It's clear at both ends that there are meaningful judgements which derive from craft. At one end there is the lower level where poor writing makes for bad art. Sometimes works in this lower limbo survive, or are revived, for other reasons: my daughter is doing a short paper in Lady Mary Wroth as part of a Grade 12 class; there is a reasonable view that Wroth may be historically important in a way but that her poetry is technically bad. In general, though, these are the works of Pope's dunces and the Peri Bathous. At the other end there are writers like Virgil, Milton, Henry James, Shakespeare, Dante, and so forth.
In the middle, with adequate craft, it's much more of a blur. There are a lot of reviews of books on LibraryThing which amount to assigning one star because the reader was not interested in the type of book bring reviewed, and not in whether the book was well done of its type, and a pit of the Hugo filters probably come down to those sorts of judgements.
Traditionally, before English was taught as a discipline, there was a simple way of punting the question: wait a hundred years. If a work lasted it might not become part of the canon, but it would still be recognized. (The Anatomy of Melancholy has never been part of any canon.) One did not have to make judgements, but just recognized "the judgement of posterity".
The rise of English Departments and pressures to include things more recent than (then) the mid-Nineteenth-Century made this a burning issue for about fifty years: how to determine what works were "worthy" in the interim? The advent of critical theory and the new Historicism, which pushed English studies in the direction of history of ideas rather than aesthetics, has rather blunted the edge of that problem.
It's clear that lots of lasting art is not about feeling: neither The Rape of the Lock nor The Ambassadors is much about feeling, appealing to the intellect instead. So gut response based on feeling is sometimes, in the aggregate, a good metric for applying, and sometimes not.
Whether anything from SF (broadly defined) will endure probably depends on the random appearance of appropriately skilled and driven individuals: lasting authors and works are rare in any domain. Tolkien probably counts, and Cabell and Eddison are around the hundred-year mark, as is Wells. (Wells is in a similar category to Doyle: a founder effect contributes to keeping their works alive.) Pynchon is a reasonable candidate. Somebody could appear on the scene next year with a masterwork (and probably be denounced by some as being too literary).
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2019-09-14 06:41 pm (UTC)The question of quality in art is a vexed one.
It's clear at both ends that there are meaningful judgements which derive from craft. At one end there is the lower level where poor writing makes for bad art. Sometimes works in this lower limbo survive, or are revived, for other reasons: my daughter is doing a short paper in Lady Mary Wroth as part of a Grade 12 class; there is a reasonable view that Wroth may be historically important in a way but that her poetry is technically bad. In general, though, these are the works of Pope's dunces and the Peri Bathous. At the other end there are writers like Virgil, Milton, Henry James, Shakespeare, Dante, and so forth.
In the middle, with adequate craft, it's much more of a blur. There are a lot of reviews of books on LibraryThing which amount to assigning one star because the reader was not interested in the type of book bring reviewed, and not in whether the book was well done of its type, and a pit of the Hugo filters probably come down to those sorts of judgements.
Traditionally, before English was taught as a discipline, there was a simple way of punting the question: wait a hundred years. If a work lasted it might not become part of the canon, but it would still be recognized. (The Anatomy of Melancholy has never been part of any canon.) One did not have to make judgements, but just recognized "the judgement of posterity".
The rise of English Departments and pressures to include things more recent than (then) the mid-Nineteenth-Century made this a burning issue for about fifty years: how to determine what works were "worthy" in the interim? The advent of critical theory and the new Historicism, which pushed English studies in the direction of history of ideas rather than aesthetics, has rather blunted the edge of that problem.
It's clear that lots of lasting art is not about feeling: neither The Rape of the Lock nor The Ambassadors is much about feeling, appealing to the intellect instead. So gut response based on feeling is sometimes, in the aggregate, a good metric for applying, and sometimes not.
Whether anything from SF (broadly defined) will endure probably depends on the random appearance of appropriately skilled and driven individuals: lasting authors and works are rare in any domain. Tolkien probably counts, and Cabell and Eddison are around the hundred-year mark, as is Wells. (Wells is in a similar category to Doyle: a founder effect contributes to keeping their works alive.) Pynchon is a reasonable candidate. Somebody could appear on the scene next year with a masterwork (and probably be denounced by some as being too literary).