Your question intrigues me in part because I don't agree with your premise which is that contemporary writers limit themselves to one form. While it is true that Canada's only winner of a Nobel Prize in Literature, Alice Munro, mainly writes short stories, a major Canadian counter-example would be Margaret Atwood who first became known for her essays on Canadian fiction (including "Survival," "Negotiating With the Dead," and "Strange Things") and later for her poetry (e.g., "The Circle Game"), short stories (e.g., ("Bluebeard's Egg") and fiction, including historical novels (e.g., "Alias Grace"), science fiction ("Oryx and Crake"), and dystopian fiction ("The Handmaid's Tale").

In other countries, New Yorker Paul Auster writes novels (e.g., "The New York Trilogy" and "The Book of Illusions") and stories in various forms (memoirs, essays - e.g., "The Invention of Solitude") that are considered - especially in Europe - as existentialist and social commentaries on American life. The greatest living example of a fine writer who does not write only narrow fiction is Milan Kundera, a Czech expat who now lives in Paris and writes in French. Known equally for his philosophical fiction (novels and short story collections, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," "Immortality," and "Laughable Loves") and his essays on literature ("The Art of Fiction," "Testaments Betrayed"), Kundera also write on music and history in both his fiction and his literary essays. The Italian Umberto Eco who recently died was a scholar created the field of semiotics as well as having written literary bestsellers such as "The Name of the Rose" (and a "Postscript to The Name of the Rose" which describes the inventive process of writing that worldwide and literary success). Besides his academic writing and his novels, Eco wrote a popular column in an Italian newsmagazine, often collecting them into essay collections, as well as writing one of the most important studies on American society, "Travels in Hyperreality." Eco also wrote brilliantly on the writing process, commenting both on his own work and lowbrow fiction (Ian Fleming's James Bond novels) and highbrow fiction ("Six Walks in the Fictional Woods").

I agree that there is some narrowing of readership, notably in English. It's my impression that English-language poetry is at an abysmal low. More accurately, younger men are reading less fiction than my generation of boomers and literature is more compartmentalized and specialized than ever. Most of my own impressions, and I suspect your question, arise from thinking about serious or literary fiction. If we throw our net a little farther, I think we'll find that other forms of writing in various guises are thriving and exploring new worlds, including speculative fiction and philosophical fiction. Contemporary English writer China Miéville set out to write a novel in every genre and is do so with respectable and intriguing works in several genres so far!

Vincenzo Di Nicola

Psychiatrist and Philosopher

University of Montreal

To Lyotard, Modernism and Postmodernism are cultural phrases, continuous

with one another and both emphasize the Now and ignore history. The ‘modern’ is

not a historical period or a particular practice. It is timeless and permanent and

cannot be contained within the historical narrative. Like anything, anarchic Modernism

can never really die. It has taken the form of paralogical science and is totally

blended with the system. Lyotard calls modern works which belief in reason and

logic as ‘metanarratives’ which try to reassure and explain.

Creating your own order in chaos, discover the truth, answer internal reality, the clearest way to communicate, breath, to say no one said, bring new solutions, read more, to build different worlds-lives, escape from reality, like, be able to keep on living etc. Most of them don't know the reasons for writing novels, even Alain Robbe-Grillet

This might risk sounding banal, so let's call it a classic Marxist answer, one that takes it's premise the mode of production and its inevitable influence on all products, including cultural ones:

Novels are what sells in today's marketplace.

You could add, too, that the cultural imagination has been shaped by the particular mode of production: e.g. literary journals are less popular than the used to be, where poetry or the serialised novels (such as Dickens) might have appeared; theatre, the home of plays, is being overshadowed by film as a cultural enterprise. And the consumers of cultural products - us -  are culturally specific as well: Shakespeare's audiences and 21st century readers are very different sorts of human beings, with different ideas about social relations & their inner world, and so have different ideas about what constitutes 'art' ('entertainment', 'enlightenment', 'learning', etc.). 

You might also ask why modern (I assume you mean 'contemporary', rather than 'modernist') writers produce more film, television, video games, etc. Same answer: the mode of production. These formats were simply not available before (or as ubiquitous), and there was not the appetite in the cultural imagination. Artists use what's available, and audiences come to expect, demand, and prefer those formats. Pop songs tend to be three to four minutes because they were pressed on 78 rpm-speed phonograph records that could only fit songs of that length. That technology (mode of production) becomes a norm that establishes a cultural expectation which fuels demand. Most pop songs are still that long or thereabouts, even though the mode of production has changed. 

Similarly, the mode of production of literature is undergoing a transformation, and there are many who speculate that the increasing use of e-readers might mean a resurgence in shorter novellas or novelettes, and collections of poetry and short stories, which the economics of paper publishing make financially difficult. 

There are, of course, as the other answers say, plenty of poetry and philosophy and drama etc. being produced, both classical/traditional and experimental, and a lot of it is very good. But if you're asking about the ubiquity/popularity of one form over the other, look at marketability, sales, mode of production, industrial limitations, technology.

Simple answer, and a bit dull. But sometimes it doesn't take much.

In the organic (cell) structure of imaginative arts, its music first as nucleus, then poetry/lyrics, then drama, then prose at the periphery - in that order. writing poetry is as easy as interpreting the abstract rhythm of music into its concrete manifestation: dance.

Hello, Mr./Prof. Ravipati,

One motive in the US.  More publishers want novels, not short story collections.  Make sense?  And you will have a terrible time trying to get tranlations published.  Harder yet to get a collection published if they are translated short stories.

Ya, Mam that's absolutely   true   that  now a days publishers are want of novels, which  the  taste  of the 21st century reader. As they aimed marketing  there is  a great  demand for novels than other works. 

It is not the publishers that want the novels but the masses and the change of the trend in human development.Theory of weakness which propels easy life without stress is making people to seek decoded write-ups.

Ya , Mr. Yohanna, the modern reader wants easylife  means  he or she has to read it earliest possible  as  he does not want put effort  to read  and understand  for a long time is also one of the major reasons to prefer  novels. 

I would question your premise. What is your evidence that modern writers limit their works to novels? If you are basing your assumption on works published, then the question is perhaps more about the publishing industry. Have you considered screenplays? Blogs? Radio drama? Web fiction? Graphic stories? On what do you base your initial presumption?

Along with some of the other commentors, I also question the premise and wild like to see any evidence for a significant shift in numbers within the last decades. There are of course enough other forms, even poetry, especially if we consider the lyrics of pop songs, as we should do after the winning of Nobel prize by Bob Dylan

it is because of the industrial strength and pragmaticism of writer to reach the popularity among the contemporary space..

I think it's probably impossible to prove, but I would suggest that commerical imperatives have something to do with this. 

The novel is still a viable product which sells in large numbers. A successful writer can make a living out of writing novels. But even the more succesful poets would struggle to make a living from sales of poetry. 

Novels are designed to be read individually, whereas when poetry was more popular and respected than it is now it was often a semi-public performance, Upper-middle class readers would recite poetry in front of friends. I think it ewas Charles Dickens who largely turned writing from a gentleman or woman's pastime into something that could be a viable career. 

I don't think that modern writers limit their work to novel only but no doubt, taste of the age and commercial aspects do count here. We see the best seller non-fiction too.

Every genre has an organic relationship with an age. 20th century was undoubtedly the age of the novel - as Elizabethan era was of Drama. 

Another aspect which is crucially related with the mass acceptance of a genre is technological developments which affect cheaper production and easy accessibility. These factors are already changing the preference of the reading public in favor of smaller versions of on-line fiction; for eg. blogs.

is there relation betwen novel and democration era?

Hello,

One more thought.

Mikhail Bakhtin the literary and rhetoric theorist says this:

In "Epic and Novel", Bakhtin demonstrates the novel’s distinct nature by contrasting it with the epic. By doing so, Bakhtin shows that the novel is well-suited to the post-industrial civilization in which we live because it flourishes on diversity. It is this same diversity that the epic attempts to eliminate from the world. According to Bakhtin, the novel as a genre is unique in that it is able to embrace, ingest, and devour other genres while still maintaining its status as a novel. Other genres, however, cannot emulate the novel without damaging their own distinct identities.

Don't forget that the 21st century consumer of stories takes in many of them by watching television, which offers a large and increasing number of series available on any screen, including handhelds.  Granted this is not reading, but it is, increasingly, substanitive drama, involving large numbers of writers, imagined and executed with  a vision and scale that approaches the size of O'Neill's "cycle,"  a series of plays American llife and living that he never came close to completing, or to the largest of novels.   

Certainly the novel has more commercial viability than poetry, but my experience is that there are lots and lots of poets (if not readers of poetry) and the difference is that poets get far less attention.

I think it has to do with readership. How many of us grab a poetry book and read it from cover to cover? Many find reading poetry challenging for they have to make sense out of very sophisticated condensed language. Is it possible that we readers find it difficult to make sense sense of a text on their own? Readers read novels sometimes for plot, story and suspense, characters, etc... elements which are not found in poetry. A novel is the most commercialized genre, and poetry is not. Novels are turned into movies, but we are still waiting for a movie based on a poem....  A novel can be engaging of course, but readers can read it with some kind of physical and mental lethargy, a poem can not and does not give us such an escape. 

You realize, of course, that there are very few print publications for poetry and short fiction unless the writer has his own website or blog to publish his/her own material. Big name authors/writers still can get "minor" works published, but not the newcomers. Moreover, there is no money in getting poems and short stories published. You can write these short pieces for your own or friends' and family's enjoyment though, just like in the days of the Renaissance and Restoration periods. Okay, they had patrons of the arts then.

Novel provides a wider palette to integrate, history, modernity, culture, religion reality and imagination. A common. Reader needs all these things gelled well in an interesting story. A. Novelist meticulously works out life in detail yet precise. Poetry is short so detail is not there yet drama needs performance  on paper drama remains ineffective.

Quratulain Shirazi: A very interesting perspective! I do believe that for the 20th century, what you say holds true in the Western novel, especially in literary fiction and in the philosophical fiction of writers like Camus, Sartre and Kundera. I have just two caveats. Novels are not always as meticulous as you say. This is more typical of the Victorian novel. Once we get into the modern novel of the 20th century, the novel could spread out in the way you suggest without being meticulous. PD James who was a serious writer of genre fiction and wrote one important novel that transcends her detective fiction - Children of Men - wrote in great detail to the point that someone complained that you don't have to describe every leaf in the forest. Milan Kundera and Paul Auster don't overwhelm us with such meticulous detail (which I find a relief). Second, poetry is not always short. It has become these short bursts of basically confessional statements about the state of the soul but some modern poets, notably Ezra Pound, WS Merwin, Joseph Brodsky and Derek Walcott, wrote longer works or connected series of poems on key themes. Classically, poetry ran to lengthy philosophical argumentation but that was more common before the rise of the novel. Some of the comments here about publishing, about the media of how poetry and fiction is propagated are very relevant to help us understand why some forms of creative expression dominate in given historical circumstances.

To write philosophy you must be a philosopher. You can not talk about the platonic idea

theory's if you do not know the writings by Platon (it's an example).

Only  doctors in philosophy can write about philosophy with success. To write about Philosophy  is necessary  to have deep knowledges. 

To write Poetry or Drama you need different skills and also you must  feel  you want write them.  

To Josefina Llaurado Senar:

Since it was me who introduced the notion of philosophical fiction in this discussion thread and that you may be addressing my comments, I would like to respond. 

First, I am not at all sure what is the point of your intervention. 

Of course, writing poetry or drama may well require different skill sets than other kinds of writing, from Freud's clinical case histories to the dialogues of Socrates written up later by Plato or the aphorisms of Friedrich Nietzsche. 

But are you so sure about the line between philosophy and fiction?

As a young man, Freud had two passions, philosophy and medicine. He had noteworthy teachers in both domains, including Franz Brentano who led to the founding of phenomenology, one of the most famous schools of philosophy, through his student Edmund Husserl. The point is that while he chose medicine instead of philosophy, many eminent philosophers have read Freud precisely as a philosophy, and a significant one at that!

Socrates' dialogues hold their power in great part as narratives with a dramatic arc that creates tension and eventually offers resolution that is typical of drama. Augustine's Confessions are simultaneously autobiography, philosophy and theology. Nietzsche is perennially one of the most read and commented upon of philosophers in the Western world. I am sure many more non-philosophers know something about Nietzsche than about Immanuel Kant, a founder of Western philosophy. Nietzsche wrote stories in an aphoristic manner, notably in his masterwork, Also Sprach Zarathustra, which is not only brilliant philosophy but wonderful literature, having inspired Richard Strauss' musical tone poem of that name, whose opening fanfare was used in Stanley Kubrick's film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Is  Kubrick's work itself merely cinema or is it itself a philosophical statement?

And of course you know that the entire school of existentialists if we define it very broadly to include Nietzsche and Soren Kierkegaard in the 19th century and Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre in the 20th century was founded largely on stories. Camus' novels in particular have a great presence in world literature - from The Plague to The Stranger. Camus also wrote philosophical essays such as the celebrated The Myth of Sisyphus on suicide. Both Camus and Sartre were awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (Sartre refused it). Both are understood as philosophers.

Now, let me address your first assertions. No, you do not have to have a doctorate in philosophy to write philosophy or to be a philosopher. Those are academic credentials. You may well need a doctorate in philosophy to be paid to teach philosophy in the academy. Jacques Lacan, a psychiatrist/psychoanalyst, is read closely by many philosophers in the Continental tradition, as are other writers such as Maurice Blanchot. 

In fact, being a teacher of philosophy does not necessarily make one a philosopher.

This is a serious debate among philosophers: what is the activity of philosophy? Is it defined by certain kinds of questions and argumentation or is it defined by the academy?

For the record, I have a doctorate in philosophy during which I was mentored and supervised by three leading European philosophers of the first rank: Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, and Slajoj Zizek.

Vincenzo Di Nicola, MPhil (psychology), MD, DipPsych (psychiatry), PhD (philosophy)

Psychologist, Psychiatrist and Philosopher

Professor of Psychiatry

University of Montreal

Sorry, but I think the same I wrote. Please, do not judge my thought throw the level of my english. 

I'm a writer and I'was studied philosophy in UNED. Of course are different philosophy and literature. Philosophy is not a  fiction It's way to tray to explain reality. Literature is a way to tell something that happens or not and must be connected with art.  I understand art  like the power of and opera to imprison your attention in order you have the sensation the time, know as Kronos,  has disappeared. 

Then is more difficult to write a literary opera dealing with philosophical ideas, because a writer must have deep knowledges in philosophy and also the skills of a creative writer.

Once long ago,  I write a essay in spanish language upon one panting by Vincent Van Gogh, The crows, connecting the Freud's unconscious and the Kant's sensibility. But It was not Literature. 

I can write the essay in català in a more accurate form, but to be Literature I need to create a story and create a  character who during the story is writing this essay.  And to do this is not as easy as a write a book of fiction. These is the only  idea I want to explain: the difficulty to do this 

Josefina Llauradó

www.josefinallaurados.com

Please, read through not throw in the second paragraph.

Josefina Llauradó

Josefina,

You can write in Spanish or in Catalan which I understand but the language of exchange here is English. The issue is not your ability to capture nuances in another language but the lack of nuances in your thought. I gave you a thoughtful and detailed response and you maintain a rather simplistic view of the matter at hand.

Philosophical fiction exists and the line between philosophy and fiction has nothing to do with the skills of the writer in question but is in itself a philosophical question. I gave you examples of outstanding writers who are each of them masters of both literature and philosophy: Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Camus and Sartre, to which we may add many others. 

You are either unable or unwilling to address this issue which is relevant for both literature and philosophy. For this reason, I bring this exchange to with you to a close. 

Vincenzo Di Nicola

Université de Montréal

Ok.

I would agree with Jim Curry's view on the premise. Over and above that, poetry, screenplays and theatre, short-stories and philosophy, are all very much in abundance and are thriving genres. Generally, the people who write these forms don't cross over to other forms, but try to concentrate and hone their chosen craft. However, I would also agree that there is a financial aspect to writing, but even succesful fiction doesn't pay the rent today. Finally, someone once said that everyone has a novel in them, and I suspect not everyone has a screenplay or stage drama waiting to come out.

It became a fachion ! 

Mr. Vicenzo Di Nicola,

Note that nuance because is important:

Plato uses from Socrates his method ask and question, ask and question, in order to write the Dialogues but the contents of the most important of them Fedon, Fedre, The banquet, show the ideas of Plato. He is a great great philosopher not a write copy of Socrates. 

Philosophy is live coming through the time looking for the truth. I'm sure fictional philosophy does not exist, perhaps fictional pseudophilosopy.

The trouble is with the question,  you must remove "Philosophy" and you must put instead of it "essay". You can see Descartes, Regles per al correcte us de l'enginy. I don't know  the english tittle, but it means rules to think properly.

I think you must be sure about your own limits, before to talk about the limits of the others. Humility is a Christian virtue.

Sorry if you have the sensation I disturb your debat, I only have the intention to clarify some shades.

I agree with all the points thus far. i have just completed my postgraduate course and i will attempt this question as a graduate student. i prefer writing novels than poetry, i flow easily in writing novels, i am never short of words, i know what next to say especially since it based on personal experience. it also depends on where ones interest lies. i love poetry quite alright. thank you

Frankly, I believe that the days of writers being content with the "cheese and crackers" existence of a "pure" literary writer are largely over.  Many literary writers today often are just as interested in having their works reach mainstream audiences (and to have the opportunity to collect substantial advances) as popular writers.  I think this is healthy because it has a two-fold benefit:  general writers are exposed to a higher level of writing and writers are adequately rewarded for their efforts.

Novels are flexible dynamic beings of pure thought. Poetry restricts thought and feeling to metre. Anyone can write a novel provided he/she has an interesting plot - be it fantasy or realism. This genre easily reaches everyone. Once considered second hand literature, the novel has come a long way indeed. 

Getting a short story or a poem published today is like winning Lotto Max. There are very few publications for these two forms. Putting material in a blog or other electronic venues (like the olden days of vanity presses) may get gratification  but not much else. Whereas, the novel has a better chance to be published and read. Moreover, a decent novel (or just a barely  competent one) has a chance for movie adoption, claims to fame, and money.  Don't forget the money.

Still, I write short stories. I make my living teaching and writing  textbooks on how to write essays.

There is here a tendency to concentrate on print-publications, usually in the control of agents, often members of identifiable cliques, and publishers who in many instances determine public preferences. The internet meanwhile buzzes with all kinds of literary accomplishments and genres. Several writers have recently made their names via this source, especially poets.

I would like to introduce the thread of technology as a creator of novels. It may sound simplistic rather, but a historical analysis of the genre, proves it beyond doubt.

Every age is organically related to a particular genre; ours happens to be the novel - in the 20th century. Reading and writing priorities are still developing to comment on the future of the novel as a popular genre in the 21st century.

The genre of the novel start developing with the printing technology. Prior to that one could not afford writing in prose - duplication and retention were the problems. Technology provided certain amenities to the masses and it definitely changed the way they read or wrote. These changes are immediate and overwhelming, yet are embraced by every people. If the advent of the printing technology changed the masses' preference of the genre, the onset of the computers is set to change it further. Already the kindle versions of classics are more popular among the youth, who chose to read smaller pieces of fiction in the e- libraries, rather than bulky novels. This preference is not a rejection of values presented in old classics, rather a new way to read and share and write. Post modernism is not related to the outside only - it changes the way we read and write. It also means that the novel will once again change its appearance. I feel that the future lies in shorter narratives; shorter in the sense of its downloadablity! The youth is sharp to appreciate the values, does not need a dilution; but somehow is in a hurry; partly because it has so much to do with kaleidoscopic changes in their world, partly because they live the information age.

I would add that I am a produced playwright in addition to writing short fiction and a couple novels. I have not done a statistical analysis, but just among the writers' groups I have been in far fewer writers attempt writing for the stage. To know if this is really the ratio of stories and novels to plays would require a literature review of publishing statistics.

If this is the case, though, one reason that there may be fewer plays being written is that they require more labor to perform than writing fiction takes.

Both plays and fiction prose require either an agent or active marketing efforts by the writer. But the play is very little on the page without a live performance. Usually, for lesser-known playwrights, getting up performances means being involved in some way in putting the performance on.

Usually new plays are not even staged but are given a reading with actors sitting on chairs with no live action or a "staged reading" performing the play with limited props and set with a script in hand. Most plays by unknowns do not impress a theatre company enough to give a fully staged production unless they win some prestigious award. Then an unknown playwright play might leap from the page to a fully-staged production.

How many contests and how far a playwright can afford to travel to help in putting up a production are also factors. Sometimes the theatre company wants no involvement from a playwright but a new playwright who wins a prize from a festival like the O'Neill or Yale Prize in the US or some university or theatre festival prize may be expected to travel at her or his own cost to accept the award and possibly to advise the directors and actors.

This takes a bit more energy than what a writer needs to expend in order to send of drafts and try to get published, although the playwright does this, as well.

Gloria, once young ambitious playwrights established their own theatre companies and produced their plays in that fashion. Has that now gone, and, if so, why?

I think that a reasonable answer should go through Bourdieu's concepts "literary field" and, above all, "habitus". The literary habitus of the 21st century is concerned with the exemplary model of the best-seller writer. In other words, those best-sellers are the "Ars dictaminis" of our time.

Sorry, Colleague Wilkin, I just saw your answer. I think young playwrights still try to organize their own companies, but if they want any staging the price in time and money make them want to go to an existing theatre. The better equipped a theatre is, the less interested they usually are in taking real risks on unknowns. A vicious cycle begins.

So One way to make new theatre is to keep it very simple. Also, do it outdoors in parks or on street corners. I am serious. The minute bricks and mortar theatres are involved we get producers as gatekeepers. Look for city-sponsored "theatre in the park" because sometimes there is a band shell and it may even have sound eqipment and they will publicize (another expense.) Hope this helps somebody.

I have found that non-fiction has seen a large increase in the millennial generation. As the political strife of the United States has grown over the past decade, so has the amount of blogs and opinion columns being published online. I believe that the blogging medium is still growing in maturity as a form of literature, but tried and tested journalism has always been a respected form of published communication. As for the aspect of novels, I have noticed that poems are not being turned into seven to eight figure grossing feature films nowadays. It is hard making a living as a writer, after all.