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What has caused a general shift in aesthetic values and priorities for the literary establishment?
In certain circles, one will often hear refrains like “the modern-day literary establishment acts and functions as if Joyce and Kafka never existed”. The societal archetype of a 'serious writer' has gone from a radical experimentalist like Joyce or Beckett or even people like Calvino, Bernhard, Pynchon etc. to an "elder spokesman for liberal elite values" like lan McEwan, VS Naipaul, or even Salman Rushdie. And yes, I’m aware those guys are not entirely without literary merit. But neither is Celine. Even Gabriel Garcia Marquez is hardly radical on a formal level compared to Joyce or even Faulkner, but I still thoroughly enjoyed Love In The Time of Cholera. What exactly led to this shift in aesthetic priorities though? Even the MFA-ization of literary fiction seems to be a symptom of this shift. A common argument would the rise of mass literacy and wide access to higher education led to a larger demand for more accessible but still aspirational reading material and that this caused things akin to Ulysses to be left in the dust. However, in all fairness, writers like Pynchon still wrote in an era of mass literacy and could sustain a career doing so. Even during the Cold War era you could sustain a career as a 'formally experimental and radical novelist' It's clearly after the end of the Cold War that there was a sea change I think. I'd include the American Silent Generation writers like Pynchon, Delillo, and Cormac McCarthy in that experimental group along with people like Calvino, Bernhard, Perec, etc.
Even modern-day auteur cinema doesn’t completely escape the shadow of directors like Antonioni and Godard, not to mention early montage filmmakers like Eisenstein. So what happened in literature by comparison?
Maybe Bolano and James Kerman are two examples of people who “picked up the torch” from The Moderns to an extent and are primarily recognized for work written after the end of the Cold War. And yes, Kelman’s won a Booker Prize, but he doesn’t have a fraction of the renown of a McEwan.
#entertainment
In certain circles, one will often hear refrains like “the modern-day literary establishment acts and functions as if Joyce and Kafka never existed”. The societal archetype of a 'serious writer' has gone from a radical experimentalist like Joyce or Beckett or even people like Calvino, Bernhard, Pynchon etc. to an "elder spokesman for liberal elite values" like lan McEwan, VS Naipaul, or even Salman Rushdie. And yes, I’m aware those guys are not entirely without literary merit. But neither is Celine. Even Gabriel Garcia Marquez is hardly radical on a formal level compared to Joyce or even Faulkner, but I still thoroughly enjoyed Love In The Time of Cholera. What exactly led to this shift in aesthetic priorities though? Even the MFA-ization of literary fiction seems to be a symptom of this shift. A common argument would the rise of mass literacy and wide access to higher education led to a larger demand for more accessible but still aspirational reading material and that this caused things akin to Ulysses to be left in the dust. However, in all fairness, writers like Pynchon still wrote in an era of mass literacy and could sustain a career doing so. Even during the Cold War era you could sustain a career as a 'formally experimental and radical novelist' It's clearly after the end of the Cold War that there was a sea change I think. I'd include the American Silent Generation writers like Pynchon, Delillo, and Cormac McCarthy in that experimental group along with people like Calvino, Bernhard, Perec, etc.
Even modern-day auteur cinema doesn’t completely escape the shadow of directors like Antonioni and Godard, not to mention early montage filmmakers like Eisenstein. So what happened in literature by comparison?
Maybe Bolano and James Kerman are two examples of people who “picked up the torch” from The Moderns to an extent and are primarily recognized for work written after the end of the Cold War. And yes, Kelman’s won a Booker Prize, but he doesn’t have a fraction of the renown of a McEwan.
#entertainment
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