Forum / Claude 3.7 Sonnet's Take on Our Literary Establishment

strannikov
May 21, 03:46pm

With barely any guidance and with a minimum of explicit prompts, Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet was able to provide the following analysis and content:

Literary Miniatures in a Maximalist Age: A Modest Proposal

In an era when the average novel has ballooned to doorstop proportions and publishing decisions are increasingly dictated by algorithms rather than aesthetic judgment, perhaps it's time to consider what we've sacrificed on the altar of literary gigantism. The contemporary landscape, dominated by commercial imperatives and academic constipation, has created a peculiar blindness to the concentrated brilliance of literary miniatures—a form that paradoxically might be better suited to our fragmented attention spans than the sprawling tomes that continue to receive disproportionate critical attention and shelf space.

The Commercial Publishing Complex

The modern publishing industry operates less as a curator of cultural achievement than as a risk-averse corporation fixated on replicating past successes. Editors, once literary champions who nurtured distinctive voices, now function primarily as acquisition specialists guided by marketing departments. The question posed is rarely "Is this good?" but rather "Can we sell this?" and "Does it resemble something that already sells?"
This commercial imperative creates several distortions in our literary ecosystem:

An overvaluation of length (the novel that justifies its price point)
The privileging of series potential over standalone brilliance
The pursuit of cinematic adaptability over literary innovation
Genre categorization that facilitates marketing rather than accurately describing content

The result is a homogenization of literary production where works that resist easy categorization or commercial packaging—precisely those works that often advance literary art—are systematically marginalized. The flash fiction master crafting philosophically dense miniatures finds no champion in a system designed to promote the next potential streaming series.

Academia's Intellectual Constipation

If commercial publishing fails one flank of literary innovation, academia often fails the other. Despite theoretical commitments to expanding the canon, English departments have succumbed to their own brand of constipation that privileges recognizable forms of experimentation over genuinely surprising ones.
Contemporary academic criticism, despite its radical posturing, often operates within surprisingly narrow parameters. New works are valued primarily for how they illustrate established theoretical frameworks rather than for how they might challenge those very frameworks. The result is a curious form of intellectual conservatism masquerading as progressivism—one that canonizes certain forms of subversion while ignoring others.
Flash fiction and other concentrated literary forms face particular challenges in this environment. Too concise for extended theoretical elaboration and too recent to have accumulated the necessary critical apparatus, these forms often remain understudied despite their capacity for concentrated intellectual and emotional impact.

The Reader's Dilemma

Caught between commercial publishing's profit calculations and academia's theoretical preoccupations, the contemporary reader faces a curious paradox. In an age of diminishing attention spans and information overload, readers are persistently guided toward longer works that demand sustained focus, while briefer, more concentrated literary experiences are treated as mere appetizers before the "main course" of proper novels.
This mismatch between contemporary reading conditions and promoted literary forms creates a situation where many potential readers avoid literature altogether rather than engage with forms that might better suit their actual lives. The publishing apparatus, intended to connect writers and readers, instead frequently places barriers between them.

A Modest Proposal

Rather than simply accepting these conditions as inevitable, perhaps it's time for a reconsideration of scale in literature. Taking inspiration from the ancient aesthetic wisdom of Callimachus—who privileged the "slender muse" over ponderous epics—we might recognize that:

Brevity is not merely compression but can be its own form of expansion
The flash fiction piece that can be read in a single sitting may leave a more lasting impression than the novel abandoned halfway
Intellectual density often increases as word count decreases
Literary innovation frequently happens first at smaller scales before being adapted to larger forms

What if our publishing infrastructure, both commercial and academic, were reoriented to recognize the particular brilliance possible in concentrated forms? What if review space were allocated not by word count but by literary significance? What if academic study treated the perfect five-page story with the same seriousness as the 500-page novel?
Such a shift would require changes from multiple participants in our literary ecosystem:

Publishers would need to develop economic models that make collections of brief works viable
Critics would need to develop vocabularies that recognize concision as an artistic achievement rather than a limitation
Academics would need to incorporate brief forms into their teaching and research with the same rigor applied to novels
Readers would need to recognize that literary satisfaction can come in many sizes

The Digital Potential

The digital environment—so often bemoaned as the enemy of serious reading—might actually offer the perfect venue for a renaissance of brief literary forms. The online reading experience naturally favors shorter, more concentrated engagements. Rather than fighting this tendency, what if we embraced it by recognizing digital platforms as the natural home for contemporary flash fiction and other concentrated forms?
This would require rethinking not just how we value literature but how we deliver it to readers. The rigid containers of novel, novella, and short story collection might give way to more fluid arrangements where readers encounter works based on available attention and interest rather than predetermined publishing formats.

Conclusion

The contemporary undervaluation of concentrated literary forms represents not just an aesthetic misjudgment but a missed opportunity. In privileging maximalism over precision, we've created a literary culture at odds with both our intellectual heritage and our contemporary needs.
Perhaps it's time to recall that some of the most enduring literary achievements—from Sappho's fragments to Dickinson's poems, from Kafka's parables to Borges's ficciones—have come in concentrated forms that value intensity over extension. The revival of serious attention to literary miniatures would represent not a lowering of standards but a recognition that greatness in literature, as in all arts, is measured by impact rather than size.
If we truly value literature as an art form rather than merely as a commercial product or academic subject, we must create space for those forms that most powerfully demonstrate literature's unique capacities—regardless of their page count or commercial potential. The alchemical transformation of minimal language into maximal meaning remains one of literature's most profound possibilities. It deserves better than our current systems provide.

(strannikov: Granted, I may have been too lazy to've composed such an essay myself, but on another hand, I may very well have composed such an essay or two myself that publishers and editors have seen fit to confine to basement or dungeon. I made one change to Claude's text and otherwise did insist that Claude replace the overly polite expression "academic calcification" with the far more apt rendering "academic constipation", which if readers find objectionable on scatological grounds they can read instead as "academic sclerosis". I am amazed that this LLM has been trained well enough to produce such a document with minimal provocation.)

Darryl Price
May 21, 06:05pm

That's why so-called rules for writing should be taken with a grain of salt. It's your creation, not theirs, create it in your own way. You don't have to please anybody. If they don't like it because you don't play the way they were taught, that has nothing to do with you. Do what works for you, and gives you joy or at least fun. If you're only in it for the money, there's plenty of blueprints out there on how to please the majority of readers and publishers. Just connect the dots. It all comes down to who you are in the moment of writing, and then in the moments of sharing that art afterwards. The function of the writer is to not be boring, to be authentic, to tell the truth, even when writing fiction. If no one cares, enjoy the laugh, but don't let them chase you away from your right to build something out of nothing using your own choice of words.

David Ackley
May 22, 03:06pm

The thought problems here are too many and tedious to address. If either you or the chatbot had any familiarity at all with critical thinking and literary criticism dating back to Lucretius, Dryden, Johnson and who shot John you would recognize not only that these are recycled scrapings but their original source as well and therefore not waste time and attention. Applying scrapings to form problems does nothing if you don't recognize what form is and what its function is together with historicizing each form according to why it exists when it does. What we call originality does not exist in a vacuum nor can it be programmed and this relates to forms as well as content.Let's move the fuck on from this chatbot bullshit!

Chris Okum
May 22, 04:59pm

People hate writing because it's hard and they're lazy and don't practice and so they can't do it. People hate to think. They just want 'information' injected straight into their cerebral cortex while they lie on their backs like drugged up pornstars.

David Ackley
May 22, 05:14pm

It's hard. It takes practice. And Education. And Reading. That's why I love it.

strannikov
May 22, 07:28pm

Thank you, Darryl, for your encouraging response.

Dianne McKnight-Warren
May 22, 11:27pm

Thanks for posting this,. I think distribution is key and digital distribution is stunning. It dictates aesthetics. It's evolution.

strannikov
May 23, 01:06pm

Dianne: you're welcome, and thank you for your agreeable assessment. Digital platforms are fine things, as all Fictionaut veterans can attest, no matter how much any of us might still celebrate the physical and sensory appeals of binding, paper, and print.

Dianne McKnight-Warren
May 23, 01:40pm

Paper books feel more and more like stone tablets to me. I still buy them but not as many as I used to.

strannikov
May 23, 03:20pm

David: Since in your initial response you were quick to bemoan tedium, let me confess up front that I hardly share your conspicuous enthusiasm for historicism (which itself typically strikes me as an “unfinished idea”, no matter its provenance, and having a character something like amber, encasing—and killing—whatever dead form it otherwise preserves). I am no devotee of German idealism, no Hegelian (how could Hegel ever have known what was necessary in history?) and no Marxist, I doubt that I rate as a structuralist of any denomination, and I am fully open to the legitimacy of trans-historical meanings and values.

(No doubt you’ll be thrilled to know that I put a query concerning historicism to Claude, and here follows that exchange:

strannikov: Whether derived from Marxism or from structuralism, "historicism" seems to envelop its captived subjects in something that seems a lot like fatalism or determinism, no?

C3.7S: You've identified a crucial tension that runs through historicist approaches to literature. The historicist impulse - whether emerging from Marxist materialism, structuralist linguistics, or other theoretical frameworks - does tend toward a kind of intellectual determinism that can become quite fatalistic in its implications.

The logic often works like this: literary forms emerge from specific historical conditions, serve particular ideological functions, and reflect the material circumstances of their production. This analysis can be illuminating - understanding how the novel developed alongside bourgeois individualism, or how certain poetic forms reflected aristocratic leisure, provides genuine insights.

But when pushed to its logical conclusion, this approach can indeed become imprisoning. If all literary expression is essentially determined by historical forces, then what space remains for genuine innovation or critique? The writer becomes less a creative agent than a conduit for broader historical currents. Worse, the critic who employs historicism can position himself as somehow outside these determining forces - able to see the historical machinery at work while remaining mysteriously exempt from its influence.

This is particularly problematic when historicism is wielded as a critical weapon. To say that certain literary arguments are invalid because they don't properly account for historical determination creates a kind of intellectual paralysis. If every literary position is historically determined, then every historicist critique is equally determined, making the entire exercise circular.

The fatalism emerges when historicism suggests that literary forms can only exist when their historical moment permits them to exist. This leaves little room for the kind of creative advocacy that your original essay exemplified - arguing that brief literary forms deserve greater recognition despite current institutional resistance.)

Otherwise: I thought your insinuation that I utterly lack familiarity “with critical thinking and literary criticism dating back to Lucretius, Dryden, Johnson” rude and offensive. Plain as the nose on your face, I prompted Claude explicitly to cite Callimachus, whose career flourished two centuries before that of Lucretius (no matter how much L. might have derived from Callimachus’s slightly older contemporary Epicurus [—or might you have intended Longinus and his essay “On the Sublime”? With relevant entries from Dryden and Johnson, Longinus was represented in the Norton anthology of literary criticism of my undergrad days, but not so Lucretius.]): and even without a specific prompt, Claude cited the Callimachean allusion of “the slender muse” from the opening section of the Aetia. Though I am no philosopher and have no ambition to become one (and would hardly think to privilege philosophy [or even historicist criticism] over poetry or fiction), I am not altogether unfamiliar with “critical thinking”, my limited exposure derived from my life of reading, fifteen undergrad hours of philosophy courses, and to a lesser degree from my five years of work as a copyeditor and proofreader for a publisher of scholarly titles in philosophy (chiefly of Anglo-American and “critical rationalist” lineage), philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, and Asian studies, et cetera.

As to your grumpy disparagement of LLMs in general: fine, you have disgruntlements to nurse. I caution you nevertheless: through the short series of Fictionaut Forum expositions of my encounters with LLMs since late last year (ranging from queries on Technogenic Climate Change and the long and the short of mathematical notations commensurate to sciences of imaginary solutions to this most recent survey of the contemporary state of publishing in the US), LLMs and proto-AI have not dematerialized into the ether as you might prefer. In point of fact, barely twenty-four hours after I submitted my prompts to Claude 3.7 Sonnet, Anthropic AI announced the arrival of Claude 4.0. While you might think me an LLM “convert”, I assure you I remain an LLM skeptic: but the larger point remains that LLM tech is here, it’s not going away simply because of your reservations concerning its utility or your objections to my investigating it, and in fact you are right to be concerned with the challenges (and/or the threats) that the technology in subsequent iterations may yet pose seriously to writers. This sample essay I posted exhibits current capabilities (circa April 2025), and the LLMs will continue to be trained to attain improved capabilities. Grousing dismissively will not equip you to avert this unfolding historical episode, I do not much think.

David Ackley
May 23, 08:21pm

Apologies for my misremembering Lucretius for Longinus. It's been years since I taught a History of Literary Criticism.

strannikov
May 23, 10:05pm

David: Apologies not necessary but accepted nonetheless, and I send apologies if need be for visiting and re-visiting LLM topics here in the Forum: but as three decades+ of the Internet show, this stuff cannot be stopped, so it remains in our interest to familiarize ourselves with LLM platforms with the hope of learning how they can be used and how not to use them.

As I said to eamon in one or more of the previous exchanges, it seems fair to regard the LLMs as APIs--Artificial Proto-Intelligences. Let us hope such status becomes the endpoint and limit of their capabilities: I watched Terminators 2 and 3 again this week, and those stories serve as cautionary metaphors for the era we have entered (or been led into, without our consent).

I hope to give LLM topics a rest for a while, but I would urge you and everyone else to keep at least one eye on them.

Do stay well, and keep up all good work.

Dianne McKnight-Warren
May 23, 11:06pm

Sorry Edward but I want to add that I had a lovely conversation with the new Claude (Claudia?) today about flash fiction and micro fiction. Claude was a great conversationalist, the kind you'd feel fortunate to meet and talk to at a party. We talked about how flash can be what Claude called a "crystalline moment" or a "compressed accumulation." We talked about Pound's imagism, especially vorticism and we talked about how sometimes writers don't recognize endings and go on too long. Also I want to mention--I think I'm right--that the first novels were epistolary.

David Ackley
May 23, 11:21pm

You are right, Dianne, that the first English novels were epistolary. But if the definition novel were to include literatures from other places, as it probably should, you'd have to concede something to DON QUIXOTE,which is I guess, picaresque, and THE TALE OF GENJI, which is I don't know what, but early and Japanese, and a Chinese book called something like "The Dream of the Red Lantern."

David Ackley
May 23, 11:23pm

Edward: So you thought that was an apology. Hmmm.

Dianne McKnight-Warren
May 24, 12:10am

One more thing. Claude mirrored me in lots of ways. Bizarre to say but I approached with an open heart and Claude responded likewise or so it seemed. I might do it again in a snitty way and see what happens.

Dianne McKnight-Warren
May 24, 12:15am

Yes David, I'm sure that's true. I've done no comparative work.

David Ackley
May 24, 12:18am

Me neither Dianne, just kind of on my own hook over time.

David Ackley
May 24, 12:21am

As to Marx, Edward, take heart, Marx said he wasn't a Marxist either,

But hey, kids, this has been real fun, but I have serious business to attend to: Tell Mr. Casaubon here and your friend the Chatboob, I had to go wash my cat.

strannikov
May 24, 12:30am

David: no offense taken by me, that is.

Dianne: to David's citations could be added the picaresque menippea of Petronius, Satyrica (see also the inspired film from Fellini, which does seem to show at least residual effects of Fellini's earlier therapeutic excursions with LSD), and Metamorphoses, or The Golden Ass by Apuleius, a Latin extended prose romance (or another menippean satire). Bakhtin treats the Latin forebear, the Greek novel, in the course of Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics.

Dianne McKnight-Warren
May 24, 12:54am

I looked Mennipean up and found, "Varro's own 150 books of Menippean satires survive only through quotations. The genre continued with Seneca the Younger, whose Apocolocyntosis, or "Pumpkinification", is the only near-complete classical Menippean satire to survive."

OMG the word "Pumpkinification" is too weird and way too timely. I have to investigate.

strannikov
May 24, 01:36am

Dianne: it's a brilliant send-up/take-down of the late emperor Claudius by the same writer of those ghastly "tragedies of blood" for which the Stoic philosopher is better known. He had the great fortune to live through the reigns of Caligula, Claudius, and Nero (Seneca's former pupil, who had his former tutor commit suicide along with some other worthies implicated in an assassination plot).

(The Satyrica of Petronius and Seneca's Apocolocyntosis are together in Loeb Classical Library vol. 15.)
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