/lit/ - Literature

>>11022598
Dude Kendrik la mar

>>11022598
proles were taught to read

>>11022598
consumerism

>>11022598
>only obscenely rich people get to see original play debuts
What? New writing is cheap as fuck to go watch (because it's 95% shit). It's the established classics with big stars which are expensive

>>11022602
>he thinks Kendrick Lamar won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature

>>11022617

That doesn't explain how short stories went from incredibly popular pulp stories like those of Lovecraft and Leiber to people like George Saunders who actually considered writing his debut novel instead of more short stories to be "selling out."

>>11022598
>only obscenely rich people get to see original play debuts
maybe something has to do with the fact that there's a class divide to begin with

>>11022598
How? Radio, movies, TV, cable, internet, smartphones. How else? Reading and live theatre went from one of very few options for entertainment to something seen as boring, expensive, difficult to access and requiring too much work. And compared to watching videos on a screen, they're generally right.

>>only obscenely rich people get to see original play debuts
So what? Go see a later performance. Premieres probably aren't as good acting-wise as reprises anyway.

>>nobody buys poetry collections anymore
Rupi Kaur sells pretty well :^)
>>nobody subscribes to short story magazines or buys short story collections anymore
The novel is currently indisputably the dominant literary form, poetry and short stories are completely overshadowed by it. I'd say that the reason is a subconscious hierarchy of genres, a residue of the premodern(ist) era, where we expected great art to paint the picture of the reality and totality. Short stories and poetry offer only fragments of the whole picture (seen through strongly subjective lens in the latter case). When you think about it, even in the canon their function is to accompany the great novels and epics (the forms ideal for representing the totality) rather than to be parallel to them.

>>memoirs are the only commercially viable non-fiction
Tbh when was non-fiction commercially viable?

>>11023066
>Lovecraft
He died broke

>>11022598
>nobody buys poetry collections anymore
Speak for yourself, illiterate cunt. I bought 5 last year

>>11022598
Internet

>>11022894
No he won it for music, being the first time it's been given to a non-classical/jazz album, and that's just ass offensive to me.

>>11023735
I suspect it has more to do with time commitment. In the old days I read short stories if I had half an hour to kill, but now I watch an episode of a tv show or browse social media. Novels are a genuine investment of time, and therefore succeed because they are a thing you dedicate yourself to.

>>11023735
Don’t really agree that short stories are a somehow ancellary rather than an (aesthetically, if not economically) equal art form. You think artists like Borges and Flannery O’Connor have had less impact on the advancement of fiction than their novelist coevals? I personally feel like Borges especially serves as a repudiation of your idea of totality via length being the ultimate virtue of a piece of writing. He said something to the effect of the ideal writer can express in a short story what a lesser craftsman needs 300 pages to do.

>>11023066
That is indeed strange. I suppose the vast majority of readers have no familiarity with short stories because they are never introduced to them in high school.>>11023735
>I'd say that the reason is a subconscious hierarchy of genres, a residue of the premodern(ist) era, where we expected great art to paint the picture of the reality and totality.
Nah, is that what the vast majority of people get out of a novel is a sprawling plot. The more you read about a specific story and set of characters, the more you become affectionate to them. This is also why 10000 pages long fantasy schlock are so popular. People like "meaty" things, so to speak. The thing about representing reality as a totality is present in a lot of postmodern fiction as well. As for poetry, people simply don't know how to read it.

>>11022607
>increased demand causes decreased supply

>>11024091
>>11023735
Also
>When you think about it, even in the canon their function is to accompany the great novels and epics
This is beyond dumb, esp for poetry considering that poetry precedes novels and at certain points in time it was the only artform.

>>11022598
>only obscenely rich people get to see original play debuts
t. knows jack shit about theatre
For fuck's sake, I've seen plenty of original plays, and my net worth is less than $5,000.

>nobody buys poetry collections anymore
I've bought 3 in the past month and a half.

>nobody subscribes to short story magazines or buys short story collections anymore
Then how the fuck are there more small presses operating than ever before?

>memoirs are the only commercially viable non-fiction
Tell that to the literary agents who sell novel-length biographies of historical figures on a regular basis.

You're an uncultured faggot and you don't belong on this board.

95% of people only read for prestige. There is less prestige in saying you have read x poem or short story or subscribe to x magazine than there is in saying you have read x 1000 page book.

>>11024100
it causes demand for garbage which floods the market. the transition of aristocratic to capitalist elite also is relevant

>>11024142
I bet none of your hypotheses stand up to any real scrutiny here.

>>11022598
>>only obscenely rich people get to see original play debuts
what? first night is cheap as shit on these
>>nobody buys poetry collections anymore
Are you this nobody? I'm a nobody but I still buy them. Some of them aren't even from living authors.
>>nobody subscribes to short story magazines or buys short story collections anymore
I think you are getting your information from a very stingy sample of one
>memoirs are the only commercially viable non-fiction
Yours certainly won't be, but non-fiction more generally is pretty sustainable.

>>11023735
>So what? Go see a later performance. Premieres probably aren't as good acting-wise as reprises anyway.
That's why first night is cheapest.

>>11022598
I would buy a short story subscription. However, I doubt they would be run well and would probably turn out to be a heavily politicized and repulsive circle jerk.
So yeah, there you go, I don't participate in modern literature because of above reasons. Fix those, I'm in.

>>11024056
I think it's kind of funny honestly.