This would take a long thread of its own to assess, and there isn’t any clear answer. One thing to remember, though, is people started saying that film was the dominant artform of the 20th century a long, long time ago. Certainly by the 1930s and probably by the 1920s. During the era we now think of as the peak in 20th century literature. Before blockbuster summer films. Before advertising had radio and television to drive their images home a hundred times a day.
I have a copy somewhere of Gilbert Seldes’ The Seven Lively Arts, from 1924. (That link is the full text.) He’s rhapsodic over silent film, though I don’t remember any particular quotes. But that book was wildly influential and people built up film higher and higher from there.
The case you have to make is a complicated one. You have to compare film to literature as dominant cultural artforms, you have to sort out the popular and literary as culture and art, and then you have to throw in advertising and evaluate it as an artform and explain how you can include it while excluding summer blockbusters. I don’t think it can be done, but you might want to start a thread on it and see where it goes.
While I agree with pretty much everything you say here, I would simply reply that most people don’t consider advertising as an art form of any kind. It is not something they seek out or choose to watch or look at. On television specifically, it is something they are more likely to complain about as interfering with what they ARE watching. At movie theaters, people are annoyed by the delay in getting to the start of the movie. In print media, eh, I don’t really know about how people perceive the ads, I find them annoying in that they break up the stories I’m reading.
So I’m not so comfortable about calling it a dominant art form if the audience doesn’t perceive it as such. If it is, I might argue that architecture is the most dominant art form, because at least as many people live in or go into buildings as see advertisements.
As a librarian who works with publishers on a regular basis, I can tell you that the publishers definitely think of “literary fiction” as a genre. A part of me is pretty convinced that it’s only a few years until bookstores will pull them out from the “general fiction” as a matter of course.
Having worked as a YA librarian myself I can attest that “literary fiction” is very roughly synonymous with YA “Classics,” which in turn is exactly synonymous with “books adults want teenagers to read.”
Most bookstores in New Zealand have had a separate section for ‘Modern Literature’ or some varient aside from the ‘General Fiction’ for as long as I can remember.
I know this is an older post but I thought this podcast might be interesting to you guys. It’s from Boise State University’s (where I went to school and work with now) Beyond the Blue program which is a podcast series that focuses on the school’s academics.
This week’s is from Dr. Jeff Wilhelm, professor of English Education, as he explores whether or not non-traditional texts (such as vampire, horror, fantasy, manga, etc) are “real” literature and how teens engage with these texts.
Thank you for the link, taylorburton. I greatly enjoyed it and found it most interesting. However, I don’t think it actually speaks to the thread’s point; the link’s speaker talks of the usefulness of literature of usually low reputation to children and teenagers, whereas the thread, as I understand it, discusses the actual artistic value of popular literature.
I know it’s a bit late for me to drop my two cents, but I think what happened in literature as in much everything else in the late 19th and early 20th century was modernism. Literature ended up split into serious and popular and hasn’t really recovered since.
Modernism didn’t begin as a movement in literature until after WWI. That was generations after popular literature began as a separate publishing and marketing category. The beginnings of that can be traced to the development of new printing presses (primarily the rotary press) which allowed for the first time for cheap printing of mass quantities of copies - in the hundreds of thousands. Newspapers picked up on them first but cheap novels followed shortly after, and were well established before the Civil War.
Well, you just want to fookin’ kill him, but after a few drinks, reading it aloud, and forgetting everything you read a few words before as your friends throw empty pints at you?
Okay, may not be literature, but it can be fun. As can be Dubliners. Portrait is emo shit that makes you want to punch him in the face. Okay, I don’t remember the abstract, much less the details, but I’m Irish enough that, from that title, “punch him in the face” is still the default. “Ya call that ART, ya fookin’ bastid?”
Near as I can tell, since the 40s “good” literature has been written for pretentious English professors, while the rest of us get to roll in the wonder that is properly done genre fiction and laugh at the guys who have to work at enjoying what they read. Including the quality of the writing.
ETA: Silas Marner is an abomination.
I think more people read than they used to, so you’re going to get a wider audience. That and the fact the publishing industry has a lot of resources to get stuff out there.
Also, I can’t help but wonder if some authors write with the intention of selling movie rights. Bleh.
About modernism, I think we disagree because we’re not from the same background. Searching wiki for a cite to my assertion, I saw that the English page mentioned *Ulysses * (1922) as a mark for the beginning of literary modernism, while I’m more used to seeing Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (1857) or Flaubert’s *Madame Bovary *(1856) mentioned as the markers.
But I don’t disagree with the rest of what you’re saying and I should have added the massification of culture, made possible by technological and economic advances, as a significant factor in the divide.
The point I was making is that Modernism as a movement, which was named that and applied to all the arts, is sometimes confused with talking about the modern as opposed to a classical past. Modern, modern-day, modernity, and other variations get tossed around a lot by people striving to show how a break with a past art or culture emerged. I can make a pretty good case for 1900 as the start of the modern. But Modernism was another 20 years off in 1900.
Pinning down Modernism is a game that scholars play and gets you into criticspeak, which is unintelligible to normal folks. On the Wikipedia Modernism page, Clement Greenberg calls Immanuel Kant the first Modernist. Sure, and Lucian of Samosata was the first science fiction writer. But the term science fiction didn’t exist until 1927 because there wasn’t a need for it before then, no matter how many writers of scientific romance are brought into the fold.
The realer problem that I see is that high art criticism tends to be as ignorant of mass art as it is contemptuous of it and so is not a good guide to anything outside its narrow expertise. The history of mass art has not been studied a fraction as much as the history of high art. It’s much harder to make statements about something that has not been properly studied.
Ha! I was always thaught that Kant was either the last great philosopher of the Modern Age (as opposed to the Contemporary Age, began in 1789) or the last great philosopher of the Early Modern Age (with the Late Modern Age also beginning with the French revolution and ending in the 19th century). He is often described as “very modern” (in the non strict sense of the word) because of either how in-tune with the times or how ahead of the times his thoughts were. We’re both using the same words to mean different things, which is probably my fault, as I’m not a native English speaker and come from a different cultural context.
For me, literary Realism, Naturalism and Symbolism are modernist movements, as was Modernism itself (the one you’re talking about). Just as a curiosity I’ll mention that here in Brazil the Modernist movement is unanimously said to begin in 1922 with the “Week of Modern Art”, in São Paulo, but nobody will disagree that Machado de Assis was a modern writer, although he wrote almost all his most important works in the 19th century; it will also be generally agreed that the Realist movement to which he adhered after an early Romantic phase was a manifestation of artistic modernism. I agree that if we get stuck on classifications we’ll never get anywhere, but I wanted to make clear what I was talking about and why I was talking about it in the way I was.
One way or another, the point I wanted to make was that, at the same time that events were making literature accessible to a greater and more varied slice of the population than ever before, literature was changing in ways that made it ever more remote from the general reader. Sure, compared to anything written by Joyce Wuthering Heights (an early manifestation of what I’m calling modernism) will seem positively tame, but at the time it was published it was shocking both in form and content. The same with Flaubert, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Whitman, Chekov, Zola, Dostoyevsky and any number of other writers from roughly the same period.
I’m not sure of what you’re saying here. If you are you pointing out a problem with high art criticism, I’ll have to disagree, at least on this specific point (the ignorance of popular art). The two kinds of artistic production have different objectives, often employ different methods and are definetely judged by different criteria, so I don’t see why specialists in one field should be expected to participate in another.
If you’re lamenting that mass produced literature lacks enough study, I just don’t know enough about academic research in literature to actually have an opinion. It does seem to me, however, that this field of study provides many serious challenges not present in high art criticism, such as those of quantity and durability. “Serious” art is made in relatively low quantity (fewer creators who take longer to produce each work) and is made to last (so much so that the proof of quality of a work of art most often pointed at is how well it stood the test of time). So, to study mass produced art, it wouldn’t be enough to just change the evaluation criteria, but also to develop a whole new set of investigative tools. I remember sometime ago I read about a scholar who was studying the 19th century novel from a purely economic point of view, which seems like a very viable strategy, but I’m not sure if it’s actually satisfying to readers of popular literature who would like more serious treatment of their choice of reading material.
In the late 1960s a few colleges started offering courses in science fiction. By the 1970s these had grown so quickly that an academic organization, the Science Fiction Research Association, was created. Though not a formal academic, I was a member and did indeed give formal papers to academic conferences. So I got to see slices of both worlds: the popular world of genre fiction and the academic response to it, as well as the instant and enormous academic backlash to taking popular culture seriously.
I don’t know if this split is as wide and deep in other countries. In the U.S. it is a major obstacle to study. While you can find infinite details about the lives, works, and context of literary writers, we know next to nothing about most popular writers. It’s somewhat better for music and film, but even there the writers are comparatively overlooked.
If you want to make any case at all for the impact on society of popular vs. literary fiction, you need comparable data. It mostly doesn’t exist. But any examination of society over the 20th century makes it obvious that both high art and low art have been thoroughly intermixed to create the present. We can’t talk about that with any understanding because half of that equation hasn’t been studied.
Margaret Mitchell won a Pulitzer Prize.
So did James Michener.
So did Harper Lee.
So did Herman Wouk.
My point? There was a time, not so very long ago, that popular, middlebrow literature regularly won major awards. That just doesn’t happen today. The gap between popular and critically acclaimed has rarely (if ever) been wider.
Nine of the last ten Pulitzer Prize fiction winners have made the New York Times Bestseller list. (Geraldine Books’ March didn’t in 2006. But The March by E. L. Doctorow probably should have won in 2006 - it got every other award - and it did make the list.)