Why has literature degenerated so much over the past century?

Why has literature degenerated so much over the past century?

I was reading this dime novel on Project Gutenberg just for laughs and am shocked by how much better written it is compared to the garbage of today

This story is essentially YA for the preteens of 1909. Its author, who wrote one dime novel a week at $60 a novel, was ashamed to be associated with the story and adopted multiple different pseudonyms to distance himself from his writing. It was read in ten cent boys magazines alongside cartoon illustrations of lions and firemen. But his prose is twenty or thirty times better than the trash in Barnes & Noble's new fiction section, not just intellectually but aesthetically.

Consider how much different this is from Ready Player One or The Hunger Games

>The usual scenes were visible on the wharf–the rushing on board of belated freight and baggage–the crush of passengers and their friends on deck, or down in the cabins, where partings were being drunk in wine; the crowd of steerage passengers forward, trying to keep out of the way of the sailors, and at the same time to salute or converse with their friends on the dock; the rattle and bustle all around; the blow of steam from the impatient boilers; the sharp, brisk orders of the junior officers; the rush of carriages with passengers, and the shouting of draymen anxious to get their loads aboard–all these sights and sounds were both felt and visible as a bright-looking young man, distinctly American to all appearances, alighted from a cab and walked up the steamer's gang-plank, followed by a porter and the driver with trunks and parcels.

The author writes long, flowing sentences with complex punctuation and vocabulary specific to his nautical setting. Even though the story is garbage for little kids and he knows it, he uses a formal register and pays close attention to detail and imagery. He describes with figurative language the intimate habits particular to his chosen setting, taking great efforts to make his reader really feel like he's on the wharf. The narrative itself addresses (admittedly from a highly simplified viewpoint) weighty topics like contemporary geopolitics, terrorism and the Russian Nihilist movement.

This is frankly better than a lot of modern adult fiction. Just in terms of the prose itself, this is better than that Cat Person story the twitterati were celebrating last month--a story written by a Harvard doctoral student and published in the English language's best known literary magazine.

So what the fuck happened? Did television fry everybody's brain and make them want screenplays instead of literature? Or did people just get dumber and lazier

Other urls found in this thread:

theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/07/a-readers-manifesto/302270/
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

1. The First World War. Killed off a generation of the best and brightest. Thanks, Germany.
2. The Second World War. See above. Again, thanks, Germany. Hmm, you know, I'm starting to detect a pattern here. Fucking Germans.
>So what the fuck happened? Did television fry everybody's brain
Television, movies, vidya gaems, porn, advertising; all the diseased panoply of the post-war consumer world have contributed to the decline of the culture. Thanks, USA. Oh and let us not forget the USSR, with its purges and poisonous ideology rammed down everyone's throats - where are your modern Pushkins, your Tolstoys, now, eh?

what the fuck does a formal register have to do with quality?

>why is literature worse in an era where children aren't taught literature
Nigger what do you think? Reading through the canon used to be common place. Today's children don't even know who Homer was.

Things with literary and artistic merit are mostly not profitable

>Today's children don't even know who Homer was.

well that's preposterously untrue

you wanna know why literature has (((degenerated))) cause reading is boring

>Things with literary and artistic merit are mostly not profitable
This. Our culture is all about money and the making thereof, to the exclusion of beauty, art and soul. This is why it is a horror story of banality and filth.

Name one (1) western national curriculum for children who mentions Homer.

I-I thought reading was supposed to make you smarter

>reading is boring
I should like very much for a giant asteroid to strike the earth and split it in two.

I should like bla-de-bla for you to drop your early-20's sounding earnest-act and simply acknowledge that of course reading is boring. I'm not that guy and I like reading too but it's clearly a boring activity relative to the remainder of possible human experience.

my shitty public school in the southern US

It largely depends on what you read, my good man.

because democracy powered by capitalism is pure cancer to the arts.
Giving the power to set cultural trends to functional illiterates will always give a regression towards the mediocre.

Add to the mix big data, THE best tool to accurately segmentate and target your audience, and you will get sequels and other recycled garbage created with the goal of pander to a particular bias.
You have retards throwing their money to anyone reinforcing their pre-existing biased views, thus stagnating culture.

Case in point: the western canon is pretty much based upon oligarcs fags thinking about life and stuff in between fucking young boys, an absolute teocracy trying to teach its dogmas to illiterate plebs and more oligarcs with way too much money trying to buy a place into the History.

Also democracy was willed into reality by rich educated men that thought Joe Average was eager to learn latin and reading the greeks after his 8 hours shift

Occidental culture is a dying culture.

Do you think they were more profitable before? Can't imagine Melville doing Moby Dick with dollar signs on his eyes.

If one has yet to broach the barrier to the point that the benefit of reading outweighs the boredom that it induces then reading can be quite a tiresome burden. This barrier, though not insurmountable, is significant.

My family from the USSR all read Pushpin, Tolstoy, Dosto

Basically the USSR ed system was FOR these writers, or atleast, you will not meet a soviet citizen who doesn't know who Tolstoy is, actually from those that I have met they would consider you an idiot if you haven't heard those names (I have met many many people who don't know these names, not even talking about reading them even)

>your Tolstoys

Tolstoy's prose is exceptionally lucid and accessible though.

If you aren't Russian you can't even begin to make that judgement.

A regression towards the norm along with every individual having every desire within arms reach, there is no need to work any harder or to aim any higher. Especially not when every so called dream or aim is something created by the system that they live under and are ruled by. Each individual is now only seen as a unit of the workforce. Why do you think mass immigration from the third world is happening at an unprecedented rate? They are so easily pleased when they live in a house with heat, water and electricity.

This was a bit autistic but it is still true

History course in Norway

>long, descriptive, enumerating sentences are a long lost pinnacle of writing

1)"The usual scenes were visible..." is as banal as any Carver copycat.

2)You're middlebrow and a pseud.

theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/07/a-readers-manifesto/302270/

DAE le wrung geanerayshun?

>things are just as good now as they were in the past

+1

It's not so much that as much as publishers won't publish anything that doesn't have wide demographic appeal. Companies play a prudential game. Things with literary merit typically don't have blatant appeal to wide swaths of people. In Melville's time there was much less of a press on widespread appeal because publishing didn't have as much competition in terms of entertainment, they could still afford to have editors look for great works and risk it.

People wrote and told stories in person. This is clear when you go back and read soldiers' letters, the average man had a much better grasp of the language than most Grad students today.
And not only did they tell stories, they contemplated what they were writing, taking time and care to evoke a connection to their family members. Today people share information with strangers, and generally there is no need for contemplation as the information is merely reference and reproduction of mechanised culture.
There are other factors, but it is the abandonment of traditional communication that has changed language more than anything else. I would say it is an inversion of the printing press, or perhaps even the shift from oral to written communication - in this case we have not lost the ability to communicate and think orally, instead our writing has morphed into something like a written-oral communication with machines.

Oh yes, things couldn't possibly be any better today! [Rubs hands]

Literally every public school in America has a unit on the greeks. My school even brought in some guy to tell a couple parts of the Odyssey orally for everyone.

Sweden. Also learned about other important greeks like Aristophanes, Sophocles, Euripides etc.

That said, half of the kids will probably forget those names before they graduate. And even if they don't they most likely won't read them outside of the classroom.

Not op but:
>You're middlebrow and a psued
>linked article literally starts off with 'le born in the wrong generation' meme

Fuck off.

I think people actually had longer attention spans and tended to write longer sentences back then due to less technology. I've noticed this too, I'm used to reading older English-language literature and in high-school and college everyone would call my sentences overly long in essays. Even when I tried to shorten them as much as possible, when we had to do peer-review, sentences I thought were medium length would get pointed out on the side with a "this is a run-on sentence, break it up," making me want to strangle people.

>reading oddysey in usa english class
>"Og Dr. Suess lived on an is-land"
>"E axed da kyke lobster"

It's also done freshman year when the teachers and students are mutually at their dumbest.

Warsaw pact countries had state funded book publishing and books were cheap to buy. Culture was fine.(After a bit of liberalisation) The economy on the other hand...

"wrong generation" is a reddit meme reprised by conformist, human cattle nu-male wageslaves that don't want to escape their condition.

Don't forget when they call the vocabulary "archaic" or "too complex" either.
Fuck off cunt, there is no problem with using a bit of latin or other words of foreign origin.

in Canada we studied Ancient Greek myths in grade 6..

The ideology still severly limited most intellectual activities. Good authors were rare and mostly banned. All humanities were seriously fucked, most research was ideological drivel comparable to the worst of the scholastics.

I learned about the greek myths, including Homer and his works, in fifth grade. USA, public school. Fuck off, cunt.

Depends on the country honestly. The USSR was the gaping asshole of the alliance.

just about every European country

They're both bad in different ways.

Post-modern literature, because of the influence of Hemmingway, Pound, Eliot, etc, we tend to pare down language to the absolute minimum and let the accumulating context suggest the fuller meaning. "Iceberg theory." Y.A authors are just writing using the writing advice in the air, which is derived from this kind of stuff. So the Y.A tends to be thin, conversational, etc, etc.

Back in the day, the prevailing literature was supposed to be verse-like, and so it is overwritten, cluttered with details, has over-complicated grammar, etc.

The floor for writing was technically higher back in the day because it takes more skill to write complicated sentences and to generate details, but ultimately they suck pretty equally compared to somebody good.

If you can't sell a story, it's your own fault. Storytelling has always been profitable because humans have always liked hearing stories. Shaper sang at Hrothgar's meadhall and was draped in gold for his service.

If you can't find a way to sell your shit, it's not because there's no market for it. Either your shit is bad or you're selling it at the wrong meadhall.

Same here, though with mine it was select excerpts from The Odyssey both followed and proceeded by philosophy chatter.

What literature from the 21st century have you read?

It was a means to live by back then. Now its a side project and there are thousands of people who grew up on Harry Potter who want in on it and since the audience are also those people you get terrible books.

Im sure some people out there still try.

In Canada we went over greek myths and gods in grade 2 and 5. There are optional courses in high school that also went through some greek history.

Not as in depth into it as would be ideal but its something.

None because its all shit

10480257(No you)
The Hungarian curriculum has the greek myths both in elementary and high school (you must read both the Iliad and the Odyssey). Apply yourself you dumb faggot

oh boy. We've got a Smart Intellectual here. Everyone back off befores you get OutBrained

>sentences I thought were medium length would get pointed out on the side with a "this is a run-on sentence, break it up," making me want to strangle people
It's possible you were just not as good as you thought. I mean, you -can- write long sentences, but generally you only get away with it if you're very good at writing. Otherwise shorter sentences will generally be clearer and less annoying for the reader.

>Eliot, etc, we tend to pare down language to the absolute minimum and let the accumulating context suggest the fuller meaning
Wut? 'Minimalist' is not a word that springs to mind when I read Eliot.

Eliot isn't a linguistic minamalist, but he is an emotional one. Think of how restrained he is compared to Shelley and you'll see what I mean.

Modern literature tends to be thin and dry when it is bad, Victorian or classic literature gushing and cluttered.

Of all the responses, of which many likely played a large role in this issue, I believe the greatest enemy was time, or more specifically the loss of it.
Put simply: people used to spend hours of the day on one or two things only, during which they had a long pensive think about things in general. In modern times there are too many distractions to allow one to truly mull over things which happened last week, let alone that essay you scribbled down in 14 minutes to get to class on time.
This loss of pondering time is not due entirely to one distraction, but the multitude of them which shot up during the middle of the 20th century, changing the pace at which people live their lives

11 words: Women pissing estrogen from birth control pills unto the water supply.

Yeah, I had this a lot, but I suppose I had it coming reading steinbeck for ssr.