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<blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 1218581" data-attributes="member: 812">Well, if you were going to choose one person, Joyce wouldn't be a bad choice.That's not to claim one person is responsible for it all, or to say that there's a instant change at a particular moment. And in any event, it's not my statement, it's his -- I just think it's an idea worth considering. Or funny, at any rate.It's the old &quot;Beethoven and Shakespeare were stars&quot; argument. You can make a pretty good case that popular culture and &quot;high&quot; culture used to at least be closer than they are now. Goethe was considered the most famous man in Europe. Shakespeare was massively popular.One of the things, in literature at any rate, is that the audience for literature used to have a much, much higher level of average training. That is, at one point, virtually everyone who could read English could read iambic pentameter. Now, there's so many more people who can read, but most of them have never been trained to read complicated structures like, say, sonnets.And it sure helps to get some training to read that stuff.Ah, there's quite a little trench war being fought over this very turf. Some research suggests that in the late 1800's lower-class people were overwhelming reading &quot;classic&quot; literature, as you say, with the express purpose of self-improvement, but something seems to happen at the turn of the century.Is it the flooding of the market with crap? Or is it the refinement of &quot;literature&quot; to a point where nobody can be expected to teach themselves how to read it?In any event, the idea of the Pre-Joycean Fellowship is meant (by me, at least, but then I'm neither a member nor even friends with one) to evoke the idea that literature can be created to please a broad range of people -- even people without much literary training. That's an idea I support, whether it's Joyce's fault or not.But blaming things on Joyce is nearly as much fun as blaming them on the French.&nbsp; <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin&nbsp; &nbsp; :D"&nbsp; data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

[QUOTE="barsoomcore, post: 1218581, member: 812"] Well, if you were going to choose one person, Joyce wouldn't be a bad choice. That's not to claim one person is responsible for it all, or to say that there's a instant change at a particular moment. And in any event, it's not my statement, it's his -- I just think it's an idea worth considering. Or funny, at any rate. It's the old "Beethoven and Shakespeare were stars" argument. You can make a pretty good case that popular culture and "high" culture used to at least be closer than they are now. Goethe was considered the most famous man in Europe. Shakespeare was massively popular. One of the things, in literature at any rate, is that the audience for literature used to have a much, much higher level of average training. That is, at one point, virtually everyone who could read English could read iambic pentameter. Now, there's so many more people who can read, but most of them have never been trained to read complicated structures like, say, sonnets. And it sure helps to get some training to read that stuff. Ah, there's quite a little trench war being fought over this very turf. Some research suggests that in the late 1800's lower-class people were overwhelming reading "classic" literature, as you say, with the express purpose of self-improvement, but something seems to happen at the turn of the century. Is it the flooding of the market with crap? Or is it the refinement of "literature" to a point where nobody can be expected to teach themselves how to read it? In any event, the idea of the Pre-Joycean Fellowship is meant (by me, at least, but then I'm neither a member nor even friends with one) to evoke the idea that literature can be created to please a broad range of people -- even people without much literary training. That's an idea I support, whether it's Joyce's fault or not. But blaming things on Joyce is nearly as much fun as blaming them on the French. :D [/QUOTE]

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