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Who Killed American Literature?

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I kept wondering for years why American literature is so dead. Today I learned the answer:

I honestly had no idea about this.

Here’s the link to the article. It has a funny passage on Stephen Markley who showed great promise in his novel Ohio only to produce the following monstrosity later on:

And Stephen Markley’s 2023 climate change epic The Deluge, replete with a Jamaican/Native American heroine and a queer neurodivergent Arab-American mathematician, shows that appropriation is acceptable so long as the politics are sufficiently on the nose (“The trauma of that time, especially the storming of the Capitol, lit a new fire under me…”).

At least, there’s Emma Cline. That’s good literature. Slim pickings in such a large country but better than nothing.

One more quote on the same subject:

In 2022 famous novelist—and no liberal—Joyce Carol Oates wrote in a post on X: “(a friend who is a literary agent told me that he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers, no matter how good; they are just not interested. this is heartbreaking for writers who may, in fact, be brilliant, & critical of their own ‘privilege.’)”

How to Recapture the Lost ‘Literary Men’

19 responses to “Who Killed American Literature?”

  1. Demotrash Avatar
    Demotrash

    I’m surprised you didn’t know about this. I feel like I’ve fallen down on the job not telling you 😛

    As a reader, I don’t really care about the sex and race of the authors I’m reading, but current literary fiction is definitely written *for* women as well as by women. Very few male readers are interested in reading something like “All Fours” by Miranda July. It’s obviously perfectly fine for woman-centered books to exist, but why do they seem to be the bulk of literary fiction? I’m far more open minded on this front than the vast majority of men and it gets to be a bit much even for me. I read a book about a girl who goes to boarding school that my friend recommended (Prep by Sittenfeld), and liked it more than I thought I would. But I would not want to read books like that all the time.

    Most men I know who are into literature retreat into sci fi/fantasy and the classics (and even with SFF they’re probably reading older stuff now that that section of the bookstore is flooded with “romantasy.”) There’s definitely still good stuff with cross gender appeal but you really have to hunt for it and many men just throw up their hands and give up.

    I feel worst for men who may have wanted to become writers. I would imagine many don’t even bother trying because they know it’s hopeless. The only path for a white man is to be gay and write terrible queer fiction. Hilarious example: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62039259-open-throat

    All this in addition to the class and regional provincialism within current literary fiction. Is it any wonder sales are down? Btw, anytime the “men” topic is brought up among groups of people who are seriously into literature, they scoff about how men need to suck it up and read books about people who aren’t stale pale males. They’ll even say “us women had to navigate a male dominated literary culture when we were little girls and none of us complained this much!” Since when? That world hasn’t existed in several decades. Anyway, it’s a funny response to dwindling readership; you cannot make demands of people who don’t care about you.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      I blame you, too, for this. 😁😁

      Spain is woke but it never occurred to anybody to go this far, and there are many great young male writers as a result. It never occurred to me that there was a concerted effort in the US to destroy literature.

      From the time novels became a thing, there was never a shortage of female authors. So it’s weird to complain that squeezing out men is some sort of evening out the score for something in the past.

      This is all extremely sad. A culture destroying itself for no reason.

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      1. oldcowboy3 Avatar
        oldcowboy3

        What is the gender proportion in American academe? I remember Janice Fiamengo observing that when she was given English positions at the Universities of Saskatchewan, Vancouver, and Ottawa not a single male applicant was short listed.

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          Depends on the rank. Women don’t get promoted to the highest rank nearly as often as men because they choose committee work over research and making a name for themselves.

          On the lowest rank, it’s pretty equal at this point.

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      2. Demotrash Avatar
        Demotrash

        The publishing industry is heavily female dominated, and it’s exactly the kind of insufferable, NPR tote bag wearing, Elizabeth Warren voting, Robyn DeAngelo reading liberal white women you’re imagining. Nothing changes unless this changes.

        There are upstart right wing male writers who’ve found some level of success. They build an online following, and therefore have a relatively small but very loyal audience who buys and reads everything they publish. They are fantastic marketers, but unfortunately this does not correlate with writing talent. I have no interest in reading the execrable garbage written by “Delicious Tacos” or “0HP Lovecraft” (they both put out enough free content that I’ve been able to make a judgment based on that.) Decentralization won’t “save literature” any more than it has “saved music.”

        For insight on the follies of modern publishing, I definitely recommend following Alex Perez on twitter.

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        1. Avi Avatar
          Avi

          Thank you, Demotrash.

          Most if not all of what is written today by women and for women is NOT literature and thankfully it will not be remembered for long after it was published.

          The problem is whether some talented white male will be so put off by the publishing world that his work will be lost forever, which would be sad for mankind.

          Liked by 1 person

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    2. Avi Avatar
      Avi

      @Demotrash

      Ditto.

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  2. el Avatar
    el

    \ Here’s the link to the article. It has a funny passage on Stephen Markley who showed great promise in his novel Ohio 

    The link leads to X post re price of the judge’s house.

    “The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone” is behind a paywall.

    So “How to Recapture the Lost ‘Literary Men’” by Mark Judge is what can be read.

    A facinating topic. Would never had guessed that.

    How can one fight this insane and sad trend? Is there a way to open a publishing house, may be a nonprofit organization, promoting the best writers regardless of their gender or political views?

    Because opening an org for conservate authors seems just as wrong and far away from art.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      It’s the same answer as always: the West needs to decide not to self-destruct. I have despaired at this point that anything can make it decide that.

      And it’s not a political divide thing. Both sides are destroying their civilization.

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    2. Demotrash Avatar
      Demotrash

      Try this

      https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-vanishing-white-male-writer/

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      1. el Avatar
        el

        Thank you, Demotrash! It works.

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  3. Avatar
    Anonymous

    There’s at least some evidence that the substack model can work. John Pistelli serialized his novel Major Arcana on his substack and then self published on Amazon, where it did well enough (mainly due to the fan base and word of mouth from the substack version) that it got picked up by a small publishing house and is coming out in April. If it and other books like it do well enough, more small presses might realize that there is an audience that is simply being ignored by the big publishers and start looking seriously at substack as a source of authors.

    (Commenter formerly known as AcademicLurker)

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    1. methylethyl Avatar
      methylethyl

      It is unfortunate though, that the talent for writing, and the talent for aggressive self-marketing, so seldom coincide in the same person.

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      1. Clarissa Avatar
        Clarissa

        Exactly, and that’s why the whole literary establishment (including literary critics like me) exists. We are there to identify and promote talented people so that talented people themselves don’t have to torture themselves with self-promotion.

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        1. methylethyl Avatar
          methylethyl

          Someday, I’m gonna edit and polish my dad’s travelogues and get them printed up on my own dime, for my kids– as a cranky old white dude, they would not appeal to formal publishing 😉 I have traveled with him a few times, and… he doesn’t tourist. I have never felt more terrified, or more alive. We grew up hearing his hair-raising tales of adventure. I’m too close to the source to tell if they rank as literature or not, but half my life I’ve listened thinking… this should be a book. I’m sure they’re part of what permanently warped our sense of “what’s normal”.

          https://dzugashvili.blogspot.com/

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        2. Demotrash Avatar
          Demotrash

          Which is why it’s alarming that, more and more, publishing companies expect authors to do most of their own self promotion. There are fewer reasons to bother with a traditional publisher every day. But if you’re self publishing as a serious author, you have to be very business minded. This is not a model that’s likely to produce great art.

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          1. Clarissa Avatar
            Clarissa

            Yes, I heard that if you have fewer than 5,000 followers on Instagram, you shouldn’t even approach a publisher. And it has to be Instagram for some reason. Other social media don’t count.

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            1. Demotrash Avatar
              Demotrash

              Their editing has gotten sloppier as well. At that point, what are you even getting from them?

              Publishing houses used to value art to some degree in addition to profit. Now it seems to purely be a moneymaking venture, at best (literary fiction publishers apparently don’t care about money, as we’ve been discussing.) It’s sad.

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  4. Stringer Bell Avatar
    Stringer Bell

    Funny.

    One of my favorite stories of the Woke Era is the sordid tale of Yi-Fen Chou, an obscure poet whose poem “The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve,” was selected for the prestigious Best American Poetry collection in 2015. What the editors of Best American didn’t know was that the same poem had been rejected over 40 times by journals large and small and that Yi-Fen Chou was not a Chinese woman with a complicated immigration story, but a non-descript white guy from Fort Wayne Indiana named Michael Derek Hudson who after years of summary rejection by the literary establishment decided to submit his poems under a different name and was immediately vaulted to the heights of success in his field.

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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