Skip to main content

Aesthetic Apathy

By
I’d like to push this idea that today’s writing has no coherent aesthetic direction. Central to this lack is a complex net of social, political, and technological developments. For me, the “Facebook Generation” I referenced in the title of my last post already carries a note of exhaustion and cliché. What exactly does it mean to be living in such a generation? Beyond the useless moralistic debates that swirl around social networking sites, I prefer to analyze them as embodiments of social trends, and not as social trends in and of themselves. An integral aspect of the social realities advanced through the explosion of Web 2.0 onto the scene is that people have become more distanced from reality.

We North Americans live in fevered times, but in many ways these times always seem to happen elsewhere—on the internet, on our computer screens, across the ocean…wherever. War today is a foreign concept for the majority of North Americans under a certain age. We’ve heard stories of the World Wars, Vietnam, Korea, etc. and against the backdrop of these horrors, the ongoing wars in the Middle East just don’t carry the same “we-need-to-keep-our-lights-off-at-night-because-the-Germans-are-coming-to-bomb-us” kind of terror. So, we’ve got problems—massive environmental disasters, fuel and water shortages, economic recessions—but these problems are so abstract and complex that it’s difficult to know how and why doing art is a valuable and necessary activity anymore.

Political apathy is a major part of this aesthetic apathy. Writing is expression; it depicts, slants, and unveils reality from multiple perspectives. Yet instead of exploring and expressing the many issues the world is faced with, more and more of us choose to simply ignore these issues in favour of activities that give us easy and immediate gratification (like clubbing and video games). In order for writing to have a coherent aesthetic direction, it has to recognize and respond to the social, political, and technological realities of the present moment.

George Orwell begins Why I Write by stating, “As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me” (11). WWII lent Orwell’s writing a tone of pronounced urgency that resulted in classics like Animal Farm and 1984. The Facebook Generation has not yet realized the shape of its urgency, and thus it lacks aesthetic direction in both content and in form.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Manuscript Issue

By
It's been awhile since my last post, but now that it's summer I've been reinvigorated to come back to the magazine and the blog. To shake the dust off, I want to give a brief glimpse into the direction The Writers Block is headed: The next issue is going to be a tribute to and exploration of the relationship between handwriting and poetic composition. Until July 1st, the Block is accepting submissions for a poetry-only manuscript issue of handwritten and/or hand-illustrated poems in digitized, scanned, or photographed formats. I'm interested to see what sort of submissions will come in. I've tried to phrase the call specifically enough to communicate clearly what I'm looking for, while leaving it ambiguous enough to ensure a plurality of submissions. The inspiration for the call came out of my research on e-books, and how emerging literary technologies are changing the way we read and experience older printed and hand-written texts. Both print and digitizati...
4 comments
Read more

Why Write?

By
Most writers, when asked, will tell you that they write because they can't stop, can't help themselves. This is a great answer, except that they seem to have misunderstood what was being asked of them. The question isn't “Why do you write?” but rather, “Why should you write?” It's a very convenient, romantic notion of the suffering writer, who writes because he cannot stop, despite being ignored by all (I can't help but think of Dylan Thomas' “In My Craft or Sullen Art”). Unfortunately, this is useless, and largely untrue. No longer do writers have patrons, like Yeats, nor can any but the most successful make a living off their art (and do not choose their art over their worldly existence). Nearly every writer you read nowadays holds a job separate from their art, and although it may not sing to their souls in the same fashion, it is the lifeblood that shapes their experiences and, in turn, their art. Yet again literature is struggling to reinvent itself. This i...
Post a Comment
Read more

"Why Should We Write?"

By
There's an interesting phenomenom I've noticed with the release of the first issue of The Oral Tradition: people go to the magazine's submission's page nearly as often as they look at the issue itself. This could mean any number of things, but I think it says something about writers nowadays. We seem to be more concerned with finding a place for our own voice to be heard than listening to other voices . . . and then we complain that no one is listening. This leads to the market being supersaturated, and brings me to a question I think will soon become essential to contemporary literature. A certain question can come to define a certain age. Post-modernists asked "What should a poem be?" and modernists asked "Why should we continue to write the same way?" Before this, the typical question being answered in literature was "How should we live?" or "What is the good life?" I believe ours is "Why should we write?" More people...
Post a Comment
Read more