What is the high brow literature of today?
January 5, 2014 9:45 PM Subscribe
What contemporary literature are academics discussing these days? Where is the literary avant-garde?
...And speaking of the academy, can someone point me towards a (free) article that summarizes the current state of literary studies, with a particular emphasis on what's been going on for the past 10 years? What are today's contemporary "isms" profs are discussing? Do professors still discuss "isms?" or have things moved in a totally different direction?
I'm asking this because I'm curious, and also because I'm looking to read a new novel, or set of short stories. Thanks.
...And speaking of the academy, can someone point me towards a (free) article that summarizes the current state of literary studies, with a particular emphasis on what's been going on for the past 10 years? What are today's contemporary "isms" profs are discussing? Do professors still discuss "isms?" or have things moved in a totally different direction?
I'm asking this because I'm curious, and also because I'm looking to read a new novel, or set of short stories. Thanks.
I agree with Orinda's point that cultural elitism is in principle antithetical to what most literary scholars think they're about. As a practical matter, I nominate S.D. Chrostowka's Permission and Laszlo Krasznahorkai's Seiobo There Below as the titles most often name-dropped in 2013 with highbrow connotations, if not intent.
posted by Monsieur Caution at 12:28 AM on January 6, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by Monsieur Caution at 12:28 AM on January 6, 2014 [1 favorite]
Post-modernism has taken a turn for the macabre. Michel Houellebecq, Haruki Murakami, and Brian Evenson (and plenty of others) write fiction that is increasingly disturbing and blends genre sci fi and horror elements with metafictional concerns. Certainly seems to get my friends in comp lit hot under the tweed.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 4:33 AM on January 6, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 4:33 AM on January 6, 2014 [1 favorite]
Most of the academics I know are way too swept up in the minutia of their work to keep abreast of the most current literary trends. In fact, I remember being explicitly struck by the fact that one year, the single piece of new popular fiction that all my friends in the program had read that year was the epitome of middlebrow- Jonathan Franzen's Freedom. (To be fair, no one was making any claims for it beyond that). And the one piece of contemporary culture that everyone was legitimately excited about - writing conference papers, putting into their dissertations, etc. - wasn't a book at all. It was David Simon's The Wire.
As far as the rising ism's - seems to me it's whatever is going to follow postcolonialism - so maybe transnationalism, global anglophone, etc. Also, tacking 'global' onto places where it doesn't usually belong - global modernisms, global Shakespeares. People in my program were also pretty keen on sociologically inflected criticism, esp. Mark McGurl's The Program Era and James English's The Economy of Prestige.
I know some people in MFA programs, and the writers they talk about the most aren't avant-garde either but at least they're literary: Denis Johnson and Marilynne Robinson are the two that come to mind.
posted by pretentious illiterate at 6:16 AM on January 6, 2014 [2 favorites]
As far as the rising ism's - seems to me it's whatever is going to follow postcolonialism - so maybe transnationalism, global anglophone, etc. Also, tacking 'global' onto places where it doesn't usually belong - global modernisms, global Shakespeares. People in my program were also pretty keen on sociologically inflected criticism, esp. Mark McGurl's The Program Era and James English's The Economy of Prestige.
I know some people in MFA programs, and the writers they talk about the most aren't avant-garde either but at least they're literary: Denis Johnson and Marilynne Robinson are the two that come to mind.
posted by pretentious illiterate at 6:16 AM on January 6, 2014 [2 favorites]
I think others are right to observe that high-brow literature is not a fashionable concept, at least not overtly. My uninformed armchair perspective is that academics nowadays are more likely to deeply analyze "low-brow" literature, or older high-brow literature that has already been added to the canon. In other words, it seems like people would rather have their projects be about literature that is already fairly accessible in one way or another, whether it's easier to digest in and of itself, or whether it's something more complicated, but which is commonly taught.
Generally speaking, people seem less interested in discussing new or generally unfamiliar "avant-garde" work.
That said, the world is not a uniform place...
You should look into the world of non-English literature. Other cultures still keep a light on for so-called high-brow literature.
I don't know if these qualify as high-brow or not, but you should check out books from Dalkey Archive Press and Archipelago Books.
Cyclonopedia might be of interest to you. It's para-academic theory-fiction. There have been symposia for it. It's super duper weird and well worth reading. It combines Deleuze and Lovecraft. It is simultaneously better and worse than that sounds.
Relatedly, I haven't read Necrology by Gary J. Shipley and Kenji Shiratori, but I want to. So, erm, there's that. Tell me how it is?
Thomas Ligotti is an excellent horror author. By his own choice, he is most certainly not of the avant-garde: he has famously (and wisely) said that "literature is entertainment, or it is nothing". Nonetheless, he is one of the few contemporary fiction writers whom I see getting passed around contemporary academic circles. (Not big circles, but circles nonetheless.) It doesn't hurt that his work positions him as the credible heir to H. P. Lovecraft, who is trendy in some circles, just as it also doesn't hurt that his work also happily recalls Borges and Schulz. Teatro Grottesco is a good place to start with his work. He's also written The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, a book of philosophy that might be his most terrifying work of all.
(Sidenote: it's interesting how some philosophy/theory people will pluck at their suspenders for being so with-it as to read H. P. Lovecraft or Thomas Ligotti, but it's rare to find somebody referencing actual low-brow horror, i.e. horror that is actually poppy and maybe a little disreputable. Cyclonopedia references Dean Koontz's Phantoms at length, in a smart and fun way, but I was surprised that nobody I spoke to at a Cyclonopedia symposium had actually read Phantoms! I mean, c'mon, guys, it takes an afternoon to read, and clearly Negarestani thought it was worth discussing. Sometimes, it seems like there's an unspoken set of criteria for what is or is not acceptable low-brow grist for the mill.)
Will Self's Umbrella is a self-conscious return to Modernism. Depending on your point of view, that could mean that it definitely does or does not fit what you are looking for. You should certainly check it out, either way. How you feel about Umbrella might affect how you feel about how there is not much of a trend for this sort of thing.
...
I would also say that "high-brow" is a bit like the word "hipster", in that nobody really wants to admit to being high-brow, even if one obviously is. Relatedly, the absolute "worst" thing is to be "middle-brow", for some reason, as if there was something wrong with being an adult speaking to other adults. However, non-fiction is usually not thought of as being high- or low-brow. This adds up to a situation in which cultural elitism is okay when we talk about the tools of analysis, but that same cultural elitism is not okay when your work of fiction requires even a fraction of the education necessary to appreciate it.
In other words, if your work of theory seems impenetrable to the lay reader, then you're not being high-brow, you're just using the language necessary to perform your work. However, if you write a difficult, formally experimental novel which relies on a fairly deep knowledge of certain real world things, then you're out of step with the times. There are exceptions, of course. Generally, though, I get the sense that academics would rather read Harry Potter and study the texts relevant to their disciplines than they would invite a new James Joyce (or even Iris Murdoch!) into their lives.
It's not so much that I'm all that sad that high-brow literature isn't much of a thing anymore. My favorite authors are people like G. K. Chesterton, John Le Carré, and Thomas Ligotti. It's more that I find the situation surrounding high-brow literature's decline to be interesting and full of antinomies. Is it because people can't possibly keep up with all the new, difficult literature? So then people stop even making the stuff, since they know that it won't get read?
It sort of reminds me of how YouTube videos are having a greater hold over our culture than most feature films do, leaving us with a world in which everything is either Breaking Bad (long-form stories requiring massive investment for both creator and viewer), The Avengers (blockbusters made with recurring characters or materials), or a sneezing cat (short and funny clips). I say this as somebody who enjoys all of those things, but who also misses a world in which, say, independent film was actually a thing in the US.
Getting back to somebody like Chesterton, it's interesting that we don't have many modern-day analogues to him: a flâneur, a prolific polymath who churns out millions of pages of fiction and non-fiction, sometimes just a little mystery short story, sometimes a fantasy-horror novel that is actually a heavily symbolic and surreal statement of faith, sometimes a biography of a saint, and so on and so on. I'm not talking about somebody with his ideological points of view. I'm talking about somebody who bothers to attempt such a breadth of work, with the idea that it's okay to be an adult addressing other adults, to have big opinions about big ideas, and that it's okay to assume that the reader may have (or aspire to have) a certain level of education.
(Then again, one of my most-favorited comments is just me basically mocking Jonathan Franzen for even existing, so maybe I'm part of the problem.)
Anyway, I'm officially rambling now. Flâneurs are, if anything, sort of antithetical to the idea of an avant-garde.
Please report back and tell us what you find in the contemporary avant-garde.
posted by Sticherbeast at 6:49 AM on January 6, 2014 [9 favorites]
Generally speaking, people seem less interested in discussing new or generally unfamiliar "avant-garde" work.
That said, the world is not a uniform place...
You should look into the world of non-English literature. Other cultures still keep a light on for so-called high-brow literature.
I don't know if these qualify as high-brow or not, but you should check out books from Dalkey Archive Press and Archipelago Books.
Cyclonopedia might be of interest to you. It's para-academic theory-fiction. There have been symposia for it. It's super duper weird and well worth reading. It combines Deleuze and Lovecraft. It is simultaneously better and worse than that sounds.
Relatedly, I haven't read Necrology by Gary J. Shipley and Kenji Shiratori, but I want to. So, erm, there's that. Tell me how it is?
Thomas Ligotti is an excellent horror author. By his own choice, he is most certainly not of the avant-garde: he has famously (and wisely) said that "literature is entertainment, or it is nothing". Nonetheless, he is one of the few contemporary fiction writers whom I see getting passed around contemporary academic circles. (Not big circles, but circles nonetheless.) It doesn't hurt that his work positions him as the credible heir to H. P. Lovecraft, who is trendy in some circles, just as it also doesn't hurt that his work also happily recalls Borges and Schulz. Teatro Grottesco is a good place to start with his work. He's also written The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, a book of philosophy that might be his most terrifying work of all.
(Sidenote: it's interesting how some philosophy/theory people will pluck at their suspenders for being so with-it as to read H. P. Lovecraft or Thomas Ligotti, but it's rare to find somebody referencing actual low-brow horror, i.e. horror that is actually poppy and maybe a little disreputable. Cyclonopedia references Dean Koontz's Phantoms at length, in a smart and fun way, but I was surprised that nobody I spoke to at a Cyclonopedia symposium had actually read Phantoms! I mean, c'mon, guys, it takes an afternoon to read, and clearly Negarestani thought it was worth discussing. Sometimes, it seems like there's an unspoken set of criteria for what is or is not acceptable low-brow grist for the mill.)
Will Self's Umbrella is a self-conscious return to Modernism. Depending on your point of view, that could mean that it definitely does or does not fit what you are looking for. You should certainly check it out, either way. How you feel about Umbrella might affect how you feel about how there is not much of a trend for this sort of thing.
...
I would also say that "high-brow" is a bit like the word "hipster", in that nobody really wants to admit to being high-brow, even if one obviously is. Relatedly, the absolute "worst" thing is to be "middle-brow", for some reason, as if there was something wrong with being an adult speaking to other adults. However, non-fiction is usually not thought of as being high- or low-brow. This adds up to a situation in which cultural elitism is okay when we talk about the tools of analysis, but that same cultural elitism is not okay when your work of fiction requires even a fraction of the education necessary to appreciate it.
In other words, if your work of theory seems impenetrable to the lay reader, then you're not being high-brow, you're just using the language necessary to perform your work. However, if you write a difficult, formally experimental novel which relies on a fairly deep knowledge of certain real world things, then you're out of step with the times. There are exceptions, of course. Generally, though, I get the sense that academics would rather read Harry Potter and study the texts relevant to their disciplines than they would invite a new James Joyce (or even Iris Murdoch!) into their lives.
It's not so much that I'm all that sad that high-brow literature isn't much of a thing anymore. My favorite authors are people like G. K. Chesterton, John Le Carré, and Thomas Ligotti. It's more that I find the situation surrounding high-brow literature's decline to be interesting and full of antinomies. Is it because people can't possibly keep up with all the new, difficult literature? So then people stop even making the stuff, since they know that it won't get read?
It sort of reminds me of how YouTube videos are having a greater hold over our culture than most feature films do, leaving us with a world in which everything is either Breaking Bad (long-form stories requiring massive investment for both creator and viewer), The Avengers (blockbusters made with recurring characters or materials), or a sneezing cat (short and funny clips). I say this as somebody who enjoys all of those things, but who also misses a world in which, say, independent film was actually a thing in the US.
Getting back to somebody like Chesterton, it's interesting that we don't have many modern-day analogues to him: a flâneur, a prolific polymath who churns out millions of pages of fiction and non-fiction, sometimes just a little mystery short story, sometimes a fantasy-horror novel that is actually a heavily symbolic and surreal statement of faith, sometimes a biography of a saint, and so on and so on. I'm not talking about somebody with his ideological points of view. I'm talking about somebody who bothers to attempt such a breadth of work, with the idea that it's okay to be an adult addressing other adults, to have big opinions about big ideas, and that it's okay to assume that the reader may have (or aspire to have) a certain level of education.
(Then again, one of my most-favorited comments is just me basically mocking Jonathan Franzen for even existing, so maybe I'm part of the problem.)
Anyway, I'm officially rambling now. Flâneurs are, if anything, sort of antithetical to the idea of an avant-garde.
Please report back and tell us what you find in the contemporary avant-garde.
posted by Sticherbeast at 6:49 AM on January 6, 2014 [9 favorites]
Best answer: I to some extent disagree with the above answers. Yes, few academics keep up with contemporary fiction. But there is definitely a group of contemporary authors who are extremely well known and regularly written about. Some are: W. G. Sebald, and especially The Rings of Saturn; J. M. Coetzee, and Kazuo Ishiguro. Teju Cole is much less established, but his Open City gets discussed.
Lauren Berlant and Lee Edleman both discuss Lydia Davis in the very recent Sex, or the Unbearable. They're both very important literary critics, and Lydia Davis is, IMO, one of the most interesting contemporary writers.
Recent "hot" isms: ecocriticism, posthumanism, animal studies. See this reader. Definitely a big focus on how to think about the ethics and representation of the nonhuman in literature and criticism. See Timothy Morton, Donna Haraway.
posted by munyeca at 7:23 AM on January 6, 2014 [3 favorites]
Lauren Berlant and Lee Edleman both discuss Lydia Davis in the very recent Sex, or the Unbearable. They're both very important literary critics, and Lydia Davis is, IMO, one of the most interesting contemporary writers.
Recent "hot" isms: ecocriticism, posthumanism, animal studies. See this reader. Definitely a big focus on how to think about the ethics and representation of the nonhuman in literature and criticism. See Timothy Morton, Donna Haraway.
posted by munyeca at 7:23 AM on January 6, 2014 [3 favorites]
Food studies and literature, as well as carceral studies, are also trending. There are bunch of people working on food in high modernist literature (so re-examinging some of our classic 'highbrow' literature) and people working on prison memoirs and prison poets in particular.
I've noticed a lot of new research coming out on Cormac McCarthy, Marilynne Robinson, and Zadie Smith.
If you don't already read them, going through the London, New York, or LA Review of Books can give you a good idea about what some of the current literary interests/tiffs are.
posted by TwoStride at 9:49 AM on January 6, 2014
I've noticed a lot of new research coming out on Cormac McCarthy, Marilynne Robinson, and Zadie Smith.
If you don't already read them, going through the London, New York, or LA Review of Books can give you a good idea about what some of the current literary interests/tiffs are.
posted by TwoStride at 9:49 AM on January 6, 2014
Response by poster: ... few academics keep up with contemporary fiction. But there is definitely a group of contemporary authors who are extremely well known and regularly written about.
I should have prefaced this question with this statement. I want to know more about those writers. Thanks folks for your answers. Thanks especially to Munyeca for understanding my question perfectly.
posted by Hennimore at 12:11 AM on January 7, 2014
I should have prefaced this question with this statement. I want to know more about those writers. Thanks folks for your answers. Thanks especially to Munyeca for understanding my question perfectly.
posted by Hennimore at 12:11 AM on January 7, 2014
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That said, "What contemporary literature are academics discussing these days?" and "What is the high brow literature of today?" seem to me like two barely-related questions. One of my very smart colleagues from grad school, for instance, wrote his first book on a twentieth-century genre of fiction that was distinctly pulpy and far from "high brow." Other people trained in academic literary analysis are investigating genres such as video games and cult TV. Thanks to the massive influence of the academic cultural studies movement, it has been a very long time since high-brow-ness was an important criterion for literary study.
You may be interested to read this blog post by Natalia Cecire that's getting a lot of attention among literary scholars right now, although it probably won't help you decide which novel to read next.
posted by Orinda at 10:51 PM on January 5, 2014 [2 favorites]