Excellent essay, and all too true, I’m afraid.
The point isn’t that there is no good LITERATURE being written today, because there are some good books. Mostly in niche fields like SF, fantasy, or detective stories, since the “novel” as such as largely dead—with an occasional welcome exception.
The point is that the academic teaching of American literature is so horrible that it is driving all the students away, except for those who come for the political brainwashing rather than the books.
And of course this also applies to English lit, French lit, classical lit, and almost every other kind of lit. Academia is totally bent. If you want to know about great books, you need to find them on your own, because you sure as hell won’t learn anything in the average English department. Always a few exceptions, but fewer and fewer all the time.
I used to like poetry and there ain't none of that either. died in the late 40’s, I don't like agendas.
Well said. It’s got to the point if someone starts talking about “big L” literature my stiff meter starts to ping. That’s not to say that they are all stiffs, just most of them, at least in my opinion.
Gene Wolfe has a point when he says that all these books about the crushing mundane lives of mundane people being miserable and the academic culture that grew up around them is very new, if you look at the whole of human history. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t some works along those lines that are written very well indeed. But give me a little of the fantastic any day, even if most of them maybe aren’t that good. Theodore Sturgeon had something to say about that, “90% of everything is crap”, in reference to “big L” literature vs. sci-fi.
I’ll gladly read KILLDOZER!, one of the greatest scifi novellas of all time in my opinion, over some modernistic boring garbage that some stuffed shirt elbow patched stiff digs.
Freegards