A Preface: Unfortunately (?), my career as a meta-blogger has come to an end. It seems pressing and necessary to find Great American Novels (GANs) in today's time. Literature is in a state of confusion. We may just be in the age of post-post-modernism, people's novel reading is limited to airplane novels and pop-fiction, and indeed the physical novel is becoming a relic of sorts. Interestingly people still read (see: Harry Potter, Twilight, The Hunger Games), but they do not read literature.
My mission is to review those books already established as GANs, and those that have the potential to be such. In addition, I plan to contemplate what it means to be a GAN, and toss out some ideas for forms it could take. I wonder if it is possible for a book that is actual literature, that actually has the qualifications of a GAN to be popular today. I would imagine it would need immediate accessibility to disguise its vile literary intentions. People's attention spans are growing shorter. It is rare to find someone who has the patience to let a book have its say.
An idea: An idea I had was a book like Hemingway's In Our Time: a collection of short stories ultimately connected by the cross-section of the post WW1 world they all provide. Perhaps we could have In Our Time. There is something to be said for rehashing an idea. I don't know if that is something bad or good but there is definitely something to be said.
A note: I find the acronym GAN appropriately silly for a topic as serious as this.
What do you think? Does the next Great American Novel need to masquerade as pop-fiction? Is there room for literature to be reborn yet? Is there anyway to stop (in my eyes) the perpetual cheapening of culture?
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