/lit/ - Literature

>>22145005
>>22145071
Thinking some more about what I've said, it's not alienation that is lacking or false in modern-day literature but authenticity, or the lack of it. It's cliched to say now but only because it's true, that no one talks or interacts or just observes anyone else because they're all on their phones. At any major event or even some great disaster half of the crowd will be recording it on their phones, to share it on snapchat or tiktok or whatever with acquaintanes who don't really care about them. People share cherry-picked or straight up fake moments of their life with with strangers to gain some bit of validation.
A while ago I read The Old Man and the Sea and thought of it as a normal man vs. nature novel until someone here said it was about authenticity. The old man pours the entirety of his existence into the struggle with the marlin and the sharks and hunger and fatigue, to come out with nothing but the experience itself. The tourists see just the old man and the skeleton of a fish and make a fleeting remark. They observe that great struggle for just a moment and from far away and end up with less than the old man even though he suffered and lost more.
Now people are trying to create little fake pictures like what the tourists saw of the old man and sell them to eachother like postcards in a currency of vanity and clout. That's what our modern world is, not alienation. Alienation is nothing new and has been a theme in literature since the Gilded Age. That's what modern literature is missing.