Some of my fiction even has dragons in it. But for some reason, the moderators let me stay with my transitory inferior prose.
No great literature has dragons in it.
Especially nothing written in Old English.
Have we degraded literature?
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No great literature has dragons in it.
Especially nothing written in Old English.
I count the nights, the sistrum sounds . . .
Death, thy victory,
Death, thy victory . . .
The rubber plant is free.
From the heart of dawn
Thou sinister albatross.
(The rubber plant is free . . . .)
Death thy victory.
And the linden trees quiver,
I count the nights, the sistrum sounds,
The hoopoe awaits me,
And the linden trees quiver.
This happens in my classes ALL THE TIME. It's like a really dreary Madlibs puzzle!
1. Adjective
2. Corresponding adverb
3. Three 19th century writers, all male
4. James Joyce
5. Three adjectives that are synonyms of #1, but more overwrought
6. Modern writer, male
7. Modern writer, female
8. Three modern appliances
9. A Shakespeare play
Literature is [1. dead]. Really, it's a [2. rotting] corpse. Where are our [3. Tolstoy, James, and Balzac]? Where is our [4. James Joyce]? And, no, Mrs. Dalloway is not even in the same realm as Ulysses because it's too FEMININE. Anyway, yes, literature is [5. gone, mutilated, and maimed]. [6. Johnathan Franzen]? Maybe. But he lacks the depth of Tolstoy. [7. Margaret Atwood]? Ha! Good one. It's thanks to [8. electric can-openers, iPads, and vibrators] that our generation will never write [9. The Tempest]. Stick a fork in it, it's done.
1. Adjective
2. Corresponding adverb
3. Three 19th century writers, all male
4. James Joyce
5. Three adjectives that are synonyms of #1, but more overwrought
6. Modern writer, male
7. Modern writer, female
8. Three modern appliances
9. A Shakespeare play
Literature is [1. dead]. Really, it's a [2. rotting] corpse. Where are our [3. Tolstoy, James, and Balzac]? Where is our [4. James Joyce]? And, no, Mrs. Dalloway is not even in the same realm as Ulysses because it's too FEMININE. Anyway, yes, literature is [5. gone, mutilated, and maimed]. [6. Johnathan Franzen]? Maybe. But he lacks the depth of Tolstoy. [7. Margaret Atwood]? Ha! Good one. It's thanks to [8. electric can-openers, iPads, and vibrators] that our generation will never write [9. The Tempest]. Stick a fork in it, it's done.
And they say literature is dead....
Hah! I say. Hah!
And there's more where that came from!
As long as my version of javascript stays compatible...
Amadan
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I only wish I still had the short story fragment I wrote in high school in the style of Finnegans Wake...
There's a Perl cgi that does that; it was called, I think "word salad," but I'm not finding it.
You'd be proud, I think, actually. I researched homophones from various languages and tried to figure out the best neologisms to try to achieve the same effect in both sound and layers of meaning. It was exhausting, and not something I'd want to do again, though. I appear to have lost it in various computer migrations, though. A shame. I rather liked it, especially the last paragraph.
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It's all yours. My education is apparently little more than an expense of spirit in a waste of shame, resulting in a half-penny-worth of bread to an intolerable deal of sack.
If we have degraded literature, it's because we have degraded life itself. I don't mean to say that our moral values have been degraded (which is probably the opposite, even though you wouldn't think so if you listen to news), but that there exists a greater disconnection today between cultural emersion by an average person today compared to the time when mentioned classics were written. That is not to say that life was easier, but that more thought went into it, from the way we dined to the way we listened to music. Today, of course, we have degraded such experiences by overly integrating them into our consumerist lifestyles (I am speaking of an average Western person here).
This disconnect has produced several reactionary movements in culture. Personally, I think that postmodernism is one way literature fights against this alleged degradation, by running with it instead of rejecting it.
This disconnect has produced several reactionary movements in culture. Personally, I think that postmodernism is one way literature fights against this alleged degradation, by running with it instead of rejecting it.
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I would point more to hysterical realism as an example of that than postmodernism, which has more to do with the nature of truth, reality, and perception, though many do consider hysterical realism to be a particular form of postmodernism.
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This is, again, not really being terribly thoughtful or informed.
It is, in fact, an overtly first world take on literature.
It's a overly romanticized view of the past, and certainly, for those eras in which I am most versed about the history of codicology and literature, it is ahistoric.
Those great writers of the past? They wrote for money. (Or beer.) They wrote what they thought would result in money (or beer).
They're strikingly similar to writers today, right down to their reactions to rejections.
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Yeah, really.
I'd get this same argument from every single incoming class of English majors.
And really, everyone knows that literature died after the Reform bill was passed.
You kids git offa mah lawn!
Why aren't you scooting your butt along the carpet like a dog with tape on it's bunghole
Isn't it easier to dogpile
(/end sarcasm)
Oh, hey! Watch the canine references!!
< is sensitive to speciesism.
MacAllister
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This topic comes up about once a month -- usually dragged up, yet again, by some college sophomore taking a survey of novels class and ridiculously but unshakably convinced they're better-read than anyone else in the room and who then sets off to condescend and hold forth to the entire room; a room, by the way, with more than one PhD and a whole truckload of Masters degrees.
We're all done here.
We're all done here.
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