/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.18560571]

Are there any major writers, thinkers or intellectuals today? As in, is there anyone who will be read centuries from now, whose quotes will be instilled in the public consciousness, whose ideas will be implemented in policy and education, whose major works will be seen as canonical masterpieces? I don't think there are any these days. Is it over?

[Anonymous No.18560580]

Derek Parfit

[Anonymous No.18560595]

>>18560571

There are, but it's difficult to say with reasonable certainty who will be remembered and considered significant centuries from now. It'll depend on whose work is relevant to the consciousness of the future, how well their legacy fits within the narrative that the future constructs about the past.

[Anonymous No.18560630]

Yes.

Coetzee and Pynchon too.
Once they die the game is over though.

[Anonymous No.18560641]

>>18560571
Hard to say. From my interpretation of historical writings, it seems that people of the past didn't feel this way. There was nearly always someone living they could point to as an eminent thinker. I suppose right now it would be DFW? He might make it into the canon just by his lack of competition; there are very few periods if any where the canon continuity has a gap of a lifetime. But yes, living through this period now it does seem like we're dealing with a dearth of talent. Maybe the CRT people will win and some of of them whom I've never heard of will be recorded as today's special few.

[Anonymous No.18560677]

>>18560580
Started reading his wiki skeptically and damn this shit is wild. His wife thought he had aspergers too lol.

[Anonymous No.18560711]

Rachel Cusk
Hugo Williams
MBEMBE

[Anonymous No.18561374]

>>18560571
ME

[Anonymous No.18561398]

>>18560571
As for philosophy, Emanuele Severino died the last year. Not that I expect the clownworld of anglo academia to understand the immense importance of him. But still, one the greatest philosophers of all time died the last year. Yup.

[Anonymous No.18561428]

>>18561398
>Emanuele Severino
>Italian who got filtered by Heidegger’s ontology
>awful writing style
Yeah he’ll probably be remembered for ever
for being a pseud

[Anonymous No.18561438]

>>18560641
I think it's easy to be mislead in how well people at the time saw the great minds among them. Certainly there are stand out cases, like Aristotle, Kant, or Hegel, but there are also lots of influential writers and thinkers who flew under the radar for most or all of their lives (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Spencer, etc.).

It's also not totally clear when a big name with become THE big name. So a person in the early 19th century might think of Hegel on equal footing with many other thinkers for awhile, and not see that he'd become the most influential mind of the century.

The cast today does seem pretty thin though. Pinker might be a good candidate for someone who combines the sciences' view of human nature with a humanist philosophy of progress. Murray could seem prescient if cognitive gaps between the classes continue to widen. There are a bunch of people writing about the inherit contradictions of modern liberalism, but it's hard to see who is getting a synthesis that moves us forward, not into the even worse contradictions of wokism and Trumpism.

Literature-wise, I expect genre fiction to begin to get more mainstream in literary circles. It's where the interest is. Pelevin is already an example of a literary rising star writing fantasy, and magical realism already opened the door.

[Anonymous No.18561453]

>>18560630
this. McCarthy is a lock

[Anonymous No.18561459]

>>18561428
Filtered? LMAO, he's the one who has understood it better, and the only legit heir of Heidegger. Come back once you have read the 90+ books he published.

[Anonymous No.18561500]

>>18560630
I don't think Pynchon will last as well. So much of the humor is based on 20th century pop culture ephemera, it will need massive notes to be made sense of in say 150 years, and won't be funny.
When he talks about the Fool posing like the Rolling Stones, we know what that means, but our future student will have to have it examined what a rock band was, who the stones were, what an album cover was like etc

[Anonymous No.18561560]

>>18561500
This. I think Eco has a better chance of standing the test of time.

Most of the new "classics" from the early 20th century will fade too. I predict Borges holds up though, and Camus.

Really hard to think of intellectuals who will stand up. Philosophy is mostly advancing in relation to physics or cognitive science/AI/neuroscience. There would need to be a paradigm shift to make someone stand out.


I guess Rawls is recentish and a moral philosopher who will be remembered.

We're the most educated generation ever and intellectuals are going extinct.

[Anonymous No.18561582]

Imagine declaring what will be remembered and what not from the perspective of a monolingual anglo

Your cultural environment is completely ignorant of what's going on in the world, just sayin

[Anonymous No.18561824]

>>18560571
Donald Trump

[Anonymous No.18561841]

>>18560571
Yes, but anyone who claims to know who is kidding themselves.

[Anonymous No.18561867]

>>18561560
I'd say 20th century, first half at least, will endure fairly well due to litterary movements still having been a thing back then. Its authors are part of the same flow of invention and deconstruction that led previous centuries, so they get to make history.

[Anonymous No.18561870]

>>18560630
>>18561560
Good points all around; McCarthy has cemented himself as one of the standout prose stylists of the 20th/21st centuries; I agree that Pynchon will age worst than most of his contemporaries, but then again, Joyce's most well known works are about a very specific place (Dublin mostly) at a very specific time (the early 20th century) and are full of references from that place and time period, and we get along just fine today, even if we need extensive notes; I can see the same thing happening for Pynchon. Borges intentionally wrote his stories to "take place in somewhat indeterminate places and many years ago" so I think he will be just fine too

[Anonymous No.18561909]

>>18561582
Lel so true. Angloids didn't even get to read Plato in their mutt language until the 16th century.

[Anonymous No.18561915]

>>18561909
the fact that you’re using English to type this post is pretty much proof that Chadnglos culturally buck broke your people

[Anonymous No.18562033]

Hans-Herman Hoppe

[Anonymous No.18562933]

>>18560571
Not really. Nearly everything is reactive to current events or minor additions to groundwork done in the early 20th century.

[Anonymous No.18564585]

>>18561870
Tbh Pynchon is already quite badly dated. In GR the Nixon parts are embarrassing schoolboy stuff, and now the Apollo missions are ancient history the rocket symbolism doesn't have the impact it must have done at the time.
TCOL49 is almost 60s kitsch, like Mad Men or that chess thing

[Anonymous No.18564596]

>>18561374
This, but me.

[Anonymous No.18564597]

Jon Stewart.

[Anonymous No.18564600]

>>18561915
No, it just means 1) 4chan is an English website and 2) we couldn't communicate otherwise because burgers are the only people who only speak one language.

[Anonymous No.18564606]

>>18561438
>Literature-wise, I expect genre fiction to begin to get more mainstream in literary circles. It's where the interest is. Pelevin is already an example of a literary rising star writing fantasy, and magical realism already opened the door.

This is why I expect Gene Wolfe to still be read centuries from now.

I actually have a bit of a bet that science fiction is going to ascend to true literary status, with Wolfe and several others acting as forebears. It's always been the more "literary" of the two major genre fiction categories since it almost always also functions as commentary on the present, unlike a lot of fantasy. I think many of the great works of literature of the coming years and decades might be science fiction.

[Anonymous No.18564648]

>>18561453
lmao. no one will care about cowboy capeshit even 20 years from now

[Anonymous No.18564657]

>muh gene wolf
>muh beancarthy

Genre fiction never ages well. If you unironically nominate these hacks as answers to OP, you're no better than someone choosing grrm or jk rowling

[Anonymous No.18564661]

Neoreaction/NRx has somewhat decent odds of being regarded as a notable epoch in philosophy. Certainly Moldbug and those who have flowed from him are among the more interesting new thinkers of the last 20 years.

[Anonymous No.18564664]

>>18564648
>>18564657
Ignore these posters. Based McCarthy shagged their mamas and they been on seething spree since.

[Anonymous No.18564699]

>>18561500
Pynchon epitomizes postmodernism and is just an all around fantastic writer. You don't need to understand every little reference he makes in order to get something out of reading him. I've honestly never understood why people want to distill (I would probably say 'cheapen') everything down into it's composite parts. Reminder that Pynchon was high off his ass every day for years and years, especially during the period over which he wrote GR. I could make an argument that the presence of so many unknowns (wrt references to pop culture and science) is actually the intended and most exegetically correct place from which to engage with Pynchon. We are, after all, tiny little humans among many of our kind and constantly surrounded by unknowns and unknowables every waking moment. This strikes me as the essence of GR in particular, the work which has obviously come to define the author. To break everything down into little nodules of information, then, would be almost entirely contrary to the essence of the book.

[Anonymous No.18564710]

>>18561870
Desu Joyce frequently gets labelled as 'more talked about than read'. Literature is still under the influence of the modernists, it will be interesting to see Ulysses' trajectory 200 years in the future. However, I don't think the references make Ulysses great. Joyce's prose will undoubtedly stand the test of time.

[Anonymous No.18564737]

>>18564710
I realize this may sound a bit plebbish, but I worry that Ulysses' deliberate difficulty will make it less likely to stand the test of time. Basically, I worry about absorption. I worry there's too much difficulty for difficulty's sake in Ulysses and this will hurt it in the centuries to come. Didn't Joyce say that he deliberately threw in a lot of puzzles to keep the critics talking? Which is all well and good, but how's that going to keep him alive 500 years from now?

Compare him to Melville or Shakespeare. They can be difficult too, but you never feel as though they're being deliberately difficult. Moby-Dick is a fearsome work but it feels very straightforward and not deliberately a matter of puzzlement. It's just difficult because Melville is trying to hash out great emotion and thought in the best way he can, and this sometimes gets very heady.

I subscribe to Samuel Johnson's dictum: that great literature is determined by popular judgment over time. Sure, in the near-term, the masses may not understand what's good, and may not be able to tell what's good from what's bad. But over the years and decades, what is great rises to the surface and the average person takes note of it. The average person 200 years after Shakespeare could tell that Shakespeare was great.

This may frustrate us some in trying to determine who is great right now. But I think there are great artists of the last 200 years, and they will rise to the top, eventually.

[Anonymous No.18564739]

>>18564699
Agreed. But I got one doubt over his legacy. Minor Pynchon doesn't have the greatness of the elites and Major Pynchon is unironically too long and difficult for contemporary readers let alone for readers a century or so in the future when writing would have evolved beyond 20th century diction. It can be an obstacle to his survival. He is likely to have a cultic following (like he does now despite his mainstream recognition)

[Anonymous No.18564743]

>>18564739
>He is likely to have a cultic following (like he does now despite his mainstream recognition)
And if Pynchon cares about his legacy literally at all, I would imagine he's okay with this. It might even have been his aim.

[Anonymous No.18564752]

>>18564743
His immense reclusiveness seems to suggest it. However, it might niggle him a bit I think (I was surprised he agreed to an adaptation of 'Inherent vice')

[Anonymous No.18565189]

>>18564699
>Pynchon was high off his ass every day for years and years, especially during the period over which he wrote GR.
We can tell, we can tell.
There's that bit in the V2 factory where he does a parody of Marrakesh Express by CSN. It's a tedious stoned boomer joke even now, let alone in 100 years.
I'm not sure he has enough quality to last the course, his prose alone won't do it - who now reads Walter Pater or Carlyle?

[Anonymous No.18565214]

>>18564661
Probably this. Maybe Paglia.

[Anonymous No.18565317]

>>18560571
newmanleary.wordpress.com
Still undefeated. Nobody has been able to disprove me. I'm arguing for objectivity in civilizational context and world peace in a way that can change the world in realistic ways and don't have us killed by the corrupt predators.

[Anonymous No.18565365]

>>18560571
BAP!!!

[Anonymous No.18566268]

>>18561500
This. The fact Pynchon is considered a 'great writer' by modern standards only shows how far we've been absorbed in hyperreality