Quote:
Originally Posted by teh603
Anyone who wants to write a "future classic" needs to have their head examined. That's the kind of boring tripe that gets recycled endlessly though middle and high school English classes.
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Welcome to the world of latin-american publishing.
Nobody admits to writing fiction.
Everybody aspires to write the next Nobel Prize winner.
Some do. Most end up with merely pretentious potboilers that lack even the virtues of honest genre fiction..
The Guardian article struck me as delightfully condescending.
Lots of snarky comments.
Somewhere along the way, though, folks seem to have forgotten that all those "great literary classics" of the past were not themselves written with any "high literary aspirations".
Shakespeare's plays were potboilers in the literal sense--he wrote to feed his family not to reinvent the english language. That his work stood the test of time and transcended cultures was unplanned and unintended.
Cervantes? El Quijote is a *spoof* of the popular "medieval romances" that were the literature of the day and whose readership had conveniently forgotten that the romances themselves were the genre fiction of a previous era.
Dumas? Doyle? Verne? Conrad? Austen? The Brontes?
High literary ambition? Hah!
More often than not, the works written with high literary aspirations are well-nigh unreadable, and the few that do make it are ignored/decried in their day. (Tolkien, for one.)
Critics don't annoint true literary classics, time and the masses do.
The genre fiction of one era is the literature of the next.
In decrying ebooks for building their success off genre fiction, the article is unwittingly congratulating the industry for its successful mainstreaming.
If, in the next few decades, pretentious "literary works" eschew the digital format and limit themselves to dead treeware, I'd call that a net win.