We then had 140 years of Romanticism, from Rousseau to Nietzsche, with literature on top.
Then 70 or so years of modernism: literature on top in the West, philosophy in the guise of Marxist theory on top in the Communist block.
Then 40 years of postmodernism, from Foucault and Derrida to 9-11: philosophy on top once again.
Since 9-11, Chaos Years, culminating in the conquest and occupation of literature by Woke Theory.
Trouble is that the best of woke contemporary stuff would have been turned down for lack of talent by the Union of Soviet Writers.
{Note that who rules does not determine literary merit (pace the Romantics):
Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare and Molière were under the thumb of Plato and Aristotle; Coetzee the po-mo is the equal of both the great modernist writers and the great modernist critics}
