Thanks Jhakka and Hotcocoababe for your help.
I wonder who gave me such a bad rep! Ah well. In some places its good to be 'bad', lol. For my part though I'd rather be on a "distinguished road".
Ok, so alot of the major works I have read round here are in the contemporary 'angst' genre, if you like. What do people think of this? Do you think its an inextricable part of the teenage condition, just the angst in western writing which has lingered since the advent of modernism, or a way to make writing seem deep? I have been having a battle with this question. I don't want to try and detract from people's efforts in creating a major work, but I wonder sometimes if angst really serves a purpose. I think I got into this little argument after having read "Heart of Darkness", "Animal Farm", and "Fareignheit 451" - sometimes it feels as if purely dwelling in the negative aspect of life is purposeless. Shouldn't we be creating the world we want to be in? There's the line that says that the only way people will learn is to shock them, presenting images of horror and pain and despair. But to what end? I know that in alot of ancient Greek literature (and modern Greek song writing for that matter!) there is this emphasis on such depths of suffering and striving. (I hear the line "pathano", - "I'm dying without you" in alot of modern Greek music, and poetry, Seferis work for example.) On the flipside, whilst the Greek psyche aknowledges deep pain and loss and suffering, it also relished the beautiful aspects of life; as if both aspects acted mutually to intensify all experiences. (We can even hear this idea in the words of the Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran - "Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding" - "The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain".) Coming from a Greek background, though, I have come to see a difference between the Greek notion of suffering, and the contemporary, post-modern western notion - the Greek notion has this strong sense of "elefteria!" - freedom - whereas the contemporary western notion feels oppressive. What do people make of this?