Anti-Climacus

LINK: Harrowingly brilliant takedown of modern literature:

"My hatred of contemporary literature has reached such a fever pitch that I am willing to be clownish in my depiction of it--to spew obscenities in ostensibly literary contexts or to chop books to bits with a hatchet in the pages of respectable journals. I am less and less capable of intellectual engagement with contemporary fiction because I feel like I've been had when I do so: the very process of literary analysis legitimizes a body of work that I feel is unworthy of such attention. My generation has inherited a tradition that has grown increasingly esoteric and exclusionary, falsely intellectual and alienating to the mass of readers, and just as falsely comforting to those in the club. In place of centuries of straightforward class discrimination, the twentieth century invented an elitist rhetoric intelligible to only the most diligent and educated of readers--a club that didn't exclude anyone per se, but made you work very, very hard to join. In the process we lost not just the eye but the respect of the reading public, a respect that every generation since the advent of modernism has strived for unsuccessfully, trying to entice readers back into the fold with delicately carved morsels of rotting flesh they try to pass off as prime rib. "