Hey /lit/ so I've been thinking a lot recently about the shift from modernism to post-modernism moving from the turn of the 20th century industrial boom causing modernism into the post-World War/Cold War, novels, poetry and films focusing on existential questions, breaking from the create-your-own-destiny mentality and forcing people into thought of impeding doom. The War on Terror is about 15 years in the making now, what trends and literature are being formed and what will we see come out of this new Global War? Any books you guys can think of, or trends you think you're seeing in relevant contemporary novelists? This isn't a question about Tom Clancy War novels or anything, just how/if art is mirroring ideology right now.
No one wants to deal with it, so it's just pure escapism. YA is the name of the game now. No one gives a fuck how some random writer in some random English faculty is innovating narrative structures with bold new forms or whatever.
>>7356376
OP here, do you think that's more of a response to Global Conflict or the structure of publishing and marketing of books now? (I know the answer has to do with both, but that's a really undergrad way of looking at things) The relevant forms must still just be waiting to be discovered and canonized, right?
>>7356388
Part of pomo is the complete breakdown of "relevant" form.
>>7356399
by relevant I mean the works that capture the environment of thought the best or most insightfully, not normative forms of simple prose and memoir-based literature. not memeing but something like Gravity's Rainbow which I think captures the idea of the culture of impending doom really well, even if its in a cold-ironic way.
>>7356368
Yeah you should write that people are publishing gorilla style now, amazon has enabled them to -- that's capitalism arming the talibans of literature right there, yes? Attacking the civilian core of the canon; that is, even the stuff the lower-brow pretend to read, Lovecraft statues dynamited like, ungodly bandages dundo nothing, it all unravels.
>>7356368
The major lit trend in terms of the war on terror is the development of a huge body of lit published by special forces operators. This is significant since it means spec ops are now mainstream and also idealised. In other words, spec ops is now warfare baseline.
>>7356368
Vollmann
>>7358045
culture industry tripe— get bent
>>7358084
Sigh.
What?
>>7358088
He means those books aren't ~literary~ enough. I think he has a point, but I would follow it up by saying that the GWOT hasn't had much of an effect on ~literature~ because the ~literary world~ is completely isolated from the GWOT in any meaningful sense. It's like asking how the Reformation affected contemporary Chinese literature.
Novelists don't really want to deal with it. Like TV writers, they can't risk being divisive politically to maximise readership / profits.
I would say the corporatising of literature (and everything culturely) has really taken over this century.
Literature used to be a place where to get the news or the low down truth on what's happening because you couldn't get it anywhere else, but since we have the net and reality tv, it isn't now.
World literature is more prevalent and there's no unifying tangible style.
The Yellow Birds is the only war of terror book I've read and it was ok but I wouldn't recommend it except to vets.
How do you guys feel about Bleeding Edge in relation to OP's question?
>>7358443
the literary world is also being dilluted by beatniks and what Bloom calls (I only half agreewith 'im) the school of resentment. Readers like existed 100 years ago are rarer now than even then. People don't read poetry at all anymore, which is most of the classical tradition. People don't learn languages for literature anymore, and in the US they just "learn" spanish so they can get better lawn service (and high GPAs.)
Literature as a force of culture doesn't exist anymore. Any "relevant" writers like Franzen are driven BY the times rather than directing them, and those with some okay insight (DeLillo) are almost dead.
Things fall apart; the center will not hold;
see you in the widening gyre when american everything collapses just like its literature. Sad to say it
OP here: I'd just like to say again I'm not necessarily talking about War novels or anything explicitly mentioning the GWOT; but fears, moods or themes rising out of literature now as a global war is on again. The Great War (WWI) came to mark the end of modernism because of it stifling people's ideas about self-driven destiny, WWII put the nail in the coffin of modernism. Post-WW2 literature and film showed a culture of lost: sci-fi pulp novels churning out questions over what makes us human, the Theater of the Absurd, film noir's existential elements coming out of post-War France, we could take apart most sub-genres from 1950-onward and relate it to Cold War sentiments. Are we seeing things like that now? Or is literature falling from the dominant form of cultural representation as >>7358557 said? Are we left to the Tao Lin or Mira Gonzalez digital, alt lit coming out of social media, or will works like Bleeding Edge come >>7358532 to be more representative? I think I know the answer to the Tao Lin question from this board (I'm not a fan of his at all), that his work is just escapism and that Mira's can loosely even be called poetry. Maybe Kundera and Vollman get it, but I guess what even are the cultural sentiments of the GWOT that are different from the Cold War, maybe we broke from political tension and religious tension got swept into the vacuum, I really don't know, the safest answer is just to say it's too early to tell, I just want to hear what you guys think. I will say I think Cyclonopedia could be a landmark novel if a new large movement broke out.
