Is the supposed highbrow just middlebrow pish?

[Twit 2]

I was reading 'Ping' in a collection of Beckett short prose and it reignited a prejudice I have that most serious fiction, the kind that gets reviewed in broadsheets and gets onto prize lists is just unambitious, backward-looking and stagnant. By contrast, if you looked at, say, modern classical music, dance, opera, film, painting, architecture and most other art forms, you can see the clear influence of modernism. But in writing, we're stuck on 'She walked across the room.' No she didn't.

Discuss!

[manticore]

The thing is, Beckett took writing to such a far point, so uningratiating and uncompromising, that it's hard to see where literature could go to after that. Everything seems like a backward step.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Paolo Coelho?

[Phil_A]

That's kind-of how I felt about Ian McEwan's The Comfort Of Strangers

For all it's highbrow trappings, it was basically a pulpy "twist in the tale" novel for people who pretend they're too cultured to read actual genre fiction.

If the cover had been like a 1970's Coronet/Signet thriller it would've been a lot more appropriate.

[buttgammon]

I sometimes think that in Britain especially, there is too much of a conservative streak in literature, maybe more than other art forms and definitely more than in other countries. There is definitely a tension elsewhere but I can't help but think it's more pronounced in Britain; it somehow feels that rather than trying to respond to the questions posed after modernism, we haven't even reached modernism itself. This is despite the fact that Britain was actually pretty fertile territory for modernist writing, but for whatever reason, it hasn't stuck as well as I'd have hoped.

Just as modernism was a response to crisis, the end of modernism provoked a crisis too. One of the ways of trying to resolve this crisis was postmodernism, but another was to return to the past. Modernism itself was often the site of tension between the past and the present, and in a way, it is actually quite appropriate that literature has fragmented into these different paths but at the same time, I can't see how we could ever go back.

[buttgammon]

I sometimes think that in Britain especially, there is too much of a conservative streak in literature, maybe more than other art forms and definitely more than in other countries. There is definitely a tension elsewhere but I can't help but think it's more pronounced in Britain; it somehow feels that rather than trying to respond to the questions posed after modernism, we haven't even reached modernism itself. This is despite the fact that Britain was actually pretty fertile territory for modernist writing, but for whatever reason, it hasn't stuck as well as I'd have hoped.

Just as modernism was a response to crisis, the end of modernism provoked a crisis too. One of the ways of trying to resolve this crisis was postmodernism, but another was to return to the past. Modernism itself was often the site of tension between the past and the present, and in a way, it is actually quite appropriate that literature has fragmented into these different paths but at the same time, I can't see how we could ever go back.

[manticore]

That's kind-of how I felt about Ian McEwan's The Comfort Of Strangers

For all it's highbrow trappings, it was basically a pulpy "twist in the tale" novel for people who pretend they're too cultured to read actual genre fiction.

If the cover had been like a 1970's Coronet/Signet thriller it would've been a lot more appropriate.

Absolutely. I was so disappointed in the direction McEwan went with that novel after the early short stories and The Cement Garden, which were genuinely disturbing and challenging in quite an intimate way. He turned into a comfortable writer of high-class literary 'dark' entertainments.

[Astronaut Omens]

There are definitely interesting, challenging books that win prizes and get written about in the broadsheets. In the last few years I've really enjoyed books by Lazlo Kraznahorkai,  Elfride Jelinek and Claudio Magris, all of whom I heard about through broadsheets, none of whom are remotely middlebrow. Thomas Pynchon's books are available everywhere and get reviewed in most newspapers. Slightly younger writers like Tom McCarthy and Eimar McBride, have made a big deal about their committment to modernism in their interviews.
But if the book pages of the Guardian annoy you that much, why not try the LRB or the TLS? Another source I really like for finding out about new fiction is US radio programme "Bookworm" presented by Michael Silverblatt, which is available online.
Modern writing's not some sort of waste land (lol) just because you can't open up the Daily Express and find a review of something which looks exactly like "Tender Buttons".

[Astronaut Omens]

I sometimes think that in Britain especially, there is too much of a conservative streak in literature, maybe more than other art forms and definitely more than in other countries. There is definitely a tension elsewhere but I can't help but think it's more pronounced in Britain; it somehow feels that rather than trying to respond to the questions posed after modernism, we haven't even reached modernism itself. This is despite the fact that Britain was actually pretty fertile territory for modernist writing, but for whatever reason, it hasn't stuck as well as I'd have hoped.

Just as modernism was a response to crisis, the end of modernism provoked a crisis too. One of the ways of trying to resolve this crisis was postmodernism, but another was to return to the past. Modernism itself was often the site of tension between the past and the present, and in a way, it is actually quite appropriate that literature has fragmented into these different paths but at the same time, I can't see how we could ever go back.

I've heard it said before that there's a very specific reason why the German literary scene has a particularly intellectual bent, which is that in the 19th Century writers honestly beleived that Goethe had already written both the ultimate play, Faust, and the ultimate novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, and that as such, any author of talent and vision turned their attention to philosophy instead.

[greenman]

I was reading 'Ping' in a collection of Beckett short prose and it reignited a prejudice I have that most serious fiction, the kind that gets reviewed in broadsheets and gets onto prize lists is just unambitious, backward-looking and stagnant. By contrast, if you looked at, say, modern classical music, dance, opera, film, painting, architecture and most other art forms, you can see the clear influence of modernism. But in writing, we're stuck on 'She walked across the room.' No she didn't.

Discuss!

What you could perhaps argue is that writing differs rather from those other artforms in terms of its consumption, more consumers who are drawn to something labelled "highbrow" without really having the desire for more challenging material?