Is there seriousness in modern literature?

[osho]

An air of classicality? The kind seen in Dickensian novels? Mark twain, Nabokov, Conrad and the like that go back to Marlow, Shakespeare, Milton, Bunyan endlessly who write bulkily and tirelessly and of course passionately. We are not running short of writers and every year we have volumes, catalogues of new books and publishers are running after the books that can appeal to the tastes the mass and serious literature is not for the mass since they are not usually comprehensible.
There are of course writers wining bookers, novel prizes and many others too. Maybe they are worth their works to give them classical breaths.
The Paulo Coelho type has been gaining wider readership, popularity and of course enjoying fat advances and increasingly greater publicity. The overrating of such writers is shadowing the few writers whose luminosity cannot outshine their comradely commercially compeering legions.
When it comes to composing poetry we cannot find equals of TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wordsworth, Shelly, William Blake, just to name a few.
I do not mean there is a dearth of good writers today. Literature in assorted genres are on the rise no doubt, but the ones to eclipse Sartre, Kafka, Hemingway and the type are not in their multitudes today.
Maybe the world is changing and tastes are evolving and interests are getting diverse. We are globalizing our domains of thoughts and crisscrossing geographical fronteirs and cultural and religious barricades.
The Soviet Union has been decomposed into Russia and china took part in things ranging from Olympics through beauty contests to taking interestingly the recent awarding of the novel prize to one of its authors.
Maybe literature is breaking through some of the narrow cloves to be more pervasive, inclusive and assuasive.
I am interested to discuss this issue and learn from your opinions.

[stlukesguild]

Do all eras achieve to the same level of genius in all art forms? No. The painters of the Rococo, as much as I admire them, were not equals of the Renaissance, the Baroque, or Modernism. Nor do all eras speak in the same manner. The heavy tomes by Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Dickens, etc... that you so admire are indeed worthy... but so are the great comedies/farces/satires by Aristophanes, Cervantes, Sterne, Swift, Kafka, Joyce, etc... Have we produced no literary geniuses on the level of Shakespeare, Milton, or Dante? Well surely few eras can boast of such. Have we produced nothing to rival T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wordsworth...? Judging the art of our own time is always the most difficult. The great artists of the past have been cherry-picked for you... and their work has been absorbed... digested by the literary culture... and even the larger culture as a whole. Are there no "serious" writers? I would suggest that you need to recognize that the greatest satire and comedy has always been deadly serious at heart. I would also suggest you look into poets like Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney, Yves Bonnefoy... or such recently deceased figures as Anthony Hecht, Czesław Miłosz, etc... Is the increasing Globalization changing the face of literature? How could it not. Didn't Industrialization, the Renaissance, the French Revolution, the Enlightenment, the Reformation, etc... all change the face of art? What form these changes will take remain to be seen.

[cafolini]

Anything said is deadly serious at heart, good or bad writing. As Steimbeck pur it, time is the only critic without ambition. Time is the filter.

[cacian]

Literature does not need serious it needs an uplift and cheerful face and a smile. A joke here and there about language with language is what is needed. I read because I wish to improve my humour my talent in appearing and feelinf jolly because where medicine fails literature picks up.
Writing is fun and so should reading. I much rather read about a word that turned into a different spelling with a different meaning because then it means I need to think about it in my own time and way. It is fun to figure out new things. It is like a discovery of a new language. I like a challenge of meanings I want them to change because I want to change. Reading the same meaning all over again does not make different it makes me the same as another one.
Literature for me is a world of things I can look at and wonder about. I need to feel that I can contribute my own meanings to literature by contributing new senses and feelings. One way of achieving innovation/creation is to let go of serious and drama.
I have my daily intake of seriousness and drama and I wish for something completely different when I read.
If literature was mosaic I would rearrange it a thousands shapes.
Literature is in danger of escaping our notice because one day we would be able to read without reading because we can work out a meaning from a thousand miles. We ride and drive without thinking about it. Literature is no different to that.
If however literature changes according to our personal meanings then it means I have to pay it more attention and speculate at each and every details everytime something is written. The beauty of literature is the ever changing coats of its nature. Just like the seasons it keeps me on my toes and that is what I most need.

[mortalterror]

Admittedly, I'm much better versed in the older writers and artists, but I think there are definitely a few living today which can equal the accomplishments of the past. Every year there are one or two good novels written, one or two good poems, one or two good popular songs, one or two good paintings, one or two good movies, one or two good plays. It just takes a lot of effort to discover them. For instance, I'd say that Gabriel Garcia Marquez was every bit as good as Hemingway or Faulkner. He's still with us even if he has dementia and isn't writing anymore. Saul Bellow was a very good writer nearly on the level of those old guys. Since the middle of the century when many of those guys you named died we've had a lot of good literature.

1998 My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk (Turkey)
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)
1987 Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami (Japan)
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)

Bulgakov, Herbert, Vonnegut, Albee, Mishima, and Calvino are nothing to sneeze at. And this century we've had

2008 August: Osage County by Tracy Letts
2006 The Road by Cormac McCarthy
2004 Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
2004 2666 by Roberto Bolano
2004 Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
2004 Wolf Totem by Lu Jiamin
2003 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
2003 The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
2002 Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
2002 The Coast of Utopia by Tom Stoppard
2001 The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
2001 The Human Stain by Philip Roth
2000 Ravelstein by Saul Bellow
2000 The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa
2000 A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers

Dave Mitchell is a nice upcoming young talent. Murakami is in his prime. McCarthy is still writing. Tom Stoppard, David Mamet, and Tony Kushner all write good plays.

I was looking at contemporary art yesterday and found myself enjoying the works of Sterling Hundley, James Jean, and Roberto Ferri. They aren't quite as good as Odd Nerdrum, Gottfried Helnwein, Michael Triegel, or Stelios Faitakis, but there is definitely something there, especially in regards to Hundley. And while I was reading the original post I was listening to Peteris Vasks Concerto for Cor Anglais and Orchestra which isn't that bad as far as contemporary classical goes. Now, I'm not about to add it to my list of favorite classical music. The newest work I whole heartedly recommend is 1976's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs by Gorecki, but I feel like if I just keep my ear to the ground, in time I should find newer things worth listening to. And if I put a lot of time into contemporary poetry I might find someone who is the equal of T.S. Eliot. In the meantime, isn't Derek Walcott still alive and doesn't Mario Vargas Llosa write poetry along with his prose?

[Ecurb]

Buglakov died in 1939. True, "Master and Margerita" wasn't published until 1973 -- but it still doesn't count as being written in the second half of the 20th century.

I think technology and changes in the media have a dramatic impact on art. If playwrights aren't as important as they used to be, well, movies and tv have become more important. I'm sure recorded music has an impact on changes in poetry -- from a form of literature that is meant to be read out loud, to one that is seen on the printed page. If the 19th century and early 20th century were a glorious period for the novel, it is probably because cheap printing and the rise of a literate middle class created more demand for novels.

"Modern literature" (by the way) includes not only novels, plays and poetry, but essays, critiques, histories, and biographies (as well as other forms of literature). Perhaps one reason for the "decline" in literature (if there is one) is that many people now see non-fiction as a "scientific" or "polemic" endeavor instead of a literary one (of course it can be both). Gibbon was considered a seminal LITERARY figure. Indeed, some "modernists" might even think (shudder!) scientific pursuits superior to literary ones.

[quidoftullamore]

Never Let Me Go was published in 2005 and it examines what it means to be human, through a glass, darkly. So yes, serious literature is still published and being written.