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Literary movements and aesthetics: what do you feel the purpose of literature should be?
So there have been some recent posts here on literary movements. I’m far from an expert on these, but I seem to chart a general movement from 19th century realism and its variants to 20th century modernism, and then to post-modernism and then to whatever hodgepodge it is that we have today.
It feels like it used to be the case that people would argue passionately about what the purpose of any particular art was. Musicians would argue about what made for great music, visual artists about what made for great art, and novelists and poets about what made for great novels and poems.
It seems like we lack that kind of passionate argument over what art means and how it should work nowadays.
What do you feel the purpose of literature — especially novels — should be, and what aesthetic goes along with that?
Personally I think the purpose of literature is to depict individual perspective, and to convey that perspective through style. I think interior monologue and subtle descriptions of a flow of consciousness are what literature can do better than other art forms.
In service of that, I love Proust’s version of modernism (not the Joycean kind). I like profound insight into psychology and society. I like styles that allow for plenty of telling and not just showing. I like baroque sentence styles (when they are used to create a powerful effect, of course).
I hate MFA minimalism, any kind of idea of literature as cinema and therefore only showing what a camera would show, and all kinds of annoying post-post-modernist cleverness and shallowness and pop culture over-reference. I dislike novels being conceived to further some political agenda, except very indirectly. They should first serve to depict psychological truth.
What about you?
#entertainment
So there have been some recent posts here on literary movements. I’m far from an expert on these, but I seem to chart a general movement from 19th century realism and its variants to 20th century modernism, and then to post-modernism and then to whatever hodgepodge it is that we have today.
It feels like it used to be the case that people would argue passionately about what the purpose of any particular art was. Musicians would argue about what made for great music, visual artists about what made for great art, and novelists and poets about what made for great novels and poems.
It seems like we lack that kind of passionate argument over what art means and how it should work nowadays.
What do you feel the purpose of literature — especially novels — should be, and what aesthetic goes along with that?
Personally I think the purpose of literature is to depict individual perspective, and to convey that perspective through style. I think interior monologue and subtle descriptions of a flow of consciousness are what literature can do better than other art forms.
In service of that, I love Proust’s version of modernism (not the Joycean kind). I like profound insight into psychology and society. I like styles that allow for plenty of telling and not just showing. I like baroque sentence styles (when they are used to create a powerful effect, of course).
I hate MFA minimalism, any kind of idea of literature as cinema and therefore only showing what a camera would show, and all kinds of annoying post-post-modernist cleverness and shallowness and pop culture over-reference. I dislike novels being conceived to further some political agenda, except very indirectly. They should first serve to depict psychological truth.
What about you?
#entertainment
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