I'm wondering if this is contributing to an increasing body of evidence that Western literature (and by extension literary criticism) is out of things to say. There was an article[^1] in n+1 a little while back that makes that point, and then there was the coverage of Your Name Here, which is being praised for being a difficult read in a sea of easy-to-read but shallow chaff, but seems like it's loaded with "self-aware" decisions like copying and pasting whole email exchanges, a decision that seems like a signal the author is infatuated with their own perceived cleverness rather than an actual innovation, and making a lot of references to other obscure/"difficult" books.

This latest bit almost does seem like performance art, a way of saying that all that's left to do is keep chopping up and regurgitating the same ideas in different combinations ad infinitum, but the level of self awareness needed to pull it off just isn't visible.

[^1]: "The latest crisis in literary studies feels different: more spiteful and less fertile, more terminally gloomy, a scene of death throes rather than birth pangs. It can seem that literature professors agree on little beyond a sense that something is irreversibly wrong."

[–] purpleworm@hexbear.net 9 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

I am reminded again of this quote from Sartre:

If philosophy is to be simultaneously a totalisation of knowledge, a method, a regulative Idea, an offensive weapon, and a community of language, if this “vision of the world” is also an instrument which ferments rotten societies, if this particular conception of a man or of a group of men becomes the culture and sometimes the nature of a whole class-then it is very clear that the periods of philosophical creation are rare. Between the seventeenth century and the twentieth, I see three such periods, which I would designate by the names of the men who dominated them: there is the “moment” of Descartes and Locke, that of Kant and Hegel, finally that of Marx. These three philosophies become, each in its turn, the humus of every particular thought and the horizon of all culture; there is no going beyond them so long as man has not gone beyond the historical moment which they express. I have often remarked on the fact that an “anti-Marxist” argument is only the apparent rejuvenation of a pre-Marxist idea. A so-called “going beyond” Marxism will be at worst only a return to pre-Marxism; at best, only the rediscovery of a thought already contained in the philosophy which one believes he has gone beyond.

It feels to me like a lot of western intellectualism, by its rejection of socialism, is forced into a position where it is incapable of making progress and, having hit a wall of its own construction, can do nothing but sink to the floor.

[–] BodyBySisyphus@hexbear.net 1 points 1 hour ago

Good point; it seems pretty self-evident in econ and political science, where the reigning orthodoxies disallow departing from the assumptions of liberalism, but given that literature also takes place within culture, it end ends up subject to the same constraints, blindly or deliberately imposed by publishers, critics, and readers.