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/lit/ - Literature

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3232056 No.3232056 [Reply] [Original]

Hey /lit/, where do you think literature is headed in the next decade? I haven't really kept pace with contemporary literature myself, but I'd like to hear what people expect to get big.

In my experience, there is a dearth of talent (at least among popular authors). Most of the acclaimed contemporary authors I've read write Speculative Fiction (McCarthy, Atwood) and they don't hold a candle to their predecessors (particularly the giants of postmodernism like Pyncheon, DFW, DeLillo). What are your thoughts?

>> No.3232063

in the future all literature will be written and read on cellphones, and they will all be written at a fifth grade reading level.

we're already half way there.

>> No.3232066

i am confused please explain this.

>> No.3232070
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3232070

>>3232056
>implying dfw over mccarthy
>mfw

>> No.3232075

Elvis Presley + Jet Li?

>> No.3232087

You should probably try to branch out from reading exclusively US and Canadian literature. There's a lot more out there than your insular interests.

>> No.3232090

What I would like ideally is some kind of balance between populism and quality.

At the moment there is a huge gap between authors like Pynchon and DFW who are good but who the average person could never understand. And works like Twilight and Hunger Games which are fluff entertainment without much substance.

Would like to see more big releases that bridge the gap between the two.

>> No.3232095
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3232095

>>3232070
Why? McCarthy's prose is tedious and pretentious. And before you say DFW is pretentious, too, at least he had an immense, effulgent way of writing. McCarthy is misdirected machismo plus hamfisted attempts to "drop some wisdom on yall," which in my mind is much worse.
>>3232075
half right. are you new to /lit/ ?

>> No.3232099
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3232099

>>3232087
thanks for that constructive advice

>> No.3232102

>>3232099
If you want suggestions, there's plenty on the wiki. You seem to be trying to predict the future state of literature based entirely on a single fucking country.

>> No.3232104

>>3232075
It's some gay conservative jap that committed suicide or something.

>> No.3232114

In 'the book of laughter and forgetting' Kundera talks about an approaching time when everyone will write their own stories and cease to listen to others. I think this mother fucker was on the mark all the way back in the '70s.

Recently I watched an interview with Paul Auster - who's work should be deleted from history. He said the same thing as Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood and others who I have forgotten, namely that ideas of publishing and writing professionally are ideas dreamed by fools who are either 1)brave enough to starve to death, or 2) swimming in their parents money. Auster even went on to say that that he didn't know why a majority of serious current writer hadn't already committed suicide..

I have my ideas about the future of literature but I am keeping them to myself until I have produced something worth reading.

>> No.3232115

>>3232056
>>3232095
McCarthy >>>>> DFW any day.
"The black shape of it running from dark to dark. Then a distant low rumble. Not thunder. You could feel it under your feet. A sound without cognate and so without description. Something imponderable shifting out there in the dark. The earth itself contracting with the cold. It did not come again. What time of year? What age the child? … The silence. The salitter drying from the earth. The mudstained shapes of flooded cities burned to the waterline. At a crossroads a ground set with dolmen stones where the spoken bones of oracles lay moldering. No sound but the wind."

Hamfisted and macho?

>> No.3232118

>>3232104
Oh Murakami?

>> No.3232121

>>3232116
Milan Kundera's a fucking obvious one

>> No.3232126

>>3232115

yeah, plus its melodramatic. But let's not turn this into a flamewar on an offtopic author

moving on... where do you see literature going?

>> No.3232127

>>3232116
There's like 7 lists from other countries which all contain several contemporary authors, if you want to be really entry level there's GG Marquez and Zadie Smith off the tip of my tongue

>> No.3232130

>>3232116
really?

http://4chanlit.wikia.com/wiki/Recommended_Reading/Literature_by_origin

Brothers (2005) by Yu Hua
Life and Death are Wearing Me Out (2006) by Mo Yan
Vertical Motion (2011) by Can Xue
The Journey Home (1999) by Olaf Olafsson
The Blue Fox (2003) by Sjon
Stone Tree (2005) by Gyir Eliasson
Q (1999) by Luther Blissett
Love-Shaped Story (2002) by Tommaso Pincio
The Housekeeper and the Professor (2003) by Yoko Ogawa
The Guest (2002) by Hwang Sok-yong
Omega Minor (2004) by Paul Verhaeghen
Tomorrow Pamplona (2007) by Jan van Mersbergen
The Twin (2008) by Gerbrand Bakker
Out Stealing Horses (2003) by Per Petterson
2666 (2004) by Roberto Bolano
Parallel Stories (2005) by Peter Nadas

plus all the things that haven't been dated yet. not to mention almost the entirety of the contemporary novellas chart is non-american authors

>> No.3232143
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3232143

come on don't derail now

>> No.3232147

>>3232143
how is talking about contemporary literature from other countries derailing a thread about the future of contemporary literature?

>> No.3232149

>>3232147
because it's about the future

>> No.3232156

>>3232149
and having an understanding of now is pretty essential to making any guesses about the future.

>> No.3232159

>>3232149
It's also bullshit posturing, at least by pointing out how little people here know about contemporary literature we can build a base from which to look forward. Guessing about the future is pointless if you're neglecting the present

>> No.3232162

>>3232143
Seems there's a little Tao Lin in everyone.

>> No.3232164

>>3232095
mccarthy's prose is sparse and targeted. it utilizes a kind of harsh minimalism to impart complex feelings with a minimum of text. it lends a sense of the scarcity of decency in humanity at the extremes.

what you consider 'misdirected machismo' is mccarthy's interpretation of the truth of human nature. he writes a dialect of violence that is unique to his prose but common to humanity. it's the language common to men who have returned to their earliest home.

finally the quip about mccarthy's desire to 'drop some wisdom on yall' is a 'hamfisted' attempt to dismiss the work simply on the grounds that its author originates from a background to which you assign no artistic credence.

>> No.3232167
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3232167

relevant combo here
So some of you have posted contemporary lit but aren't saying how you think it will evolve in the future, which was my point

>> No.3232173

>>3232164
nah it wasn't a stab at his background at all (its actually mine showing through). What I meant was that he'll punctuate his passages with characters reflecting on some "really deep" thought about humanity (this is particularly egregious in The Road)

>> No.3232192

I WANT MORE MINIMALISM AND LESS PLOT AND EACH SENTENCE TO REVEAL THE AUTHORS ANXIETIES ABOUT 'x' SITUATION. MAYBE JUST STATE WHAT THEY WANT TO EXPRESS AND NOT EVEN BOTHER WRITING BEYOND THAT. BETTER YET JUST USE MATH.

>> No.3232208

>>3232192
got a problem with math, bub?

>> No.3232217

>>3232192
I WANT AUTHORS TO DO THIS BUT IN AN IRONIC WAY, BELYING THEIR DEEPER ANXIETIES ABOUT THE STATE OF THE VERY MEDIUM THROUGH WHICH THEY EXPRESS THEMSELVES.