Two on Literature in the Academy

Patrick Gillespie:  Let Poetry Die:

The best thing that could happen to poetry is to drive it out of the universities with burning pitch forks.  Starve the lavish grants.  Strangle them all in a barrel of water.  Cast them out.  The current culture, in which poetry is written for and supported by poets has created a kind of state-sanctioned poetry that resists innovation.  When and if poetry is ever made to answer to the broader public, then we may begin to see some great poetry again – the greatness that is the collaboration between audience and artist.

Ted Genoways:  The Death of Fiction?:

[T]he less commercially viable fiction became, the less it seemed to concern itself with its audience, which in turn made it less commercial, until, like a dying star, it seems on the verge of implosion.  Indeed, most American writers seem to have forgotten how to write about big issues—as if giving two shits about the world has gotten crushed under the boot sole of postmodernism.

Most fledgling writers and poets require another source of income.  And teaching is clearly a legitimate route.  However, the insular world of the academy provides university-affiliated writers and poets with long term income and publication, with or without readership.  The academic-publishing-complex produces an almost infinite supply which is totally indifferent to demand.  To make this possible, this excess supply is funded by someone else, i.e. the tax and tuition payers.  I can think of no other field where we see so great an imbalance in supply and demand.  This situation is finally receiving the attention it deserves.

To writers I would ask, which is preferable:  Publication in an obscure literary journal (readership, maybe, a few thousand) or on a Google-searchable website?  I suppose it's a question of prestige versus availability.  Make that incestuous prestige versus the risk that no one will want to read your easily-available work.

To readers:  If you want to be intellectually stimulated, or God forbid, entertained, look for poetry and fiction produced by writers who are not part of the academy's infrastructure.
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Attention Writers: Plot Trumps All

In a follow-up to Fiction Need Not Be Boring, it is interesting to note all the pompous criticism of popular fiction.

Look, this highbrow distaste for plot produces a never-ending series of novels that:  A.  Don't live up to the authors' literary aspirations, and B.  No one wants to read.  Sure, you can legitimately criticize Dan Brown's writing.  But I choose to criticize the lack of plot in modern literature.

The lesson here is that great writing is a distant second to having a great story to tell.

And, let's take it a step further:  Writing is a teachable skill.  There are creative writing classes on every college campus.  They may not make you a great writer, but they certainly inculcate an academic sense of what is great writing.

Personally, I'm not at all convinced this is a good thing.  These classes surely can't give you an imagination.  The best writer I know, by far, has a comfort with the English language which I envy, but more important, she has a story to tell. Truly great writers always have a story to tell.  Pretenders write lyrically about the wallpaper.  And endlessly develop psychologically complex characters who never get around to doing too much.

Bottom line:  Having something to say is infinitely more important than how you say it.
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Fiction Need Not Be Boring

I remember an old Lev Grossman piece in The Wall Street Journal which was headlined:  Good Books Don't Have to Be Hard.  But his somewhat condescending article should have been entitled:  Fiction Need Not Be Boring. Here's Grossman:

If there's a key to what the 21st-century novel is going to look like, this is it:  The ongoing exoneration and rehabilitation of plot. 

[The Modernists] trained us, Pavlovianly, to associate a crisp, dynamic, exciting plot with supermarket fiction, and cheap thrills, and embarrassment.  Plot was the coward's way out, for people who can't deal with the real world.  If you're having too much fun, you're doing it wrong.  

The novel is finally waking up from its 100-year carbonite nap. Lyricism is on the wane, and suspense and humor and pacing are shedding their stigmas and taking their place as the core literary technologies of the 21st century. 

These books require a different set of tools, and a basic belief that plot and literary intelligence aren't mutually exclusive.

Emphasis mine.  I would agree that it's not so much that modern literary fiction is difficult.  It's just boring.  One reason Grossman left out is the modern affiliation of literary writers with academic institutions which, in their own self-interest, value pretentious "literary" obfuscation.
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