Is 'Literature' Still Being Written?

Stop feeding Deboss, seriously.

Then again, quite a few people say good music stopped being made decades ago. I wonder if there is a connection.

They aren't connected, and I'll only speak for the mainstream sucking now.

edited 22nd Oct '11 2:36:14 PM by Erock

And you'd be wrong on both counts for reasons that are well-documented.

Literature, people.

I quite understand the skepticism with which popular literature is treated, but let's not project our frustrations about Dan Brown and Nicholas Sparks onto the entirety of modern literature. If you are at a loss regarding where you'd find good modern writing in the first place, I again direct you to literary award winners. Also, many courses' syllabi are public. If you are interested in a specific genre, movement, topic, time period, or region, seeing what books professors assign in relation to the above may lead you to a good selection of modern classics.

Every time someone says this is off-topic, someone comes along and continues being off-topic. Come on.

Yeah, uh, rerail please, folks.

I have rarely seen the word "Literature" without a specific century in front of it. The few times I have seen it alone is when it was in a general course, "meaning all the centuries we can get to before finals."

Discussion of a certain century's art or literature usually begins with a brief history lesson about the significant political events and dominant political climate of the day. The examples of literature were those that said something meaningful about life in that century. The reason we don't have modern literature is because we're still too close to the century we live in to "accurately summarize" it.

About everything from 1800-1900 can be considered 19th century literature. Anything written before 1950 can be considered early twentieth century literature because it describes the first dominate social conventions of the first half of the century. Around 2050 we should be sufficiently removed that everything from 1950 to the year 2000 can be considered later twentieth century literature.

Books that are going to be considered literature will be chosen based on how well they can be used to comment on life in our time. Considering "our time" is a vague summary of a fifty year period, that's hard to comment on at this point. You might be able tie Harry Potter into the New Age movement, but you won't be able to make all seven books required reading. You might be able to use Tom Clancy books to comment on terrorism, and Ender's Game to comment on the space race, but again you'd have to narrow your choices down to only one by the author based on which book offered the best social commentary. The way to pass a literature class is to find out what your teacher's favorite books are and write a paper on them so they finally get a chance to talk about them, which may be how the Twilight books survive into the future.

Just gonna put it out there, the notability of a work can only be completely accurately gauged in hindsight, and even then it may be misjudged. A good deal of works hailed as classic today were largely ignored in their own time, and the rest are mostly used to look at the historical/social/political context of when they were written (as well as the effect they had).

Admittedly, this all may or may not completely pertain to the topic at hand. (EDIT after rereading the OP: okay, we're good.)

I'd argue that Twilight will be considered a work of notable consideration in the future due to the meta sociological aspects of it. The entire movement it had spawned in such a relatively short period of time (of both sycophantic fans and vehemently vitriolic haters) is fascinating, and I'm sure a great deal of study by professionals in the field of sociology and literature could be done with that, if there haven't already been studies like this.

edited 29th Apr '12 12:37:40 AM by 0dd1

Gods, that means Twilight is going to become required school reading in the future.

Thread Hop

Well, literacy teachers seem to always love "classics" and claim they are timeless and yadda yadda, but yeah, if we assume that "classics" are only true good literacy, then we can't tell until another generation has passed what of this time is considered classic and "Must read" by teachers

That was an interesting thread to read.

I'm curious as to where 'genre' fiction—fantasy, sci-fi, horror, etc—fall. I know quite a few people who don't think they can be proper literature, although I'm not sure if that's just a reaction against a lot of genre fiction being popular today. I never studied genre fiction in high school, with the exception of Brave New World, and I hear it referred to as "dystopian fiction," not sci-fi.