lets say, Spanish poets from the same time period?
Domination is hard to count.