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David_Gerard comments on The Classic Literature Workshop - Less Wrong Discussion
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Pretty much: something is good if it works out of its context. The work of a savannah poet who understands human nature. People do in fact read Dickens, Austen and Shakespeare in the present day for pleasure and not just because it was forced on them at school.
That said, literary canons tend to be retconned from contemporary works of great resonance, as if history were a story that built to a climax rather than shit happening.
Er, I don't get what you mean here...
I mean that when you see a literary canon listed, or a writeup of an artistic progression, it looks very like history writing a story, but has actually been constructed at all because of interest in the work at the end. So the progression may be true, but its selection is heavily biased and makes history look like a bunch of stories. In practice, everyone is just trying to write a good one this time out, and artists steal furiously from every possible source they can, whether it fits a marketable story or not; real life is messy and doesn't have to make sense as a story.