Running for Your Life: High Cultural Pluralism – A Few Words

When it comes to writing and publishing, I recently dug out a terrific essay by author Elif Batuman in a September 2010 issue of London Review of Books about the state of the writing academy in the US, called “Get A Real Degree.”

Two gems:

The term to best describe current American literature – high cultural pluralism. (To which I would add, when it comes to high cultural pluralism as it relates to “literature,” the liberal mainstream celebrates the nihilistic hipster and the Upper West nostalgist to the exclusive of just about every else.)

And this, “There is a genuine problem when young people are taught to believe that they can be writers only in the presence of real or invented socio-political grievances.”

An essay that precipitated many letters, including this stirring one:

“[Donald Barthelme’s] fiction, with its multiple references and allusions to the histories of literature, art, philosophy, architecture and politics, certainly bears the traces of his own study of the history of everything, as a ‘melancholy recognition’ [my quotation marks] of how useful the study might ultimately prove to be; asked why he wrote the way he did, he liked to reply: “Because Samuel Beckett always writes the way he does.”

Alex Johnston, Nov. 4, 2010

Next: Running for Your Life: Treetop Tips

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