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Ritalin comments on The Classic Literature Workshop - Less Wrong Discussion
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Perhaps that is the hallmark of "literary fiction"; trying to be as timeless and applicable as possible while dealing with human failure modes. "Genre fiction," because it often deals with strange and spectacular situations, doesn't endure, because humans get acclimated to amazing and wondrous and shocking things, and they soon become zeerust of one kind or another. Also works set in the past tend to grow a wondrous and wistful aura merely by virtue of being old, making us feel nostalgia for times and places we never saw.
By the way, reading historical novels, written at different times, and set in the same time period, alongside works written in that actual time period, can be in itself a source of much amusement and bewilderment, even when the time period is fictional.
Films are also quite fun about this; pay attention to the haircuts :P.
Reading historical novels set in the same period but written at different times does sound like fun.
C.S. Lewis' High and Low Brows * builds the rather plausible theory that high brow fiction is simply more difficult than low brow, and thus higher status. He mentions Dickens, who was low brow when he was writing, and high brow after his work became less accessible.
It isn't a matter of the authors' intent.
You may have a point about more recent literary fiction considered as a genre, rather than looking at the fiction which is counted as classic.
*Unfortunately, Google books has left some pages out, but the outline of the argument is still there.
Well, yes, stuff that's harder to like and harder to enjoy becomes popular among the "right" crowd who can delude themselves and each other that they're appreciating it right, and the rest of the world's oafs aren't. Subverting this kind of stupid bullcrap is another big motivator for that project.
I suspect that many literary and philosophical projects were motivated by the urge to flip the bird to the current paradigm. I just gotta hope most of them failed and we only heard about the winners, because outrage, frustration, defiance and facetiousness don't seem like very good motivators to get suff done...