[BRIEF NOTE] Culture and Its Portability
Mar. 13th, 2004 11:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldI mentioned buying The Glass Coffin recently. I've read the book before, actually., last spring; I remember reading it in the gym, being so caught up in the plot as it unfolded that I got to work two hours late. I won't spoil the plot for people; suffice it to say that I recommend it, and the previous mysteries in its series (Saskatchewanian Gail Bowen is author, incidentally), for reading. I've consistently liked Gail Bowen for the better part of a decade, ever since i heard The Wandering Soul Murders excerpted night after night on CBC Radio.
This purchase raised in my mind a question about how much popular literature--considered as a subset of popular culture, generally speaking--will continue to be considered by future generations. It seems like too much popular literature is drawn too strongly towards one or the other of two dangerous poles, towards complete freedom of expression without regards for deeper structure, or towards a blind adherence to conventions and a highly limited possibilities for expression.
In my academic and reading experience, modern poetry (perhaps ever since T.S. Eliot) seems drawn, increasingly strongly as time progresses, towards an increasingly unrestrained communication, rejecting traditional rhyme structures and syllabic patterning for an increasingly imagistic mode of writing, focusing on communicating in increasingly evocative imagery the sensations of a particular moment or set of moments. Many elements of this poetic style I like; many elements of this poetic style I've used. Increasingly, though, the flight away from structure towards a subjective imagism creates poems which are almost too self-indulgent to be worth reading, caught in their own meanderings and without many discernable points for the casual reader to latch onto. And modern prose literature--or, at least, modern Canadian prose literature--tends too often to commit the sin of using a highly stylized and polished prose, quite self-aware and self-reflexive to a degree, but so refined as to distance the writer from sympathy with the characters described in the prose. Brechtian alienation is all fine and well, but only when it's used to produce a particular point.
On those few occasions when I read poetry, I read poetry with points for the casual reader like myself to latch onto, well-executed modern poems or simply older poems (I really like Nelligan). In terms of prose literature, I've found genre literature--science fiction, say, or mysteries--to be more resistant to noxious trends in mainstream literature.
I wonder, sometimes, what works students of literature in the early 22nd century will be taught constitute the early 21st century canon. After all, trends and styles change, and those works too deeply embedded in those movements can lose their meaning when these trends and styles end.
This purchase raised in my mind a question about how much popular literature--considered as a subset of popular culture, generally speaking--will continue to be considered by future generations. It seems like too much popular literature is drawn too strongly towards one or the other of two dangerous poles, towards complete freedom of expression without regards for deeper structure, or towards a blind adherence to conventions and a highly limited possibilities for expression.
In my academic and reading experience, modern poetry (perhaps ever since T.S. Eliot) seems drawn, increasingly strongly as time progresses, towards an increasingly unrestrained communication, rejecting traditional rhyme structures and syllabic patterning for an increasingly imagistic mode of writing, focusing on communicating in increasingly evocative imagery the sensations of a particular moment or set of moments. Many elements of this poetic style I like; many elements of this poetic style I've used. Increasingly, though, the flight away from structure towards a subjective imagism creates poems which are almost too self-indulgent to be worth reading, caught in their own meanderings and without many discernable points for the casual reader to latch onto. And modern prose literature--or, at least, modern Canadian prose literature--tends too often to commit the sin of using a highly stylized and polished prose, quite self-aware and self-reflexive to a degree, but so refined as to distance the writer from sympathy with the characters described in the prose. Brechtian alienation is all fine and well, but only when it's used to produce a particular point.
On those few occasions when I read poetry, I read poetry with points for the casual reader like myself to latch onto, well-executed modern poems or simply older poems (I really like Nelligan). In terms of prose literature, I've found genre literature--science fiction, say, or mysteries--to be more resistant to noxious trends in mainstream literature.
I wonder, sometimes, what works students of literature in the early 22nd century will be taught constitute the early 21st century canon. After all, trends and styles change, and those works too deeply embedded in those movements can lose their meaning when these trends and styles end.
