Any current books you think will become lasting literature?

[WICKES]

Is that so? Here's how I see the score:

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.

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.

[JBI]

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.

[the facade]

I'm pinning my hopes on DeLillo - but I wouldn't stake my money on it.

[Drkshadow03]

I'm pinning my hopes on DeLillo - but I wouldn't stake my money on it.

What do you like about DeLillo?

[mortalterror]

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.

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=11499

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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 poets

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think our current drama pulls more from Ibsen or Shakespeare at the moment.

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.

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.

[Truthlover]

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.

[JBI]

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=11499



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.



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.



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.



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:

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 poets

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.



I think our current drama pulls more from Ibsen or Shakespeare at the moment.



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.

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.

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).

[stlukesguild]

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.

[mortalterror]

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.

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.

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.

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?

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...

[JBI]

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.

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.

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.

[JuniperWoolf]

The score?!! I'm not interested in a my country is better than yours contest.

Then don't engage in conversation with Mortal, that's kind of his schtick.

[carolinehelston]

Or looking closer to the present, Victorian literature. Why are our classics texts dominated by Victorian literature? Britain in the 19th century was a superpower: that's why people could begin to afford better things like novels. So writers could finally earn a better living. Actually I think it was easier for a Victorian writer to earn a living compared to now, because they didn't have TV or cinema then. But why Victorian??? Why not 18th century for instance? or even modernist books? The classics everyone knows of are Dickens and the 19th century authors. I think the classic is a novel that will show a universal, timeless thought or feeling, rather than the spirit of the age. Why does Great Expectations rank higher than David Copperfield, even though DC was what Dickens considered his best work? Because the misery and ambition is universal, and the golden sunshine in DC isn't.

I wonder whether anyone has noticed that when there are fewer restraints on writing, the novel is more likely to become a classic? In the 19th century the publishers wanted long books, so you could write a lot of stuff you wanted (except the controversial bits) and extend the stories to so many characters, so you got to cover a lot of things deeply. Now my lecturer says her publisher cuts down on her words (they do that for all literary fiction), which is why modern novels can be dissatisfactory. If the author wants to explain or analyse the chracter or situation he can't because it is deemed irrelevant. But as a result it's harder to empathise with the character, which is why I feel literary fiction won't rule this age.

Has anyone considered the possibility of fantasy taking over the literary world? I know they're more plot-driven than character-based, but epics seem to be timeless for some reason. Look at LOTR and the Greek epics. His Dark Materials may be a possible candidate. I know it's set in the past, but the idea of a tyrannous establishment seems to be an old plot device. And the wicked parents. In fantasy you get to exercise the creativity and wonder you don't get to do in fiction (stupid publishers) but if it has a fault the characters are not always realistic and can be too serious. If you think about it, Gothic tales and HP Lovecraft are making a comeback too, though they weren't considered serious fiction in their lifetime.

[Drkshadow03]

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...

Yeah, I'm having similar problems with poetry on my Kindle. The formatting of the poetry always looks like crap. I'm not sure how to fix it, though.

[mortalterror]

Then don't engage in conversation with Mortal, that's kind of his schtick.

Ouch, I'm stung.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRvVzaQ6i8A

[Alexander III]

Yeah, I'm having similar problems with poetry on my Kindle. The formatting of the poetry always looks like crap. I'm not sure how to fix it, though.

I too have the problem, It is damned annoying.