20th century in literature
Technological advances during the 20th century allowed cheaper production of books, resulting in a significant rise in production of popular literature and trivial literature, comparable to the similar developments in music.
Quotes
- The Western misreading of the Soviet system was largely the product of a simple reflex. The Soviet order — indeed, the practice of communism everywhere — was seen as a form of "progressive" hostility to established Western politics and, particularly, economics. It seemed to represent a new system that had rid itself of the market, of exploitation. Whatever its doubtless temporary — or invented — faults (so the thinking went), the Soviet ideology stood for a better world. Thus many Western writers, including Lion Feuchtwanger, Henri Barbusse, and even Romain Rolland, the sensitive follower of Gandhi, spoke out in defense of the purges.
- Robert Conquest, "The Terrors", in The Atlantic Monthly (July-August 2004)
- I do think that our perception of reality is fragmentary, and in 20th-century literature, it's totally normal to not describe reality as something whole and completely transportable and explicable. That's been accepted in novels. But genre films always pretend that reality is transportable, which means that it is explicable.
- Michael Haneke, as quoted in Lawrence Chua, "Michael Haneke", BOMB magazine (Summer, 2002)
- In a general way, the literature of the twentieth century is essentially psychological; and psychology consists of describing states of the soul by displaying them all on the same plane, without any discrimination of value, as though good and evil were external to them, as though the effort toward the good could be absent at any moment from the thought of any man.
- Simone Weil, "The responsibility of writers", On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God, R. Rees, trans. (1968), p. 168