Winter \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0First Moon of the New Year<\/p>\n
I’ll respond to this in another post, but for those of you interested in the novel, it’s worth a read. \u00a0You can reach the whole article through the central question link.<\/p>\n
The central question<\/a> driving literary aesthetics in the age of the iPad is no longer \u201cHow should novels be?\u201d but \u201cWhy write novels at all?\u201d*<\/p>\n *The roots of<\/strong>\u00a0this question, in its contemporary incarnation, can be traced back to the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who at the dawn of the \u201980s promulgated the notion of \u201ccultural capital\u201d: the idea that aesthetic choices are an artifact of socioeconomic position. Bourdieu documented a correlation between taste and class position: The scarcer or more difficult to access an aesthetic experience is \u2014 the novel very much included \u2014 the greater its ability to set us apart from those further down the social ladder. This kind of value is, in his analysis, the only real value that \u201crefined\u201d tastes have…<\/p>\n The idea that<\/strong>\u00a0\u201cthe deepest purpose of reading and writing fiction is to sustain a sense of connectedness, to resist existential loneliness\u201d crops up all over the writing of the Conversazioni group<\/a>: in Franzen\u2019s nonfiction, and in Wallace\u2019s, and in Smith\u2019s beautiful encomium to Wallace in her book of essays, \u201cChanging My Mind.\u201d It also helps to explain these writers\u2019 broad turn away from various postmodern formalisms and toward the problems of the human heart. Indeed, when we consider the web of influence that connects them to old roommates and friends and lovers and students \u2014 a list that includes David Means, Rick Moody, Mary Karr, Donald Antrim and Jonathan Safran Foer \u2014 and to newer work by writers like Karen Russell or the Irish novelist Paul Murray, \u201cHere is a sign that you\u2019re not alone\u201d starts to look like the ascendant trope of and about literature today…<\/p>\n But will we\u00a0be<\/em>\u00a0alone? Literature, to a degree unique among the arts, has the ability both to frame the question and to affect the answer. This isn\u2019t to say that, measured in terms of cultural capital or sheer entertainment, the delights to which most contemporary \u201cliterary fiction\u201d aims to treat us aren\u2019t an awful lot. It\u2019s just that, if the art is to endure, they won\u2019t be quite enough.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Winter \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0First Moon of the New Year I’ll respond to this in another post, but for those of you interested in the novel, it’s worth a read. \u00a0You can reach the whole article through the central question link. … Continue reading Why Write Novels At All<\/span>