I would put the complexity of William F. Buckley up against any of his fiction-writing contemporaries. For that matter, I would put Sowell or Mark Steyn up against any modern writer.
We have had a devolution of the spoken and written language, but it has happened across all purposes and genres. It is a time-based phenomenon, not a genre-based one. Patrick Henry was every bit as complex as the playwrights of his day. William Jennings Bryan's brilliant oratory was poetry. Fiction has become debased in today's society, but non-fiction could only fall so far while still meeting its objectives.
John McWhorter, in his book Doing Our Own Thing calls out the culture as the culprit. Certainly, this is far more likely to be the case than the excess of scientific texts and a dearth of dime-store novels.
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Date: 2013-01-05 01:26 am (UTC)We have had a devolution of the spoken and written language, but it has happened across all purposes and genres. It is a time-based phenomenon, not a genre-based one. Patrick Henry was every bit as complex as the playwrights of his day. William Jennings Bryan's brilliant oratory was poetry. Fiction has become debased in today's society, but non-fiction could only fall so far while still meeting its objectives.
John McWhorter, in his book Doing Our Own Thing calls out the culture as the culprit. Certainly, this is far more likely to be the case than the excess of scientific texts and a dearth of dime-store novels.