Eve Tushnet has just put up a post in reply to
this magnificent article from First Things by Dana Gioia, which expresses a lot of things I've been thinking for a long time but hadn't articulated, or not much. (If you find Gioia's article a bit TLDR, I recommend just reading sections II, V, and VIII for a suggestion of the substance -- but I recommend even more setting aside time to read the whole thing, if you are the sort who cares about religion and/or art.) I'm not certain that I follow all of her criticisms -- I follow First Things rather irregularly, and I don't really know much of anything about the publishing world -- but I agree wholeheartedly with her point that most culture today is subculture. I've noticed it most of all in music, and to a lesser extent in literature; but the rise of web delivery of virtually every form of art has clearly allowed such individualized subtypes to develop in most kinds of art.
"The new crowd is heavily shaped by this guy named Eric, who's basically the
Paris Hilton of the amateur plastic crazy straw design world." -- Randall Munroe
I haven't taken much time to think about it, but it'd be very interesting to work out exactly what the implications of this multiplication of subcultures are for the New Evangelization. It fills me with a profound sense of something or other.
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ReplyDeleteI'm not entirely clear what the argument or purpose of this comment is; however, it seems to me to be in poor taste to (apparently) speak derisively of Polish Catholic literature and mention Auschwitz in the same breath. If this is aimed at a specific work or works, then I'd ask that specific works be criticized as such, and that such criticism be germane to the topic of the post.
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