Where have all of the great writers gone?

CnC

Ad Oculos
I'm not coming from any authority on the matter, however I believe that throughout time (even, perhaps, in Shakespeare's days) that the vast majority of writing would have been adequate to poor, leaving writings such as Shakespeares to shine all the brighter.

People always claim that books, movies, comics, whatever were somehow better in the past than they are today. They may be right in certain cases but lets not forget that there was probably plenty of crap back then as well. Rare gems find their way to immortality.
 
ranemaka13 said:
Hiroshima mon amour
Nuit et broulliard
Le Regle du jeux


I think these are great.

Does that count? Or are we, more specifically, discussing more recent examples.
yeah they count. anything that you concider to be an act of great writing in any shape or form please post it. i also enjoy movies from the 50's (if I'm correct about the time period)

ok look my main point is this. in my eyes for the past decade i have yet to see large amounts of great feats in the world of writing. i mean a few, but its just that only a few. and i realize that people are saying that "there have been no great works in a horrendously long time" well thats just the point i think that in order for something to become a great work it takes a very long time for it to become just that. i mean who know 75-100 years from now people will look back and say "wow Rodney Dangerfield and Richard Pryor are unfucking believably talented comedic writers as well as comedians" but they had and have talent and a very creative imagination. it just seems like you don't see that anymore (with some exceptions of course)
 

Walter

Administrator
Staff member
CnC said:
I'm not coming from any authority on the matter, however I believe that throughout time (even, perhaps, in Shakespeare's days) that the vast majority of writing would have been adequate to poor, leaving writings such as Shakespeares to shine all the brighter.
Shakespeare wasn't that big in his time. Christopher Marlowe was the BMOC in Shakespeare's time. His first folio wasn't published until after he died, and only then did he recieve any significant public praise. He was loved in the courts for balancing 'selling out' while still maintaining his artistic integrity.

Shakespeare tapped into a mastery of language and expression that I don't think any writer's matched up to yet. He's in a league of his own. And his success has nothing to do with the shortcomings of his contemporaries and their lack of seeing the grand picture. That's not to say I read him on a daily basis. He's pretty tiresome for the same reasons he's Great :serpico:. But we're talking about the Greats here, not mass market entertainment.

People always claim that books, movies, comics, whatever were somehow better in the past than they are today. They may be right in certain cases but lets not forget that there was probably plenty of crap back then as well. Rare gems find their way to immortality.
People say the same about this place :badbone:
 

CnC

Ad Oculos
Walter said:
Shakespeare wasn't that big in his time. Christopher Marlowe was the BMOC in Shakespeare's time. His first folio wasn't published until after he died, and only then did he recieve any significant public praise. He was loved in the courts for balancing 'selling out' while still maintaining his artistic integrity.

Shakespeare tapped into a mastery of language and expression that I don't think any writer's matched up to yet. He's in a league of his own. And his success has nothing to do with the shortcomings of his contemporaries and their lack of seeing the grand picture. That's not to say I read him on a daily basis , it's pretty tiresome for the same reasons it's Great :serpico:. But we're talking about the Greats here, not mass market entertainment.

But I think mass market entertainment plays a role. How often does something "great" come along? It isn't every week, month, or even year. Hell it can take years for something truly great to show up. This couldn't have been much different in the past. Just seems like a lot more happened when you look back, it doesn't mean things stopped entirely.

Wow, realized that probably didn't make too much sense. Pity I couldn't word that better. If only there were better writers out there to help me out... :void:
 
CnC said:
Wow, realized that probably didn't make too much sense.  Pity I couldn't word that better.  If only there were better writers out there to help me out...   :void:

There is a lot of shit out there and it is easier to ride the wave of cool than to stuggle making a work that qualifies to be called great. If most people are satisfied with shit why should the trully great writers push themselves?

Is that what you wanted to say? It's what I wanted.
 

Walter

Administrator
Staff member
Rage Incarnate said:
There is a lot of shit out there and it is easier to ride the wave of cool than to stuggle making a work that qualifies to be called great. If most people are satisfied with shit why should the trully great writers push themselves?

Is that what you wanted to say? It's what I wanted.
Good points both of you. I think Hollywood played a large role in lowering the standards of quality while at the same time, making entertainment more proliferate. This brought prominent authors like Steinbeck and Faulkner into their world, and made them work by their rules. Great for a quick buck, but it left snobs like me stranded for all eternity.
 
I know this is jumping out there again, but I think that the really important issue at hand is why we feel that America should produce great authors. Social climate aside, writing is at it's basest level story telling. As Frank McCourt said, we have replaced the legends and folk tales of our past with television and other electronic media. Whereas, nations which emphasize the oral and written traditions of their past (Ireland being a great example) are going to be more prone to producing better writers. It is an inherent problem with the "Melting Pot" that we lose our individuality and become very much like the rest of our society. I just don't think we can have our cake, and eat it too, to put it bluntly.

I look at it this way: If golf did not exist, would Tiger Woods be a great golfer? Of course not. Even if HE played golf by himself, there would be no competition to measure against, and so greatness would lack any real definition. So then, why would he bother to improve? If appreciation for great writing does not exist (which it doesn't, in America) those individuals who might have the talent are going to apply it elsewhere. If we make true art a priority, we will see the great writers return.

Does anyone really think that if Picasso were painting today he would attain the same fame and renown in the U.S. (granted he wasn't American, but he achieved fame here)? Of course not. He inspired a generation of American painters, but when their talent had matured there was no value placed on their work, and so they either applied their effort in Europe or moved on. The sort of art appreciation you often see in say, a Woody Allen movie, exists only on film. We like to reminisce about the way art was, rather than do anything to improve the way it is.

In short, we're lazy bastards who want our art spoon fed to us, and in a mediocre enough way that we can arrive at the same opinion as our friends and "discuss" it at the water cooler.

P.S. Steinbeck sucks.
 
I think we should first look at the word greatness. It is defined in Webster's as -- "used as a generalized term of approval". No for anyone to find a great work of writing nowadays is almost impossible, this is due to the fact that a writer can have their book published all over the world. Back in the age of Shakespeare the world was much smaller, and works of writing weren't published on a global scale. In otherwords the market has been saturated with too many works of writing and most of them are average. To find this one work of greatness is like finding a needle in a hay stack. Let alone when you find it trying to get people to read it, the majority of people don't want to take the time to read something when they can just see it on the T.V. I know I'm one of them, sadly. So we just let the worlds "experts" make the decisions for us, and they can never agree on anything. So getting a generalized term of approval is almost impossible, because of the shear audience is so big, and people have such different ideas of greatness.
 

CnC

Ad Oculos
Again, we seem to be seeking some kind of nostalgia as if the past was flawless (or at least much better)

We keep hearing from authors and other columnists, ect. that this generation is somehow flawed and doesn't have the same creativity or inginuity that the previous generation had, something that (I have no doubt) the previous generation said about them. Saying that we're all just vegetables watching reality TV and listening to shitty pop music or watching or reading material that is all inferior to what was done years ago is ridiculous. There was a lot of crap back then just as there was a lot of crap now. And by the same token, there is plenty of creativity and inginuity here and now.

As Walter said earlier, Shakespeare wasn't nearly as popular in his time as he was after his death. Who's to say someone now isn't creating work that rivals Shakespeare's?

Rage Incarnate said:
There is a lot of shit out there and it is easier to ride the wave of cool than to stuggle making a work that qualifies to be called great. If most people are satisfied with shit why should the trully great writers push themselves?

Is that what you wanted to say? It's what I wanted.

Not exactly. I'm saying the waves might be different, but theres still shit in the water no matter where or when you've surfed.
 

waqas

Oh, nevermind...
I don't know if anyone has heard of him but recently I've become enraptured with the work of a japanese author, Haruki Murakami. In the passed 4 months I've read four of his works; Norwegian Wood, Sputnik Sweetheart, A Wild Sheep Chase, and The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. Each of which I've really enjoyed.

His style of writing may not suit everybody but I love it. What I really like is the way in which he uses the most simple language to describe the most ludicrous and surreal events and in doing so makes these allegories believable. Which is probably a very good thing because he can go off at a strange tangent at times :carcus:

Anyway, I'm not sure what makes an artist or writer great (perhaps it's consensus?) but I personally would describe him as a great writer and would encourage any fan of literature to check him out.
 
I can't believe anyone mentioned J.K. Rowling as great. People say, "At least they're reading," which is a really empty statement to me. If someone watches The Chronicles of Riddick, do we say, "At least they're learning to watch film"?

"Greatness" is one of those qualities that is usually retrospective. Not to mention that human culture is probably producing more creative work now than at any prior time, even compared to two decades ago we're seeing a lot more so-called amateur work that's enabled by the internet and advances in technology. Things are so fragmented that I doubt we'll have anything to call "Great" within the next twenty years. Maybe fifty, or longer...

Instead we'll have "Great <Genre>" or "Great <Medium>." Both Genre and Medium, of course, becoming increasingly more specialized into their own little mini-artistic universes. Just think, the teenagers of the future will never run out of band of <chosen-subculture-affiliation-here> to listen to.

It makes me wonder about the "Critical Threshold," by which I mean, the reasonable limits of human memory. When there are so many people, each creating their own work, good or not, it will be entirely possible to be completely oblivious of the artistic past... Historical ignorance is already so bad...
 
Denial said:
I can't believe anyone mentioned J.K. Rowling as great. People say, "At least they're reading," which is a really empty statement to me. If someone watches The Chronicles of Riddick, do we say, "At least they're learning to watch film"?

J. K. Rowling got kids to read. What are they reading? The equivelent of a saturday morning cartoon put to paper. It doesn't stimulate thought or have a deeper meaning. The greats are great because almost whatever era or language you read them in or how old you are you still get something out of it leaving your mind expanded and an emotional attachment to the work.
 
CnC said:
Again, we seem to be seeking some kind of nostalgia as if the past was flawless (or at least much better)

We keep hearing from authors and other columnists, ect. that this generation is somehow flawed and doesn't have the same creativity or inginuity that the previous generation had, something that (I have no doubt) the previous generation said about them. Saying that we're all just vegetables watching reality TV and listening to shitty pop music or watching or reading material that is all inferior to what was done years ago is ridiculous. There was a lot of crap back then just as there was a lot of crap now. And by the same token, there is plenty of creativity and inginuity here and now.

As Walter said earlier, Shakespeare wasn't nearly as popular in his time as he was after his death. Who's to say someone now isn't creating work that rivals Shakespeare's?

Not exactly. I'm saying the waves might be different, but theres still shit in the water no matter where or when you've surfed.


I'm not really sure on where I stand about this whole thing. I'll agree with you on the principle of Sturgeon's Law that romanticizing the past ignores the crap back then too. And I am pretty happy to be alive right now from an entertainment perspective. We have way more options than a human could ever experience in their lifetime, so we can pick and choose from among purely the best.

At the same time, there are other factors at work, and I'd be kind of remiss not to try and bring them up.

First of all we have selection criteria. In Tudor England, your typical Paris Hilton loving, reality TV watching cretins were shovelling dung on a field. Education was an exception and a privilege. Were there people who had both who were dullards, sloths, or otherwise not inclined to care or use their knowledge? Sure. Were there talentless hacks? Sure. But I think, given the more severe selection criteria, your upper-class educated nobility of that era probably produced a better ratio of quality to crap than we moderns do.

One theory I read just the other day by one of my favorite cultural observers was how the change from typewriter to the computer has changed writing. He suggests that writers who used typewriters took far more care with their words than people who use the computer. When you screwed up a page on the typewriter, you couldn't erase your mistake with a second's effort. You couldn't rearrange paragraphs with copy-paste. What you put down on the page was solid, not ephemeral bits of data changed at a whim.

This perspective makes a lot of sense to me. Perhaps I'm making an unfair comparison, but I can't imagine any writer using a typewriter ever producing garbage like, "wuts up?! how r u?" etc. seen online on a daily basis. Like I said, perhaps it's unfair to compare online jargon to literature. And heck, I guess with people like Burroughs, that did exist back in the days of typewriters. But I doubt back then there were hundreds of hacks, legends in their own minds, producing reams of that kind of stuff and expecting to be taken seriously.
Same thing with Pollack. We get a guy throwing paint on a canvas, and now there are a billion people throwing paint on a canvas. Is that really art? Was it ever really art? If it was, how can we differentiate one person's pseudorandom paint splashes from another's? Are we basing this on "originality"? And how far is our scope for determining originality? I'm sure if you went back a few hundred years you'd find someone in an asylum splashing paint on a canvas long before Pollack did it.

What this sort of thing really sums up to, I think, is "entrance barriers" in the sense of technical aptitude. Getting high and cutting up words and rearranging them on a page has absolutely zero technical skill for writing. Splashing paint has zero technical skill for painting. I don't really respect these things because I think something has to pass muster on a technical level to even be considered a work of art. (By whose standards? Mine, of course.)

Modern tools make things even easier, which reduces any barriers even further. If you read letters from even average people in the 18th, 19th, even up till the mid-late 20th century, the quality of the writing far surpasses the average email of today. Even the letters we write by hand are undoubtedly inferior. We're used to dashed off tripe. "Thanks for the card. Empty platitude here. Sincerely..."

The further back in time you go, the more established the technical standards for any given medium tended to be, to the point where only certain subjects (Christianity or certain types of folk traditions) were even considered appropriate subjects for an artistic endeavor. I won't say I'd want to go back to those days, but I think it's worth acknowledging that the loosening of standards has negatively impacted the overall quality of artwork. Give me any random sermon from John Donne's time, and any random piece of Erotica from 2005, and the sermon is much more likely to be good. It may be a ratio of 90% crap to 10% good against 99.9% crap and 0.1% good, but I think it still exists.
 

Herald of Yama

"It is pure Potential"
As far as Great writers go,...no. There never were Great writers. There were superior writers and their inferiors, but never really great writers(Unless we DO count entities.) To this day, we have superior writers and their inferiors, the primary difference being that what passes for superior today seems inferior by yesteryear's standard. One reason for the decline in American Literature(something Europeans have claimed we've always been inferior at) is that since the 1950's, educational structure shifted toward natural science over language. 'We have to beat the Commies in the space race first, then we can go back and teach 'em American!' There were also standards lowering throughout the public education system over the past fifty years. Heck, the standards were always a-lowering. Just look at what they expected of high school students in the 1850's. Th real problem isn't a lack of creativity, or wisdom, or even intelligence. Its a lack of patience. We're all so goddamned driven to be faster, more efficient little drones, that we lack patience for anything that takes time. Next-Day delivery, Instant Meals, e-mail, Quick-dry cement, name any activity people have been doing for the past thirty to fifty years, and we have a faster, "better" way of doing it now. I'll admit, I like some things to be fast and efficient, but with medical science extending human life out to eighty years or more while the economic structure demands ever-faster results, it sometimes seems like there's more life and less living. But enough of my inferior writing.
 

Vampire_Hunter_Bob

Cats are great
Trashcan said:
One reason for the decline in American Literature(something Europeans have claimed we've always been inferior at) is that since the 1950's, educational structure shifted toward natural science over language.

That's not really true, it's opinion not fact. There is always excilent story writers then there's the "holy crap damn good books" [IE any stephen king book about prison]. Another thing, "something Europeans have claimed we've always been inferior at" that's just sheir bull shit. Europeans are only good for one thing and I think we all know what that is. :troll:
 

Vampire_Hunter_Bob

Cats are great
Rage Incarnate said:
They learned their trade in the US?

They really cut off all two of your toes? :isidro:

I ment toads. The cut their lives short. Anyways. What great European movie classics are there? I mean who made Porky's? It was the good old USA, no British who brought us Monty Phython. :troll:
 
I think that Bernard Werber is one of the bests writers alive. He's french. He wrote about 10-15 book I think, 1 each years for the last years ! And good ones ! He's famous because of his first book "Les fourmis" (Ants), wich is now a Trilogy. He's a good author because he write well and he take some scientifical facts and stuff like that and then put some fiction to make his stories... You guys who like to read should take a look to this author, a lot of his books have been translated to english. He's also writing short movies (2) and now a big production (based on one of his books), he wrote a story for a comic book too. He's good.
 

Aazealh

Administrator
Staff member
Shurikn said:
I think that Bernard Werber is one of the bests writers alive.

Hmm well I don't really think so... He's written a few good books yeah, but some are quite bad (Le père de nos pères). And he's certainly not "Great" as to be compared to Shakespeare or whatever this thread is about.
 

CnC

Ad Oculos
Aazealh said:
Hmm well I don't really think so... He's written a few good books yeah, but some are quite bad (Le père de nos pères). And he's certainly not "Great" as to be compared to Shakespeare or whatever this thread is about.

I forgot... I blame it on poor writing ability on the part of the posters.
 

Begemot

STOP UNDRESSING ME WITH YOUR EYES!
Well, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is still alive.

I'm not sure how his works rate strictly as literature (since all I've read are translations), but he is arguably the most influential writer of the 20th century.
 
Aazealh said:
Hmm well I don't really think so... He's written a few good books yeah, but some are quite bad (Le père de nos pères). And he's certainly not "Great" as to be compared to Shakespeare or whatever this thread is about.

Well, I think we can't compare them.. Shakespeare is far ahead of him. I still think he's great.. it's all about tastes.. you know, people can say that Martine à la plage is the best book ever made.

Personnaly I liked Le père de nos pères... It's different from the others, and about a year or 2 after he wrote that book, some scientists truly found a link between pigs and humans..
I'm about to start reading "Le livre du voyage" after writing this post.
 

Aazealh

Administrator
Staff member
Shurikn said:
about a year or 2 after he wrote that book, some scientists truly found a link between pigs and humans..

Scientists found links between pigs and humans long, long ago. Them and us are highly compatible animals, that's why so much graft material comes from pigs. Werber really didn't invent anything, and this book features some ridiculous and outdated theories. To each his own anyway.
 
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