I am partially using as reference the top book list /lit/ made. But the question is simple.What made old authors so good? Wouldn't by logic the best books come from around 2000-2020 since that's where people got access to more information and etc. Overall was there a creative decline after the year 2000?And no I am not saying there is no good literature from recent years but how come this or (previous) generation, that is more "informed", (apparently) "educated", and overall referred to as more technologically advanced is unable to create things that are as good as the things that came even from centuries ago? Hell the divine comedy is from 1321. I am not saying all books have to be as influential as the bible but I have not heard of a groundbreaking book from recent years.
>>24724602Publishing companies have a major incentive to push out generic slop
The books you know of the past stood the test of time and survived. You can read best-seller lists from 100 years ago and only recognize a handful of the names.You're just ignorant and also lack perspective.
>>24724602>this or (previous) generation, that is more "informed", (apparently) "educated", and overall referred to as more technologically advanced is unable to create things that are as good as the things that came even from centuries ago?Threads like this spawn every day and are every time made by people who have no idea how reception of literature has worked over the centuries and how it works today. This, mixed with the general inexperience of the young reader who just goes through the classics for the first time, generates the "bias of the 20 year old" who believes nothing good is being done today.So, first of all: there have been fantastic books on par with the classics and several authors that are up there. If you take Dante as SSS tier or an age-defining genius of the kind of Plato, Homer, Shakespeare and Joyce, clearly you don't find many on his level. But classics are not just the top 10 authors in history: you can find a handful of extremely good and deep writers alive today as well. The current generation is as capable as any other generation to create good literature.Besides the very obvious fact that you don't read much, the second reason why you don't see this is that it takes a long time for critical discourse to consacrate a book - usually at least a lifespan or not. At the moment, as the boomer generation fades out, you can see several boomer authors competing in old age for the status of classic all over Europe - this is possible because they are not the writers of a single great book, but of series of works that one can consider valid. The third reason and maybe the most important is that the level of critical discourse has dropped steadily and dramatically because of a series of factors. The two most important ones seem to me the diffusion of mass media and the implementation of mass market mentality into publishing houses. The average publishing house would have revenues around 4% pre WW2 and it was fine, post WW2 they started pushing towards 10/15% to be on par with other mass markets - in order to do so they colluded with mass media and started implementing their modalities of selling to generate more revenue. Atm the model is to produce a lot of books, generate quick revenue and then forget them: the average novel in a european country sells between 2000 and 5000 copies and that's considered good. In this model there's no space for a book to grow slowly - no critics are paid to cultivate a book for longer than a year, reviews don't move copies and are for the most part written by underpaid PhDs. The profession of the critic as it existed until 50 years ago doesn't exist anymore, and you could be unaware of the existence of classics in your own country. The real problem today is not that good literature is not being written, but that there is no discourse capable of making it stand out in the midst of the vasts amount of mid and bad literature that is being written.
>>24724737if you want to get the handle of how books reached "classic" status in the modern era, and how the mechanism changed during the last century or so, read pic related. It's an enlightening book on what kind of power mechanisms are at work into creating a classic. In the final chapters she discusses the relationship between mass market and contemporary literature, the weakening of critical discourse, the shifting of cultural centers from the francophone to the anglophone sphere and so on. It's a capital book and it would spare us many threads like this, where nothing useful is ever said and people ramble about "old good new bad" as if they had been confined to a circle of hell where your punishment is to hear the same thing being said over and over. Please break the circle by actually studying the issues you want to discuss before writing something about them.
>>24724602>What made old authors so good?First of all: in the current era all the older book don't follow the Gricean maxim of manner. For example, the KJV feels very grand today, but, for example Genesis was pretty informally written. At that time for the average reader it was like you were reading your average litfic from the 2010s.Secondly, the modernists were more focused on form rather than substance, the ideas. Before the 1950s it was all about the prose, which is more evident to a "noob" than the stuff that you find coming out right now. Lovecraft writes beautiful prose, but he ain't that deep.Thirdly, a lot of US litfics today are written in the so called MFA style (those massive almost stream of thought paragraphs in between one or two lines of dialogue), which you might like or dislike, but put it together with the post modernist prose absolutely filters everyone who is not a seasoned reader.Fourthly, /lit/ used to be passionate about books. They followed the new trends and so even post modernist stuff like DFW ended up on their lists (which was famous among intellectual circles back in 2010, but not anymore). Right now everyone is copying that era, without any innovation, so you have to personally dig and find the good stuff instead of relying on recommendations (which, if you decide to avoid /lit/, will 99% of the time be a woman recommending stuff). In other words, the post post modernist (which still has no name as of right now) stuff is starting to get introduced in universities as of right now, but /lit/ is still stuck on that period where post modernist literature was starting to supercede the modernist one.Fifthly, not a lot of people read and know of the non-US current day literary movements. The spaniards, with their wacky dreamy style, Italians with their (I'd call it) "hysterical modernist" novels, The nips reinventing domestic fiction. Hell, even the instapoets are reinventing what the italian hermetic poets were doing: did you hear anyone talk about it? No. And you know nothing of it because your whole source is what was happening on /lit/ back in 2010, where Ishiguro, DFW, McCarthy were the talk of the town. As I said, these people were great, just like today's authors are great, just people are getting filtered left and right because they just don't get them.Lastly, it's always fun to see people claiming how beautiful are the classics, when those authors were mostly studying and appreciating non-fiction stuff, of the most repetitive kind, I should add.And that's because they loved the ideas that those non-fiction books contained, while the richfag who needs to stomp his feet and clap his hands (otherwise he'll cut your head for being a shitty author) were always asking for the fruity prose and the drama.Read a Gershom Scholem for once, maybe you'll get the postmodernists at last.
>>24724737>>24724742This guy gets it with a pneumonic level of basedness. Extremely worthy (You).Only small remark: coming off my personal experience (don't know if you book talkes about stats) I think that mass production of art reduces the *relative* amount of good art. I mean, publishers like Faber are basically luxory, in terms of sales, at this point, but I never felt that their sales are slowing down. They seem to be steady to me."Good art" and anything that has the intent of being good art is a niche which isn't influenced by mass market sales exactly because it's a niche market.The poetry market and the academic market did suffer from mass consumption though, I agree on that.
>>24724608They should have an incentive to suck my dick
>>24724737Precisely I am trying to say that. Is just that I think I didn't express myself properly.
>>24724754>As I said, these people were great, just like today's authors are great, just people are getting filtered left and right because they just don't get them.>Lastly, it's always fun to see people claiming how beautiful are the classics, when those authors were mostly studying and appreciating non-fiction stuff, of the most repetitive kind, I should addThis is such a relief. The reason I made this thread was because I felt like nothing interesting came out in movies since the 2010's (apart from some gems like Joker) and I was wondering if media in general was declining. It is good to hear that there is still being produced good shit.
Great writing comes from great souls who are moved to write.The greatness in a soul is awakened and refined by experience, both direct and by proxy via art.Great souls are inspired to write by a literary culture which offers challenge, respect, and monetary reward; or simply when they have nothing better to do.Meditate upon this, and you can see how 40k starving freezing medieval Icelanders can produce greater literature than our generation of billions.
>>24724754>instapoets are reinventing what the italian hermetic poets were doinggo on?
>>24724754the KJV was famously written to imitate an archaic style though, which ironically has come to represent that time even though it was not in use. using the informal thou wouldn't make it read like contemporary litfic does to us
KJV is also just good English prose. If you remove the archaisms it still stands on its own.
>>24724602Survivor bias. Only the good stuff gets remembered. All the slop is forgotten.The same applies to classical music versus, say, K-pop.
>>24725533>All the slop is forgotten.In the years of Lovecraft the usual pulp that the market was filled with got forgotten and Lovecraft got made into a legend that influenced modern horror.
>>24724737Excellent post
>>24724602It really isn't. That's just the shit that's had time enough for plebs to jerk it til ascension to s-tier cums.
>>24725168Instapoets start where confessional poets do. They talk about what happened in their lives: I got raped, I got dumped, etc.But they don't try to tell a story.They, just like the hermeticists, write to make you feel something, with the easiest wording possible.The story of the confessionalists is still present in instapoetry, but overarching. If taken on its own, the single istapoem has no meaning beside the emotion it evokes in you, but it's true meaning is where it is inside the collection.The hidden meaning of the poem stops being (as it was in the case of the hermetics) from analogies. It comes from the story it tries to tell.Take these two poems for example.Which is the love poem, which is about a disfunctional relationship?>>24725238Nah, let's be specific. It was trying to follow the style of the hebrew version. Some times it was pompous, other it wasn't. Pissing against the wall ain't fucking pompous, the people there are pretty realistic. If someone is angry he is gonna act angry. If some says the Lord says something, then it'll be pompous.>>24724828A lot of these new movies are based on books. The movie industry is fucked. Book don't cost that much, they can evolve and fix themselves.
There are only so many words out there and so many combinations in which they can be assembled. I’d say we’ve found about 98% of the good combinations already so the pickins are mighty slim.
>>24725742This is something that I have always been afraid of. Is a very weird fear that I call "The Combination famine" that is that at some point there will have been so many songs, movies, stories and video games made in this century that (imagining mankind continues living) in the next centuries no one will be able to create an original character or song because it will already have been made and the copyright laws would be stricter. This is already happening to the muaic industry and characters as well.
>>24724737>>24724742This anon is the only anon ITT who knows what he's talking about
We ‘ave become tikkytokky and youtube.Even the elites want video essays (like Reagan already got from the CIA specifically ordered) and non liberal mind professions have chronic brainrot from tv and other fast media. Academia is an IP government fund for market stimulation and the MIC. We are not in a world with the Austria-Hungary Empire anymore. Even China went anti culture communist. Do you get how perverse that is? We need a big war to get this current economic system to crumble and we’ll have such culture empires again. Until then, enjoy your 15 second videos.
>>24724737Better post than I expected.
>>24724742>It's a capital book and it would spare us many threads like this, where nothing useful is ever said and people ramble about "old good new bad" as if they had been confined to a circle of hell where your punishment is to hear the same thing being said over and over.This problem plagues virtually every creative board on 4cenks.
>>24724602Because people had lives then. They had real problems. They've been in wars. Saw governments rise and fall. They witnessed key moments in history, lived because they weren't glued to their computers and modern conveniences.
>>24724828>apart from some gems like JokerOh no
>>24724602Boredom breeds creativity, and before the internet/mass media people were bored as fuck.
>>24724754>not a lot of people read and know of the non-US current day literary movementsYou'd think that a board dedicated to literature would be the best place to find talk about niche markets like that but, like you said, it seems like after the mid 2010's this board lost its passion for literature.
>>24724737Holy based. Recommended some good literature from the past 15 years
