We're in 2023 already and it doesn't seem to be a generational passing of the torch with regards to literature.
Older millenials are pushing 40 and yet it doens't seem they have produced great authors like in the previous centuries. It seems like Gen X was the last generation that did, and even so they have less big names to them than the boomers and the previous generations.
This is not meant to shit on millenials nor do I want to star yet another boomers vs millenials war, I don't care about that.
It's just that from the 90's and onwards we'e produced a lot of fass compsumption books and a few flowers of the day but hardly any masterpiece, and none by the younger generations.
Do you know of any younger author that has the makings of a future great? Anything written in the las 20-odd years that will still be relevant in 50 to 100 years? Where are this generation's greats?
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We have Sarah j Maas, Coleen Hoover, RF Kuang etc.
All amazing talented authors that rival the likes of Dickens, Tolstoy, Twain, Bronte, path etc
I know this is a joke but it made me weep inside.
>Fantasy author, Romance author, Fantasy Author, and probably more fantasy authors.
Literature is dead. There is nothing worth reading in the XXI century. Absolutely nothing.
>why aren't the people who've been immersed in the worst soulless israelite consumer culture ever seen producing great works of art
It’s not just being immersed in bad pop culture. It feels impossible to escape. In the past, people retreated to countryside estates when popular culture got suffocating. It’s questionable whether you can even do that now not only because nobody has the means but also because every square inch of western soil is bathed in wi-fi and has internet connectivity. Not to mention the total transformation of more natural agricultural and village lifestyles into something more modern with cars and machinery etc. So it seems to me it’s less about bad pop culture and more about the inability to escape a bad pop culture.
>every square inch of western soil is bathed in wi-fi and has internet connectivity
Nobody is making you get on the internet, anon. That said, the novel (what OP means when he refers to great works of literature) is a dying form. It's like wondering why nobody is composing great choral masses anymore.
>Nobody is making you get on the internet, anon.
interacting with any other person for longer than a short period of time will indirectly involve you in the goings on of the internet. it is inescapable unless you want to talk to boomers or cave-people all day.
>nobody is making you do [dependency-based activity]
Ok, never come on IQfy again. Simply don't visit this website again I bet you can't do it.
>It's like wondering why nobody is composing great choral masses anymore.
This just came out and I like it a lot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0q3myUcYrw
I think you under-estimate just how pervasive computers and internet technology are. You can dodge it for a while, but not encountering it in daily life is pretty much impossible, especially if you have to earn a living.
>nobody is making you get on the internet
I would like to see you try to get a job and nowadays, even apply to a job, without active access to e-mail. I don't think you can even get a genuine landline anymore rather than just digital voice over the internet.
It’s not just the novel. Poetry has been dead for a while. As for non-fiction, it’s rarely read and the condition of non-fiction being written is complicated. The interest in screens and sheer technical complexity of this epoch alone have just devastated literature, all literature.
>nobody is composing great choral masses anymore.
Arvo Part is the most performed and recorded living composer and he pretty much only does great choral masses
He's also literally a boomer
Another element that I've thought about is there no longer exists any portion of society in which you would converse in elevated language. In polite society, academia, in written correspondence, everything is painfully homogenized and degenerated. You drop a Latinate word in conversation in any of these places and you'll at best be given a few glares and ignored, or worse case, viewed as supercilious (or more likely in their words, "an elitist butthole" or whatever) and actively derided. In schooling, even through college, you are guaranteed to get your wrist slapped by some midwit teacher for attempting anything more complicated in syntax or vocabulary than an eighth grade level: "Not clear enough! Even the dumbest reader must be able to understand it! B-".
I think it would be one thing if there was common language in daily life, but something like poets’ or writers’ or academics’ circles that used elevated language but those are hard to come by. I work in a very well-known university and I’m very conscious of my manner of speaking, but my colleagues don’t care. You would never guess these people are academics or anywhere near academia.
Well, digital computer and internet technology really did a number on literature. And I think the bizarre dogmatic rank closing that’s been happening within publishers hasn’t been particularly good either.
Why even point out the millennials at all? It’s not like generation x made anything really remarkable and it sure doesn’t look like generation z has it in them either. It’s not unique to millenials.
Generation X still produced a handful of great authors, albeit at a noticeably lower number than previous gens. I mentioned millenialls because, from a literary viewpoint, it's their time to shine.
Film has existed for more than a century and its relationship with literatyre has been mostly be a synergetic one. It didn't kill literature by any means. Also current movies are shit.
But the novel is still the flagship of literature, it it dies, it'll take everything with it.
I sort of have a similar opinion, a combination of terminally online masses, homogeneization of culture and the decaying levels of literacy might be the culprits of this gap.
>Older millenials are pushing 40 and yet it doens't seem they have produced great authors like in the previous centuries. It seems like Gen X was the last generation that did, and even so they have less big names to them than the boomers and the previous generations.
I spent my youth on the internet, in forums, playing games, watching - stuff - when I should or could (or would) have been living as a scholar and poet. What happened? I don't know, rape? Pining for pussy? In any case it seems like it's over, but it's not over. As to the guys who did make it in academia, I don't know where their great works are, I would also like to hear an explanation from them.
Why do you expect great works to come from academia?
They expect great works to come from academia because they, like our entire generation, were force fed a lie that academia is the end-all be-all when it comes to pushing the boundaries on almost anything. The boomers aren't off-base when they point at academia being a sacred church to the "younger generations."
You'd be hard-pressed to find almost anything good in cinema. It's mostly just in-jokes and interpretations of 19th/20th century literature. Possibly ironically, some of the more thoughtful works came out of the "stupid" comedy genre, but even that falls flat with hypercommercialized garbage with jokes about sex and mocking the mortal enemy of progress: the dumb, powerless redneck trope.
It’s true. I’ve noticed that academia has monopolized expertise in basically every conceivable arena. Western culture in general worships technical expertise and intellectual scholarship.
> mostly just in-jokes and interpretations of 19th/20th century literature.
>t. Has seen 100 movies ever
Because those are the people who have the time or at least the inclination to make literature their life. Additionally the only place any kind of original artistic movement could exist, if at all, is among young college students. I guess there are conventions, but that's genre dross and those people overlap with multimedia fandom broadly.
Who else would it be? I see two types.
Either autodidacts, for whom it could cleave either way since the internet can do strange things to people and isn't the best for focus. And we're talking about loners, when keep in mind many great authors of the past were in contact with their contemporaries and helped each other.
Or successful professionals who are very intelligent, retire by early middle and hit the ground running. If such millennials are out there, they must be early in their writing careers or are otherwise distracted.
It’s fair to point out that academics have the leisure and resources, but really good creative writing hasn’t generally come out of the universities so it seems odd for me to expect that. Anyway, there are some hidden gems. There’s a Russian medievalist who wrote a very good novel called Laurus fairly recently. His scholarship of medieval language informed his writing. But nobody really cares about these sort of books so nobody hears about it. A lot of is good stuff being drowned out by marketing of crap. Writers like Sarah J Maas get signal booster while Laurus is unknown.
>but really good creative writing hasn’t generally come out of the universities
Has it come out of people with a classical education even more robust than what's offered in modern classics and lit departments?
Of course, but not exclusively and don’t confuse that with being an academic.
They are in a better position than the average person to produce great works of literature on account of numerous factors present in the university system which are conducive to greater interest, knowledge, skill, and opportunity.
There are other obvious factors with regards to academia that could, and I'm sure are holding them back, but you didn't touch on those because I'm pretty sure you have some kind of autistic hangup with regards to something I didn't say that you imagine I did.
>There’s a Russian medievalist who wrote a very good novel called Laurus fairly recently
he was born 1964
I don’t think you have to be any of those things to write good poetry or fiction. Those come from all sorts of people. Literary and a bit of leisure are the only real pre-requisites. I’ll remind you here that the greatest pre-modern writers were not academics.
>Literary and a bit of leisure are the only real pre-requisites
>Literary
Such as people who specifically study literature, such as in a dedicated university program? What are we arguing about.
Literacy*
One does not need a PhD in English to be adequately literate.
Culture has moved onto film, old man.
Is Leif Randt any good?
I want to say "Eoin Colfer, but only for children's lit" but that wouldn't be fair. I haven't read Artemis Fowl in ~20 years, so it's probably just rose tinted goggles. Of course, I still maintain it is better than Rowling's filth.
The 21st century has been completely DOA for literature so far, but we still have more than 3/4ths of the way to go. There may already be some good literature, but no one has found it yet because there is just so much garbage. It's like all we get is shovelware.
I've some ideas of why this is the case. Reading, like every other hobby and interest, have been subverted by groups who avoid quality in favor of elevating certain groups of people. Of course, added into that, it could be that imagine is mostly dead and the mass majority of what is coming out is poorly researched drivel that can easily be compared to fan fiction.
All of that being said, it's also too early to really know. We do know that, unfortunately, in 100 years, if we still have literature; history; etc., they will think that JK Rowling was our favorite author of all time, despite her popularity and wealth being exclusively due to Hollywood and any serious reader realizing she plagerized so heavily that there may not be one original concept in her stories. Sure, most of us generally agree she isn't a good author, but she'll be considered influencial to anyone who writes almost anything, even if that individual has never read Harry Potter due to the very nature of most literary analysis lenses lacking entirely in basis. Outside of her, we don't have any other ideas of what literature in the last two decades will be considered important. I just don't think we have found it, if it does exist.
If it does exist, I'd wager the Joyces, Heaneys, Pounds, etc of the 21st century being generally unknown and not respected until there is a resurgence later down the line, maybe even after those people are dead. Despite the aforementioned "groups" that I am talking about saying "words matter", words don't mean much to them, synonyms are considered 100% just "different ways to say X", despite them carrying much heavier meaning and emphasis than just "X". Then there's the inability to follow along properly, maintain a coherent though, there's no whimsy or flow. So far, there is nothing but ego maniacs who have no taste for language, structure, or story-telling at the top of the stack.
Other than my low elaboration commentary being low iq, pseud trash... what do you guys think?
It's unironically dead. At best you have some schizokino online ramblings.
>tfw 36
>been working on what I hope will be my masterpiece since 2020
>have finished three books and one short story
>working on the fourth book now
>buddy who's been reading my stuff from the start thinks I'm a genius
I'm going to do it, guys. I'm going to be the great writer of the 21st Century. It's just a matter of if I'll be recognized in my own time, or die in obscurity like Melville. Wish me luck.
Would love to read it. I don’t expect you to share, but I wish I had a friend I could correspond with and share work and criticism. It seems almost silly to think about finding someone with serious literary ambitions.
You've probably seen my posts on IQfy agonizing over what to do with the first book. I have queried plenty of agents and small presses but I can't get anyone to bite, even though I have received some favorable comments on it from a few of them. It's to the point that I'm thinking of self-publishing it and using my social media to advertise it.
I don’t think I have.
Regardless, I'm going to keep trying. I'm actually not unpublished; I've gotten several short stories and quite a few poems published over the years. But nothing big, and nothing on the level of what I think I've been achieving with this story. Wish me luck.
>It's just a matter of if I'll
No one cares about your genreslop. Unless you post a paragraph, you’re larping, ESL.
An English speaker would write something like that. It's colloquial. Though I agree, he should post a sample.
wish you the best of luck fren
i am here to tell you
that it is me youre looking for,
and what youd really like
to read, is my diary
desu
F Gardner
look out for me in 10 years. I will write a new La Comedie Humaine
Chudbros...we need to make a new literary movement. Currently, chuds are the only ones really making anything vitalistic. If we are to succeed, we need to be rigorously elitist, to prevent spiritual Black folk from sapping our energy. Our prose needs to be refined, but not archaic. It should tap in to chudspeak as necessary without having it be the only notable characteristic (ala 0HPLC).
Imagine your "influences" section having /qa/...we will win.
the answer to OP is that it takes time to know which books will reflect the sentiments of future generations enough to be re-read and promoted
a lot of this is luck because we don't know what direction society will develop in
e.g. if 20th century society never became secular, then Nietzsche wouldn't be so popular right now
Nobody in this thread realizes that greatness takes time and distance. Current authors won't be reevaluated until 100 years or so from now when the lit has had time to solidify and cement itself.
But we also live in a world of hyper-accelerationism. Culture moves faster than ever. What was new a month ago is dead in the water. Longevity seems impossible in the digital age.
>Nobody in this thread
You didn't read the thread. You won't respond because you're embarassed, but I'm just letting you know: You're wrong either because you cannot read (illiterate) or selected not to read the thread before commenting about the thread (idiot)
Either way, it's not a great look.
This is one of those things where it's not the case. Most of what I see people reading is YA novels, old books, philosophy, and political books. "YA" is not going to contain good things, by its own definition, it is vapid nonsense. The people reading outside of those are the only ones capable of finding it... and there aren't many.
walrus is an honorary millennial
Stop whining and actually read some contemporary literature. Plenty of great authors out here, just no one reads them. Frick, just read Knausgaard or Houellebecq even.
Way to miss the point. Knausgasrd is an early Gen X and Houellebeqc a boomer. I'm talking about the younger generations. Where are the 25-35 up and coming stars?
Granta just published their 40 under 40 thing. Why don't you start working through them and tell us which is best?
I will check that out. In the meantime, I just ordered a copy of Tao Lin's "Taipei" to see what's it's all about, altough perhaps I've been meme'd into that.
Why would any reasonably intelligent young person waste their time writing when their intelligence can be better spent making money in things like finance or medicine? The department of defense openly funds STEM programs in many of the top colleges across the US but humanity departments are withering away. If that’s not an indication of where the top priority is among the younger generation then I don’t know what to tell you.
To be so implicitly snobbish but without any culture in you...
But Im right here
James Krake
Sweatie, books are for boomers and graves. This century's great authors will be social media content creators. Deal with it.