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> There’s a lot to unpack in that claim, but it is no accident that the publishing industry shies away from books that illustrate “the good life” in the Aristotelian sense.
Alright, let’s see what the comps are.
> These books will fade into oblivion in the next decade while great novels with moral messages—Anna Karenina, The Great Gatsby, East of Eden—will stay with us even after we leave this earth, for they are not only well-written but also meaningful.
Not one of these is about “the good life”! The Great Gatsby in particular is as close to a book about nihilism and hedonism as you can get, and was criticized in its own time for lacking morals.
So the essay is a little incoherent, a little “retvrn” to a past that doesn’t exist.
It’s convenient to blame Derrida, Barthes and Lyotard but my God, do the legwork to connect them to the thing you’re actually complaining about. If “English departments” are to blame for the nihilistic literature you don’t like, then show where that influence came from—the only connection the article provides is a flimsy “she also dislikes capitalism.” Moshfegh got her MFA from Brown, and last I checked there were few Derrida scholars there.
Most novelists these days don’t come from the university system, nor does theoretical literary criticism have much influence among the large publishers.
Yes, most art is bad! Historical art seems better because it has stood the test of time, and we don’t see the junk it outlived. Yawn.
They still complain about hippies as if there were any left. They want to go back to the gold standard. They yearn for the mines and the factories, for the hard times of hard men that they've only read stories about. And of course they believe all modern art and media is infantile, leftist garbage and they harbor a particular mistrust of the "cultural Marxists" in academia.
And the younger they are, the more regressive they get. It's like they're LARPing as characters in a Norman Lear sitcom that they don't understand are supposed to be parodies of them. The trad caths are more hardcore than Catholics have been in a thousand years. The groypers are more racist and misogynist than their own grandparents.
It doesn't surprise me in the least that they're still complaining about postmodernism. They aren't capable of updating their philosophy or looking forward, they can only look backward to an imaginary golden age and the spoils they feel entitled to and robbed of by "the left." They can never get over a fear of the future that's so deeply rooted in fundamentalist Christianity. It's just another wound on their psyches that will never heal.
As for postmodernism or deconstruction, the connections are less clear. Derrida for instance had connections with American universities that themselves had government connections and funding sources, but I don’t know of any evidence of a direct link.
If the intent is to satirize meaninglessness, then perhaps the protagonist should have joined a satirical cult, like the one in the Illuminatus! Trilogy, proclaiming that Bugs Bunny is God, and Earth is shaped like a carrot.
A satirical look at null, it seems, should argue something non-null in the end.
Don't read this person. I'm not saying you have to read the whole book to use a quote, but talking this confidently while doing what we call in French a "contresens" is a sign that the author have no business talking about serious books or philosophy.
It's like Ayn Rand who believed Kant "critique of pure reason" is about criticism of the scientific method and now a huge part of US authors think the same while never having read Kant.
