joanna wrote:
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> Why do you say that? We can surely distinguish Sophocles from Euripides
> today.
Do the arithmetic. Three Greek drmatists, 90% of their plays lost. How many great novelists? How many pages do they add up to? Various heroic efforts to read various great authors out of the canon will maintain for maybe another century ago the illusion that there exists a canon. Then people will give up. They will mostly read things their friends in their local community write, with a random selection of other stuff.
That won't be, but can you suggest a better picture of how it will be when there are more great novelists than a committee of 500 master-readers, dividing the labor, could read in a lifetime.
Your statement a few months ago that Faulkner was not in the "same league" as Tolstoi is just part of thar rearguard action to defend the canon that was only created in the last two centuries. The imagined superiority of Tolstoi to Faulkner is an illusion created by the desperate need to maintain that delusion of a containable canon.
Immortal masterpieces are already a drug on the market. How many movies can you watch in one lifetime? Would masterpieces be visible as masterpieces without _also_ having experienced a great deal of work of only passing interest? Consider what appeared from 1910 to 1960 in English alone (a small corner of the human species) -- almost no one has read all of it. Certainly no one has deeply considered all of it.
Carrol