Patience is a virtue!
Novels are THE greatest art form.
And let me guess… Tolkien is the greatest novelist!!!
Of course not. Everyone knows the Council of Elrond dragged on way too long for it to be considered great art.
Also, there is an insufficient number of snobby intellectuals writing papers about it from their ivory towers.
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The bolded part above is nonsense. Art can be subtle or blatant. Bach or the Ramones.
Slee
I don’t agree with this. I think there are plenty of examples of great art that went unrecognized in the artist’s lifetime. Sometimes it takes society a while to catch up with the cutting edge of its own culture.
Of the second half of the 20th century, yes I think, in five hundred years one of the few novels to be remembered from this time will probably be LOTR, as Don Quixote is remembered now. (probably (like Don Quixote) as some boring brick of a book that very few people read of their own volition and most read because is required in some education course, sadly)
As for novels being great art and so on, let me put it this way:
I could live without paintings, I would hate it but I could live without music, ditto movies, theater, poems and short stories. I could not live without novels. What would be the point?.
In my opinion, novels are probably the best art form for conveying subtle ideas.
Yet… do any examples come to mind?
I think there are some. Melville was mostly forgotten at his death. Moby Dick revived later. But this book had been well received when it was published, though not a huge seller:
So it can be a continuum of how much something is known in its time, how much it is appreciated later. I think examples of something truly unappreciated in its time becoming very much appreciated later are rare.
Jane Austen, Johann Sebastian Bach, Charles Baudelaire, William Blake, Julia Margaret Cameron, Kate Chopin, Hart Crane, Henry Darger, Philip K. Dick, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Paul Gauguin, El Greco, Dashiell Hammett, Robert Johnson, Franz Kafka, John Keats, Stieg Larsson, H.P. Lovecraft, Vivian Maier, Georges Melies, Claude Monet, Mervyn Peake, Sylvia Plath, Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Rimbaud, Georges-Pierre Seurat, Henry David Thoreau, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Vincent van Gogh, and Johannes Vermeer.
I’m not sure Austen counts; she died about six years after the publication of her first novel, but her books were well-reviewed and popular in her own lifetime (the future George IV was a fan; Austen did not reciprocate). And Monet was definitely a successful, influential painter by the time he died, even if some of the critics hated his work at first. A few of the others qualify because they died young, but would almost certainly have been appreciated by their contemporaries if they’d lived longer (Stieg Larsson, for sure; one could probably make a similar case for Keats, who was wildly popular by the middle of the nineteenth century, when he would have been in his fifties if he’d lived, and who certainly had Shelley as a champion during his lifetime).
I’ll definitely give you Dickinson and Blake, though.
Are you crazy? I doubt Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams had the huge teenage girl following that Lin Manuel Miranda does
Austen was popular in her lifetime but I don’t think she had a reputation as a “serious” author, which developed after her death.
Monet was popular in his lifetime but his reputation has climbed much higher since his death. I think it’s like I described in my previous post; it took a generation or so for what Monet had done to really sink in.
Ok, so I didn’t read the rest of the thread yet, but I find your thesis lacking. Largely because you don’t define what counts as great art. Also because your points don’t actually support it.
This is a nonsense argument. Either art is good or it isn’t. Context is important for appreciating it, but there are tons of novels no one has ever heard of from that that era (which seems to be anything before 1920 in your mind as far as I can tell) because they aren’t good. Quick, name Louisa May Alcott’s other novels. Moreover long-form storytelling has been around as long as we have history. “The novel” was just another way of presenting it. There is nothing new under the sun and coming up with fresh ideas was always hard.
Ok, so I don’t like Dickens, so I won’t go after that particular example, but do you think that these novels sat around unread until someone in a future time would find them nostalgic? How does this account for novels that were written in other languages and cultures? Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Dostoevsky, Cervantes, Milan Kundra, Tolstoy, Dumas, Proust, all made great are that holds no nostalgia for me. Works written in languages I don’t speak taking place in places I have never been and frequently know little about.
Also, as far as English language writers go, if you know them it’s because people at the time thought they were good…and then people generations later still thought they were good. You might not. But your opinion is only your opinion. Right now it isn’t being particularly critical either, it would seem. Mark Twain made great art. Melville made great art. Louisa May Alcott’s novel Little Women was great art. So was stuff I personally dislike like The Scarlett Letter and Great Expectations. So was more modern stuff like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and even more modern stuff like To Kill A Mockingbird or In Cold Blood (which is a novel, though one based on a true story) and crazy stuff like James Joyce and David Foster Wallace. None of these are nostalgic.
See the thing is, if we are just going to throw around unsupported assertions about what is and isn’t great art we can go all day long and never get anywhere. So… You are making the rules here. Tell me why they are not great art.
The list of novelists generally is quite small. Writing a whole novel is more work than most people want to put in. 90% of everything is crap and it doesn’t sound like you have read a ton, but I could be wrong on that front. I just provided a list of above of 15 or so authors or specific books that are all great art or artists. And I left out a lot. I didn’t mention the Bronte’s (2) of Henry James, or Kipling or any genre writers who also create great art that changed moder culture (Chandler, Phillip K Dick, Neil Gaimen, Jules Verne) or many others since this is sort of off the top of my head.
So let’s see you lists of 20 great poets since the 1800s (have to be fair and keep time periods consistent) painters, short story writers, composers since 1800. Maybe we look to include playwrights too. Any other list you think is producing great art. If you are going to say the field is shallow, whay IS deep?
As might be obvious I think your point 3 is also a nonsense argument.
Nope, this thesis doesn’t work for me. Ok off to see what others thought.
Gah! Seriously? To Kill A Mockingbird? Um, Huckleberry Finn? The Great Gatsby? All serious lit fiction. In the post modern era really great novels only work as novels. Catcher in the Rye can’t be make into a film because approximately 90% of what makes it great is that it’s told from the perspective of a person who is lying to you as a reader almost the whole time. You can’t do that on film. But it’s a flipping popular book. David Foster Wallace is pretty damn popular and his stuff was never and will never be made into movies. Kurt Vonegut keeps having his stuff attempted to be adapted because he is so popular but it also doesn’t work in other media. These are not unpopular artists. I should go to bed before I read more.
But duty calls
Theater as an art form is not popular like it was. I would venture to guess you have heard of Sam Sheppard though. Probably Tom Stoppard too? David Mammet? Possibly even Neil LeButte? August Wilson? In theater it takes longer to be accepted as a legitimate force. If it happened less than 20 years ago it’s still a fad. And no one takes musicals seriously right or wrong* (and they never did).
*it’s wrong, they should. But whatchagonnado?
Catch-22? Portnoy’s Complaint? Sophie’s Choice? The Color Purple? The Bonfire of the Vanities? The Satanic Verses? Confederacy of Dunces? The Giver?
[QUOTE=Aeschines ]
I would ask you this: What is the last novel to have had cultural impact and still be considered a work of art today? To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) comes to mind, though I’m not religiously wed to that. I would call that a decline, or a significant symptom thereof.
[/QUOTE]
An obvious example is David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Like Joyce’s Ulysses, it is cited far more than it is read, so the OP will argue it has limited cultural impact. That would be foolish, though, because DFW’s elevation after his death has been big and ongoing. When Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg star in a movie about an interview you did on a book tour, you have pop culture resonance. DFW is the Patron Saint of many, many young writers looking for a new sincerity in their voice, and IJ is lauded as the work of a postmodernist genius.
Again, I feel like the OP is asking me to do his homework.
One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest too. All of the works of magical realism in Spanish language literature. Beloved by Toni Morrison. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Rabbit Run. There are lots.