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« Bigfoot sighting/avant-garde play in Germany | Main | Gorman v. Web 2.0 » Friday, June 15, 2007The failings of the modern novelJosh, thanks for pointing out that wonderful essay on the dull, worthy, modern novel. To persuade yet more people to check it out, here's a snippet: Novelists can take from these new art forms [e.g., sitcoms and HBO-quality TV dramas] new structures and techniques for telling stories, as Joyce did from cinema. But who has? Weirdly, the modernists have a more accurate take on now than the most recent Booker winners. Finnegans Wake reads like a mash-up of a Google translation of everything ever. But John Banville and Anita Desai read like nostalgia (for Nabokov, for Dickens, for traditional virtues, for the canon). They feel far less contemporary than The Waste Land -- which is what Bakhtin would call a novelised poem: a poem that escapes Aristotle's Poetics and hitches a ride on the energy of the novel ... Since Joyce and Woolf (and Eliot), the novel's wheels have spun in the sand. So steal from The Simpsons, not Henry James. Posted by Christopher Shea at 12:23 PM
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