Western literature in decline

[Ya Sam]

Sorry if posted before


from "The Celluloid Canon in the Twilight of Western Literature"
By John David Ebert

"Surveying with one glance the current state of western literature--and by 
literature, I mean novels, poems and plays, but also the traditional 
nonfiction modalities like the literary essay and the great work of 
philosophy--compared to what it looked like in, say, the first half of the 
twentieth century, what strikes one is an appalling decline in overall 
quality.   Reading a contemporary novel, like Salman Rushdie's The Ground 
Beneath Her Feet , which falls apart about halfway through; or Umberto Eco's 
The Island of the Day Before , which starts off promising, but reads more 
and more like an outline for a novel; or Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty 
Horses , which is so self-consciously affected that it reads like a 
caricature of Faulkner; or even a master like Thomas Pynchon, whose Mason & 
Dixon goes in and out of focus, one is inevitably perplexed by the 
awkwardness of the performance." ...

"They are all self-conscious because the anxiety of influence has saturated 
the medium so thoroughly as to make it nearly unworkable.   You cannot 
improve upon Joyce, Mann, Dostoyevsky or Proust, whatever your ambitions as 
a writer; at best, you can only hope to achieve a vague approximation, like 
Thomas Pynchon did with Gravity's Rainbow --his agon with Joyce--or Doris 
Lessing with her underrated Shikasta."

http://cinemadiscourse.com./journal/twlightLit.html

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