Lev Grossman: “There was once a reason for turning away from plot, but that rationale has outlived its usefulness. If there's a key to what the 21st-century novel is going to look like, this is it: the ongoing exoneration and rehabilitation of plot.”(WSJ)
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“I am the world crier, & this is my dangerous career… I am the one to call your bluff, & this is my climate.” —Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972)
It sounds to me like this isn’t a discussion about changing the novel so much as a discussion about changing the academics who get to declare what is and isn’t literature.
There will always be a place now for sprawling, complex novels that require the reader’s analytical powers to be fully engaged. What needs to happen is for the many books that have been published in the last hundred years that were plot driven to be removed from the “inferior” niches they have been relegated to by academia. I think there are plenty of writers of “Science Fiction”, “Mystery”, “Horror”, and “Young Adult” novels (among others) whose writing attains the level of art. The academics have just never heard of them because those categories are considered beneath contempt.
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