Why Modern Writing is Dead, Supposedly...

Everywhere you hear it: literature is dead. Nobody reads anymore, the heyday of the novel is long past as the screen has devoured the page, and so on and so on... But to me, this narrative reeks of something far deeper. The real death I see is much subtler. It is not literature that died but the atmosphere that once pervaded it.

If you look back to history, writing wasn’t really born as a form of “entertainment.” Or at least, if it had entertaining qualities, they weren’t central to the idea of literature. From Homer to Tolstoy, it had always been more about cosmos-making¹, with the — often unconscious — understanding that it’s a noble art inextricably linked to truth and beauty. Those who created the formative texts of our culture were not reduced to content producers but were felt as significant, world-defining figures. Hence, to see what has withered, we must restore the lineage in its full picture, to properly understand where we are today.

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Cultures have always venerated those who could bring the world into stronger forms of presence. In archaic times it was the poet-seer: Homer singing memory and heroism into being, the Vedic rishis chanting the songs of creation, or the psalmist binding grief and praise into sacred song. The poet’s role was of great ritualistic import, for he gave a people their gods, their law, their sense of time and continuity between generations.²

As antiquity had passed, the torch was passed to the philosopher and theologian. Truth was now the task of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas. Literature did not vanish of course, but it was seen as secondary, ornamental, sometimes even suspect, treated more as an echo of truth rather than its bearer.

The Renaissance venerated the artist. Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael were exalted as near-divine creators, reflections of God’s own infinite genius. Poets like Petrarch or Ariosto still mattered, but the cultural aura of veneration had shifted: it was painting and sculpture that carried destiny.

The 17th century, soon after, crowned the scientist and explorer. Galileo, Descartes, Bacon, Newton — all those who unlocked nature’s laws or mapped the unknown became the heroic figures of their age. Writing was pushed to the margins of delight or moral instruction, but was no longer seen as a primary vessel of truth.

It is only in the 18th and 19th centuries that literature, as such, ascended to the throne. The Enlightenment and the rise of the bourgeois public sphere created a reading public, and the novel began to be taken seriously as a form for moral reflection and civic life. Then Romanticism — upon revisiting the renaissance heritage (Shakespeare in particular) — transfigured the writer into a prophetic genius. Goethe’s Faust, Byron’s Byronic hero, Rousseau’s confessions, Wordsworth’s odes — suddenly the author became a visionary, where the novel/poem came to be recognized as a sacred vessel of human destiny, going beyond the limits of mundane order. In a secularizing Europe, literature became the new sacred, the crown-bearer of meaning for a rapidly changing new world.

This is just a brief overview (obviously the historical process is much more complex and not so linear) to highlight that the noble origins of literature go beyond literature. But what’s most interesting is that, more often than not, it was language, in one form or another, that would rise to claim the crown — be in the form of a chant, a philosophical treatise, a prophetic poem, or a socio-critical novel. And by the 19th century, the novelist appeared where once the priest or painter had stood, as the custodian of truth and the artisan of beauty.

Our current decline must be measured within the context of this lineage, for the tragedy of the present is not merely that novels sell less or are less read, but that literature has been stripped of its nobility, as its throne was handed to the market and was reduced to mere entertainment.

Something shifted as we dived deeper into modernity. The break of the so-called literary process occurred slowly, in near-invisible reorientation. By the late 19th century, the conditions of culture had profoundly transformed. The printing press was no longer a tool of the few: industrialization had made books cheap to produce, literacy spread rapidly, and publishing houses discovered a vast new audience waiting to, as we say nowadays, “consume content”. And so, what was once rarefied and difficult to produce, being primarily addressed to a cultural elite, became a newly formed mass-market.

At first, this felt like a triumph, like a culmination of the promises of both the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. More people than ever could read, and more voices could, in theory, be heard. But the new scale also introduced a new law: the law of appetite. To keep presses profitable, stories had to be repeatable and predictable. This is the soil from which the “great” modern genres emerged: detective tales, romances, Westerns, adventure novels, science fiction, fantasy. None of these were ignoble in themselves; in fact, at their highest levels, they managed to touch mythic depths in an accessible style, drawing on all the great archetypes that are a part of the human condition. The decay began when their form started to get shaped above all by the market logic of supply and demand. So, by comparison, where Homer’s power lay in creating a world where the civilization could commune with and understand its gods, the new writer’s task was to feed the expanding appetite of readers. Literature was no longer primarily a noble harbinger of truth, but a product to be sold in serials, magazines, pocket editions, catalogues. Writing became tethered to circulation, and circulation meant predictability: a crime must be solved, a romance must be fulfilled, a hero must triumph.

In this shift, the telos of literature subtly inverted. The old, noble purpose — however unpronounced — was displaced by a new one: to entertain. This is not to say that all genre fiction was empty. Some carried real force — Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, though clothed in the gothic, breathed genuine cosmic terror and touched the deepest anxieties of modern man. But alongside it, Alexandre Dumas perfected the serialized novel: swashbucklers like The Three Musketeers or The Count of Monte Cristo, written with real flair yet shaped by the demands of the feuilleton press. His chapters ended on cliffhangers, his plots moved with mechanical regularity, his readership addicted to the next installment. Dumas, of course, was not without artistry — his works endure precisely because they carried a strong mythic charge; but the form of their delivery acutely reveals the new law that formed. It was all about appeasing the story-driven appetites.

Once the market discovered the profitability of repeatable forms, genre, beyond just selling books, it began to function as a kind of perverse immune system for the literary field itself. Genres were easy to shelve and advertise, easy to train readers in the art of drivel-consumption. Detective stories promised a puzzle and a solution, romances a longing and its fulfillment, fantasies a journey and a return. Each genre built a contract with its audience: you know what you’ll get, and we’ll give it to you again and again. This predictability hardened into a kind of cultural armor. By mid-20th century, genre had become the more-or-less default mode of writing and reading. A novel that broke free of genre risked being unmarketable, left to the margins. And the book industry itself trained its readers to crave the comfort of recognizable patterns.

Even “literary fiction”³ was not spared. To survive, it had to dress itself in genre’s clothing. The shelves filled with various hybrids: “literary thriller,” “speculative autofiction,” “romance with a literary bent.” What should have been literature’s noble autonomy was forced into a marketing taxonomy. The result was an inversion of values. Seriousness came to be seen as “pretentious”⁴, while depth was dismissed as “boring.” Meanwhile, novels that dared to gesture toward some greater, nobler purpose were received with suspicion, as though sincerity itself were a crime.

This, I think, should be viewed as literature’s auto-immune reaction: the very cultural body meant to host nobility of lineage ended up turning against it. By internalizing genre logic, literature hollowed itself out from within.

And so, through the course of market adaptation, the cultural field of literature metastasized into a strange spiritual disease. Genre, from being just a category of books, became a defense mechanism of culture, protecting readers from the dangerous risk of literature itself in its purest and most powerful form. In short: humanity chose the path of least resistance...

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The Resistance

Almost as soon as literature began to bend toward the insatiable appetites of market demand, a countercurrent arose.

In the late 19th century, the Decadents and Symbolists sensed the encroaching commodification of art and turned deliberately away from it. Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal was no polite verse for bourgeois parlors, acting as a poisoned chalice, where spleen, intoxication, and dark erotica became the new sacred. Mallarme fractured it further with voices of silence and evocation, transforming poetry into a ritualistic, divine act. Huysmans, in À rebours, wrote the anti-novel — a book where nothing happens except the refinement of sensation, where a single aristocrat cultivates his inner life against the vulgar tides of society. Rimbaud pursued the “derangement of all the senses,” treating poetry as a risk of the very fabric of sense-perception, a way to rupture the structures of consciousness into new forms.

These were some of the most notable counter-gestures against the economy of appetites. Where the mass market wanted clean-cut morality and digestible stories, the Symbolists and Decadents offered divine immorality and sensuous atmosphere. They preserved the noble function of literature by transfiguring it, even if only for a small circle of initiates. In turn, they are, largely, the only ones we remember from that period.

Modernism, of course, inherited this impulse. Joyce’s Ulysses expanded a single day into an epic of consciousness, collapsing the mythic and the mundane into one linguistically oversaturated tapestry, where a reader literally has no way of reading the text in any remotely conceivable bourgeois-complacent manner. Kafka’s nightmarish bureaucraphobic parables resisted every category of genre, speaking through the abysses of fate and paranoia unlike anything ever written before. Woolf dissolved narrative into pure rhythm cadence, making language move like an unfolding musical score, expressing sensations of mind and soul rather than the interplays of story. And then later came the surrealists, nouveau roman, postmodern metafiction — each in their own way continuing the counter-cultural current. They shattered convenient syntax, broke chronology, dismantled the belief in plot, insisting that literature must remain a dangerous experiment.

For a time it worked. These works restored peril and dissonance, refusing to let the novel be reduced to whims of appetite. To read Finnegans Wake or Waiting for Godot is still to be thrown into vertigo, to remember that language can fracture worlds and create new forms of meaning upon their ruins. But cultural resistance, as we now know, is never immune to appropriation. Difficult literature ossified into its own brand. Dangerous ventures with and through the world slowly transmogrified into a niche for universities. Modernist and postmodernist literature, once scandalous, was canonized and safely embalmed. Even the avant-garde, over time, was turned into a market category. Thus the tragedy: the noble flame never went out, ending up merely contained… Symbolists, Decadents, Modernists, Postmodernists — each kept alive the vision of literature as a noble form of risk and audacity. But the immune system of culture proved cunning, absorbing even rebellion, as it stored its expressions in museums and syllabi. Sure, the resistance endured (more or less), but being isolated, it failed at significantly altering the atmosphere.

By the late 20th century, after the avant-garde had been absorbed, literature entered its most uncanny phase: its embalmment.

The publishing industry had perfected its logic. Books were no longer judged by what worlds they opened, but by what categories they could be shelved under. Prize committees, marketing departments, MFA programs — each played their part in staging literature as a “prestige”⁵ artifact rather than a living danger. The result was the museumification of the novel. Works of “literary fiction” continued to appear, often with great polish, but they arrived already embalmed in this perverse expectation. To be published as “serious literature” meant to check the right boxes: a heart-rending trauma narrative conveyed in tasteful prose, an autofiction framed as boundary-pushing, a hybrid marketed as “literary thriller” or “speculative autofiction.” The air of nobility vaguely remained, but, as a simulacrum, drained of its peril.

Prizes reinforced this embalming. The Booker, the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, allegedly meant to recognize cultural rupture, became rituals of consecration in the name of safety. The same kinds of novels circulated through shortlists year after year, as they confirmed the industry’s self-image of seriousness. To win a prize was to be embalmed more deeply into the new literary dome, preserved for display in the “cultural” mausoleum.

Funnily enough, even genre fiction learned to don this mask. Fantasy series marketed as “epic literature,” romances as “literary love stories.” All those cute little market inventions now returned to infect the “highbrow” literature, where every serious novel had to justify itself by reference to genre, and every genre novel could be dressed up with the word “literary.” Thus, the whole genre game turned into a paradoxical parody of itself, where the distinctions collapsed into a hollow game of labels.

The novel survived, of course, but as a weird display of surfaces. Readers encountered it like one encounters a mummy in a glass case, as a remnant of something once powerful, still beautiful in form, but stripped of its aeonic vitality. Critics would praise the “craft,” reviewers would celebrate the “voice,” prize juries would speak of “importance” but almost no one believed the novel could still rupture reality.

Hence, the novel, as a cultural event, became a shallowly curated spectacle. The writer was reduced to a functionary of the cultural bureaucracy, crafting works that could be awarded, assigned, and then archived. Literature became dead? Oh no, its far worse: it became mummified — still preserved, displayed, and admired, but deprived of its very breath to ignite us.

Hence, in my eyes, parroting the notion that literature is “dead” is too simplistic, too surface-level of a reading. The situation is far more uncanny: literature is still alive, but can only breathe in an atmosphere that suffocates it.

Don’t get me wrong, real novels are still written. In every decade, a few appear that dare to confront the most pressing questions of the human condition, aspiring towards the beautiful and the dangerous. What has shifted is the climate of reception. When a book arrives that bears the aura of old nobility, the culture doesn’t really know how to receive it. Critics may call it “pretentious,” readers may complain it is “difficult” or “self-indulgent.” Publishers, wary of risk, will bury it with minimal marketing, or else try to rebrand it as something palatable. The book itself may be alive, but the system surrounding it works tirelessly to smother it back into genre categories.

This suppression is expressed subtly, through a climate of irony and cynicism that makes earnest seriousness feel embarrassing, in a culture that has forgotten that literature was never meant to be easy, or to flatter, or to be merely “relatable.” Instead, what thrives are the safer forms: autofictional diaries of trauma and recovery, endlessly rehearsed in minimalist prose; pseudo-ironic (in reality — sardonic) satires that mock the very possibility of truth; market-friendly hybrids that vaguely gesture at depth without ever risking for it. The noble function of literature is not outlawed, but is constantly subdued by the logic of palatability.

And so here’s where the false diagnoses usually arrives. We are told that television/the internet/TikTok have killed literature, that attention spans are too fractured, that readers have migrated to screens and don’t give a flying fuck about books anymore. Silly take. BookTok fills shelves; fanfiction communities thrive; the hunger for the Word is not gone. The real wound is disenchantment. Screens may amplify this condition, sure, but they did not create it.

To blame technology is to mistake the symptom for the cause. Literature suffocates not because readers vanished, but due to the atmosphere around it becoming so fucking lifeless.

Hence, the claim that “literature is dead” both is and isn’t true. It’s just.. the atmosphere has become so hostile to nobility, that those souls that once formed the lively fabric of newly emergent, rupturous works now prefer to not ever touch anything newly published.

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What Is To Be Done?

If literature is still alive but philistenically suppressed, then the task is not to mourn but to resurrect it.

This does not mean nostalgia for the past. We cannot return to European troubadours or the Victorian novelist; their worlds are not ours. Nor does it mean repeating the avant-garde for its own sake — difficulty alone is no longer enough. What we need is something rarer and more bold: a reawakening of literature’s nobility in the present.

We’ve always understood what that encompasses: a literature that can awaken deeper longing, that venerates beauty and embodies depth of meaning and the highest forms of truth, accessible to the human soul... A literature that risks, that embraces danger, that treats itself seriously — NOT as “content”, but as an ontic rite into new worlds.

This means.. novels must be written with the courage to be out of place, with the confidence to not be palatable, to not be digested and forgotten. Books in their highest form were never meant to only soothe our souls, but to disclose something profound and new, and in the end.. to make a new cosmos in-and-through language…

This means restoring the proper atmosphere. A culture that scoffs at seriousness will never sustain literature. The task is to build spaces where nobility is not mocked, where beauty is not trivialized, where depth is not embarrassed of itself. Literature cannot (and should not) compete with TikTok for speed; it must instead offer what no algorithm can: the slow feeling of greater presence, the dignity of a voice that refuses to be swallowed by appetite alone.

This is, I think, how the resurrection ought to begin.. when we write with the reverence and importance that literature demands. Its deeper mission was always to transfigure the reader’s soul, and until writers summon enough fucking dare to be audacious again, the novel will remain embalmed. But the moment they do — the moment WE do — literature will prove that it was never dead at all.

It was only.. waiting to breathe.

TL;DFR Modern writing isn’t dead. It’s the pusillanimous writers, lousy agents, and money-numb publishers who have become ontological cowards.

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1. Excuse the wonky phrase, but worldbuilding as a term has been too polluted these days.

2. Though of course, the reverence was not uncontested; Plato famously wished to exile some the poets for their dangerous power, supposedly “corrupting” the Athenian youth.

3. Honestly, I cringe every time I have to write this fucking word.

4. Very common buzzword these days whenever you dare to talk about literature seriously.

5. Where does this prestige even come from? Is it not deeply vacuous in nature, if it’s merely built on social networking, not on power of the word? Rhetorical questions of a venting mind — I’m sure you know the answer.