A Personal Response to "Modern Fiction"

Are we now working in a time of great literary prosperity, where all doors to truth and the human experience have opened and we achieve what generations before us could not? I do not know, but I feel it is safe to say we are not. What is apparent however is that truth no longer sells, sensationalism reins supreme and the best selling novels, the ones that garner the most public attention, have little or no value. We are in a culture of fluff entertainment, filler with no connection to the human spirit other than the gross imitation that “reality television” has become, a caricature of life.

Literary criticism focuses on the past, so where has the progress seen by Woolf and her contemporaries gone? Have we plateaued in our advancement of our literary efforts, have we regressed? There was a steady progress we can chart, a climb in exploration and self awareness for the sake of discovering the real “truth” behind everything, and that seems to have capped out amidst the hustle and turmoil of modernity. There is no longer a reaction against anything, but imitations of prior rebellions and complacency with the state of things as they are. We live in a world of compartmentalization where the successes find themselves in specific categories where convention, plot, comedy, tragedy and love interests rule.

That is not to say that there are not those out there who stand up and challenge the established status quo, but they are not the ones gracing the cover of magazines, and their names are known only by their followers who are marginalized. We are in need of a bomb to go off in every home in America, for something true and radical and progressive to take hold of our minds and captivate them for longer than the one hundred and twenty minutes of a movie, or the five minutes of a commercial. We are in need of another literary renaissance to captivate the minds of the common man, and make him challenge himself and his ideas of art and life. We are in need of the common man to consider himself, and have ideas of art and life that extend farther than the gnawing feeling in the back of his head at night that quickly fades with sleep and white noise.