Is Literature Dead?

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/08/27/is-literature-dead/

by jriot • 8 years ago

60 71 8 years ago

How does reading maintain its hold on our imagination, or is that question even worth asking anymore?

Clearly Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings do. Think how old The Hobbit is!

Maybe he was onto something with respect to polemics, philosophies, propagandas. Maybe kids are tired of that shit, they'd rather just be ironic.

Then television, with no malice whatsoever—just a better buy for advertisers—knocked the magazines out of business.

I think Kurt Vonnegut is right here. The sad thing is, all those talented people working at Google didn't get us the quality of writing that magazines did or TV does. They gave us eHow.

lmm2• 8 years ago

I suspect there's more great writing being produced than ever before. I've seen wonderful insight and brilliant craft on random blogs, on people's Tumblr or Medium, on fanfiction sites, on 4chan, even in newspaper comment sections. But the pile of dreck it's buried under is bigger than ever.

kajecounterhack3• 8 years ago

But the pile of dreck it's buried under is bigger than ever.

Maybe that's not so bad: in the past you were either famous or not. Now I think we get these common interest communities that all read the same blogs / follow the same people on twitter and great art proliferates in those niches. Maybe it doesn't enter the total public consciousness; maybe it doesn't have to.

CM302• 8 years ago

Maybe he was onto something with respect to polemics, philosophies, propagandas. Maybe kids are tired of that shit, they'd rather just be ironic.

I think most of this moved online to be honest. Almost any factual or opinion based content you can think of is now primarily posted on the internet rather than released in book form.

TuGuQuKu• 8 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

ravenstine• 8 years ago

Is literature dead, or does nothing become classic anymore? There's such a bombardment of media now that I feel even the best of things are quickly forgotten.

genericone• 8 years ago

Overabundance of choice means classics have a much harder time bubbling up organically. If everything can be published, since the costs in this day and age are greatly reduced, nothing is filtered, signal to noise ratio is much lower, and there are many signals available, which one(s) do you bandpass? It used to be editors and similar other tastemakers that filtered any media, but they don't get paid well anymore.

kajecounterhack3• 8 years ago

Some datapoints:

* Many of my conversations with friends now go "did you see that new show X on netflix?" << Usually I reply that I did! Usually because it was conveniently recommended to me or advertised to me when I turned on the TV before bed.

* I got turned onto the japanese reality TV show "Terrace House" thanks to a NYT op ed https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/25/magazine/letter-of-recomm...

* NYT book review and the front bookcase of today's bookstores still have impact. I buy books based on that sometimes.

* Amazon's best sellers list is important now the same way netflix's front page is important; if you open your kindle or go to buy books on amazon, you'll get recommendations.

* My youtube habits are mostly thanks to subscriptions + recommended videos based on my watch history and subscriptions.

If everything can be published, since the costs in this day and age are greatly reduced, nothing is filtered, signal to noise ratio is much lower, and there are many signals available, which one(s) do you bandpass?

To me it definitely seems like my bandpass is a mix of old tastemakers + recommendation algos, the algos being the relatively new addition.

austhrow743• 8 years ago

I believe the article was only talking about literature in the restricted definition of basically meaning "a classic".

It even acknowledges the ability of the written word to get huge readership numbers in the modern day, so I think think it would make much sense if it was about written works as a whole.

TheOtherHobbes• 8 years ago

If you look back at the reviews and award listings of the 40s to 60s you'll see all kinds of critically acclaimed best-selling novels by feted authors.

All of which have been completely forgotten now.

Fiction has always been faddy and ephemeral. The idea that it has to be immortal to be worth anything is rather Victorian.

zitterbewegung• 8 years ago

Literature is not dead. Google and Facebook are large adtech companies. To dominate their markets means they degrade the value of the written word. As a noble persuit classics will still be there but anything reliant on text or picture based advertisement will wither and die.

kajecounterhack3• 8 years ago

1. s/persuit/pursuit/r

2. In re:

To dominate their markets means they degrade the value of the written word.

I don't see how you draw that conclusion. Marketing copy is utilitarian. The existence of advertising has nothing to do with literature's value.

3. It's not hard to see the shift in literature's import to our society. There's more media to consume than ever today, and modern storytellers have more ways to convey their ideas than just written literature. If you're going to get gripey about something degrading the written word, ad copy should be at the bottom of your worries and TV / new media is a more likely culprit (...which is kind of the point of the article).

All that said there's a good argument to be made that television is one of the greatest storytelling mediums to date, with unprecedented reach and a lot of expressive latitude for artists.

paulcarroty• 8 years ago

If you're interested in sci-fi, for example - literature is the best choice 'cause only 2-3 Cinema/TV projects per year are good.

prithee• 8 years ago

One's likely adapted from novels as well.

puranjay3• 8 years ago

My wife is about to start her PhD with a focus on television narratives. She's an English major but as she sees it, the "novel" of the 21st century is much more likely to be a TV series. In fact, the TV series form itself mimics the serialized fiction that was popular in the Victorian Age, probably the time when literature became "Literature" with a capital L.

I'd say that literature isn't dead; it's just changing its narrative medium.

coldtea6• 8 years ago

Well, the medium is what makes literature what it is.

Else, we can just say that "fiction is not dead".

awild2• 8 years ago

I think what the person is coming at is the question whether people in Victorian times had read and revered books as much, had alternatives like television and the internet existed back then etc.

And I personally agree with his sentiment, that they would obviously not do that, it's just a form of romanticism and cultural pessimism.

Most average people read books in the past because it was an average thing to do back then. It being the most accessible medium etc

The remaining question should then be if our new media are lacking something compared to old media and if it's a ~bad~ for them to be lacking.

puranjay3• 8 years ago

I'd say that the line is getting a bit blurred. Does literature specifically have to be something written? If yes, then is a screenplay literature? A blog post?

Jonathan Franzen is turning his books into TV series. And the writing on long-form TV shows follows a similar sort of depth and narrative fashioning as conventional literature.

But I'm not really the expert on this topic. I should get my wife to comment here.

mannykannot• 8 years ago

It might be helpful to identify what difference the medium makes, and one significant difference is that, as one cannot show, one has to tell. It turns out that this is a strength, not a weakness.

paganel• 8 years ago

serialized fiction that was popular in the Victorian Age

A little earlier than that (Balzac in the 1830s, Eugène Sue and George Sand in the 1840s) the same thing had happened in France. Other than that I totally agree with you, the TV series (Netflix especially) are the new Balzac and Tolstoy.

DanielBMarkham2• 8 years ago

This is a wonderful essay. Kudos to the author. There are several excellent points all working together supporting the thesis.

Do authors explicitly write subtext? As the author says, I don't think so. I think authors use writing and editing as a way to organize their thoughts over time such that all the subtext comes out naturally. For most, I think, this is a subconscious thing. That's why you can't teach it.

Milton (the real one, anyway) was part of a lineage, a conversation, in which books—indeed, print itself— made a difference in the world

This may be the most important point of all. As a society with lots of different interests, literature has allowed the "subconscious of man" to have a multi-generational conversation about what's important. You write a book, you pick up that conversation. The public at large reads the book, they begin participating in it.

I'm not saying people sit around and study books to determine deep understanding of universe, but that's what happens. It's just not evident. You spend many years dedicating large portions of your time to climb inside the minds of great people throughout history, eventually you get a gut feel for what it means to be human -- no matter what your circumstances. You begin to see the same dramas and questions arise. You see the mosaic of life itself.

Of course, you see all of that other ways too. You can probably go to YouTube right now and watch a video on any kind of deep topic you'd like. But the key point was this shared subconscious journey, created by dedicated time in a book where your concentration and imagination were required to follow along with the story. Doing that, you live inside the heads of great thinkers in ways the click-and-move on crowd never will.

That's not for everybody to do. Some folks gravitate towards that kind of thing. Some don't. But it has to be for somebody. And it has to be for enough somebodys that the conversation continues.

I'm not sure that's the case anymore.

stewbrew2• 8 years ago

"Do authors explicitly write subtext?"

So there is only one subtext to a text? If a subtext was intended by the author and never discovered by any reader, is it still a subtext? If a reader constructs a subtext that contradicts the intentions of the author, is it a subtext or a vision? How exactly do you define subtext? Similar questions could be asked about the concept of "lineage".

DanielBMarkham2• 8 years ago

If these questions were rhetorical, I think we're agreeing.

I will assume that they were not.

Do authors explicitly write subtext? Sure. In the same way that you can purposefully decide what your subconscious will focus on. But it wanders here and there. Over time, authors coalesce around a narrative to the universe that feels pleasing to them.

So there is only one subtext to a text? Not at all. Stephen King used to say that there was no subtext to any of his work. Of course there was -- but it was nothing he ever recognized, organized, or struggled with mentally (I assume).

If a subtext was intended by the author and never discovered by any reader, is it still a subtext? Sure. It very well can be. Authors that begin organizing their subconscious around a topic may purposefully add subtext. Nobody may ever catch it.

If a reader constructs a subtext that contradicts the intentions of the author, is it a subtext or a vision? It is a process of subconscious transferal. It's not a math problem. There's no correct subtext.

How do you define subtext? I don't think you can, at least in way people want it defined. I read somewhere once that fiction was actually more true than nonfiction. This, of course, sounded like idiocy to me as a programmer. But then I got it. It's true because we're sharing impressions of life in a way that can't be explicitly said. It's one thing to say "Local man escapes execution". It's another to read "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"

To clarify, if the questions were rhetorical, we're agreeing. That's because those are exactly the questions to ask as you begin to absorb the author's world. Is this the way they feel about the world in general, is it only in this situation? Is what I'm experiencing intentional? Do others experience these same insights? Does the author have a way of looking at things that nobody else does (or can see)? And so on..

There's no one answer to your questions for any one book/reader combination. Making the questions universal just makes it into nonsense.

stewbrew2• 8 years ago

"literature doesn’t, can’t, have the influence it once did"

Well yes, since books or print in general aren't the culutally defining medium any more. Anyway, I think some people will get bored with TV & movies and will learn to find new interesting things you can do in literature. Movies are much too complex to create in order to be truly innovative. Too much money is involved. So, I don't think literature is dead, but there will be fewer readers, it will be more difficult for authors to make a living from writing literature alone and the number of professional critics will probably decline. On the other hand, literature as a mass media for everyone was, in a historical perspective, a rather young intervention anyway.

jdck13262• 8 years ago

So she agrees with her son that “This is why reading is over. None of my friends like it. Nobody wants to do it anymore.”?

Countless millions of young people read. Many of them enjoy reading the classics and many enjoy reading contemporary stuff. Many also write.

Literature isn't dying any time soon, despite what one person's son's experience might suggest.

anoncoward111• 8 years ago

Where they at though? How much do they spend on books per year?

I like reading free stuff and it's mostly non fiction.

You couldn't convince me to read something like Paper Towns.

jdck13262• 8 years ago

People all over the world read and pay for literature. You can find online communities on sites like 4chan (boards.4chan.org/lit) and reddit (reddit.com/r/literature and reddit.com/r/AskLiteraryStudies) with a strong focus on classics and contemporary literature. Also communities at any university with a solid humanities department of course.

I'd never heard of Paper Towns and I suspect it isn't what people would call literature in the sense the linked article meant the word, but a quick Google tells me it sold millions of copies.

benbristow• 8 years ago

It's not dead, plenty of people read.

I just personally don't bother reading as there's just more engaging forms of media out there (for me).

tanilama• 8 years ago

Dead? Not likely. People will always have the urge to express themselves, only that it will in various medium right now, not just paper.

otabdeveloper1• 8 years ago

No, of course not.

Virtue signaling via books is dead, however, and that's a good thing.

TuringTest4• 8 years ago

Literature is dead, right. This guy must have not heard about Twitter sagas, those threads with mystery narrations which develop in real time and get hundreds of thousands of retweets.

We may not like our nineteen-century three-volume encyclopedic novels nicely packaged in dead-tree bricks anymore, but popular fictional writing is alive and well as it adapts to the possibilities of the new media, where immediacy is a primal element.

Literature didn't even become popular as novels in the first place; many popular works were published as serials in newspapers, and before that there were booklets and romances. The article strikes me as a yell of nostalgia for a particular dying format.

coldtea6• 8 years ago

Literature is dead, right. This guy must have not heard about Twitter sagas, those threads with mystery narrations which develop in real time and get hundreds of thousands of retweets.

Or he might have heard of them. That's all the more reason to consider literature dead.

Not any form and format that includes text and fiction is literature.

The word is usually meant to refer to a particular format and a particular history, not just anything that uses words to tell a story.

The article strikes me as a yell of nostalgia for a particular dying format.

And what's bad about this? Not every dying format is bad, and not every new format is better (or even "more fit for the times").

And if some particular format gave thousands of great works that influenced billions, whereas the new one has meager results at the level of young adult fiction (and in an age of reduced cultural impact of fiction anyway), it could very well be a regression (history has those too, it's not all a smooth path to increased greatness or equally good at all times).

In the end, it's a subjective value-judgment. But that's exactly what's attempted here.

BjoernKW3• 8 years ago

The word is usually meant to refer to a particular format and a particular history, not just anything that uses words to tell a story.

The latter definition probably is the best one can come up with without resorting to notions like "stuff that I like".

Other than that, literature often means a body of works that have been canonized because somebody thought they have artistic or intellectual value, in other words: What does and what doesn't constitute literature is highly subjective.

What argues against Twitter sagas as literature though is their inherent transience. Literature usually is thought of as something that has literary value not just for the current generation but for future generations, too.

michaelmrose4• 8 years ago

As well defend modern multimedia by citing the Teletubbies or modern music by citing Justin Beiber.

B1FF_PSUVM• 8 years ago

our nineteen-century three-volume encyclopedic novels

Many of which were originally serials published in newspapers ... see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feuilleton - Herman Hesse, for one, griped about the "age of the feuilleton".

Gore Vidal, who for a while earned his living writing for TV and movies, used to argue that the post-1960 emphasis on film directors was misplaced, and that writers actually were the essential factor. But he also remarked that pretty soon speaking of a famous writer would be like speaking of a famous ceramicist.

Curiously, some of the recente movie/TV series are putting directors back in the hired-hand category that Vidal said was their place, and emphasizing producers-writers, e.g. Game of Thrones.

(People like tales, like continued tales with familiar characters, like having some sort of tag to identify what they're picking - an author name is best, and sometimes it is fake, as in "house names" used by publishers as a brand for stories actually produced by a stable of multiple writers. Which is not new either ...)

nearmuse2• 8 years ago

Or phenomena like the SCP wiki/"dossiers", I had fun reading some of those. Now Remedy are making a videogame that looks like it was inspired by those.

michaelmrose4• 8 years ago

In 1800 out of a population of a billion people about 12% could read https://ourworldindata.org/literacy

That is a pool of 120 million readers to produce the tiny fraction that would produce works worth being broadly read. Its even entirely likely that many lacked the resources to become prolific skilled writers read by others even if they had the talent there being a significant barrier to entry in those days.

Now we have a population of 7.6 billion of which 85% can read. This is a population of almost 6.5 billion readers.

If people are 1/10th as likely to produce good works then we are apt to have 5 times the number of good writers.

For there to be half as many good writers we have to believe that multimedia has extinguished 99% of the inclination to write.

scandox• 8 years ago

I think you're right...but knowing what glory hounds most writers are, it's possible we're overlooking an important factor: the motivating aim of the authors.

In 1800, say in England, there were probably some thousands of people whose opinion an author really cared about. Now authors measure success in much higher numbers. If, and it is a big If, the cultural significance of fiction erodes then it won't matter how many people can read words off a page. Most writers want the greatest audience that they can reach and they want to give them a meaningful experience.

harperlee• 8 years ago

You could argue an analogy to infection can be useful: it is not only, or not so much the number of viruses / books produced, but also the contagion probability. Factors that harm infection, such as distance to the target (which, with more offer and tastes, increases); or competing hobbies (which harm time for reading and writing / virus life); or competing conversation topics (habitat competitors,vaccines, eliminated contagion vectors through hygiene)... They all can harm literature even with more viruses.

agumonkey• 8 years ago

I have a thing in mind for a while now. We all want to make everything better, everything equal etc etc. But I so often saw a mean-levelling effect so that yes, more people are X' but X' is now 50% of what X was when only a few people were X.

Everybody is able to, and not more people want to.

More and more I think we need space, differences, voids to create attraction poles so that those who really deeply wants to be musician, moviemaker, writer, will get there and it will be meaningful.

Merrill2• 8 years ago

Within some decades, text-to-speech and speech-to-text will make it unnecessary for the average person to know how to read and write. Reading and writing as we know them will be limited to a fraction of the population that engage in high-level symbolic manipulation. Literacy could go back to 12%, especially as a myriad of mundane administrative jobs are obsoleted by AI.

mo1ok• 8 years ago

Eh, I can read significantly faster than I can listen. And listening is far more annoying.

Could you imagine, for example, a door constantly bleeping "Fire Exit, Do Not Open" for illiterates?

michaelmrose4• 8 years ago

The written word is still optimal for education and we will continue to teach it.

Even it it were feasible to get by without reading it would take 50 years for this change to happen and in between a and b the groups that allowed this would be out competed for resources by those less stupid.

gozzoo• 8 years ago

Literature—at least the literature to which I respond—doesn’t work that way; it is conscious, yes, but with room for serendipity, a delicate balance between craft and art. This is why it’s often difficult for writers to talk about their process, because the connections, the flow of storytelling, remain mysterious even to them.

I guess this is the case with the 10x programmers.

michaelmrose4• 8 years ago

"This is why reading is over. None of my friends like it. Nobody wants to do it anymore.”

This is the words of a child self absorbed, with both the limited perspective and the illusion of knowledge that childhood provides to us all.

It's not profound or insightful writing an eloquent blog post around it doesn't make it so.

This entire thesis is a shallow waste of time designed to provoke passionate refutations. Its like a young girl who cries I'm so ugly hoping for a chorus of praise to bolster her ego.

twelve40• 8 years ago

The problem is still there even for the best of the kids, if you haven't noticed: when the earlier generation was growing up, there were 1-2 screens in the whole house and everyone was reading books, now it's dozens of devices in every hand (even the school now stupidly mandates ipads - forced a replacement down our throat for what was always carefully done with pen and paper), and it takes the current-gen kids a superhuman amount of willpower to get away from the devices, casual games, etc etc. Heck, even 90% of adults can't fight that constant dopamine stream from news or FB likes, even the most intelligent ones. So blame the kids all you want, it's a problem even for the best of them.

akullpp• 8 years ago

This kind of post gives me a headache based on its premise and conclusion. There are unproductive questions like "is the world flat" or "was it created last thursday" where you don't even want to argue. Yes literature is dead, so let's keep on writing and let the next epoch decide on the classics.

teh_infallible• 8 years ago

Back in the days of the romantic poets, when Wordsworth published folios of his poems, they were the bestsellers of their day. By the time Kurt Vonnegut wrote his novels, you could probably say that poetry was dead. But now we have hiphop and graphic novels, so I would argue that “Literature” falls under a broader category of artistic human storytelling, which is now most popular in various multimedia formats.

nearmuse2• 8 years ago

It is obvious from the hamfisted title that it is some form of clickbait. You can not combine something as final as "dead" and something as huge as "literature" without generating outrage with people who for some reason take it seriously.

Besides other comments making good points, writing a novel for example is by far the cheapest way to get a story out of the door in a final way (the way the author sees it). How otherwise would you publish a story without involvement of other people and/or tons of money?

LegendaryPatMan• 8 years ago

Her talking with her son;

This is why reading is over. None of my friends like it. Nobody wants to do it anymore

Yeah, when I was a kid I felt that way too... Mainly because 99% of what was available to me and my friends was boring and none of my friends like them either...

Fast forward 20 years, and I read between 50 and 80 books a year in either paper, my Kindle or some form of audiobook and I get them in topics that I want to read, not just the small selection of books my small town library had...

Like when I was a kid my library had no books on anything related to computing except one which basically was a guide for 4 year olds in how to type... They had little on history and most of it was Irish history, given that it was Ireland and there's nothing wrong with that, but when your interest is elsewhere in history and with more technical elements of history like weapons development, you're not going to be satisfied.

I grow up, I get access to all the technical books I could imagine on computers, I get access to esoteric books tank design and novels about things that are interesting to me and I'm reading at a fair rate.

Give me what I want and I'll read and I bet it the same with her son. Give him books him and his friends will like and I bet they'll read too! Try something like comic books, that's what my brother got into as a kid when we visited the US and he went from not reading to lots of reading really fast.

The problem isn't literature, the problem is access to it

your-nanny• 8 years ago

meh. I have an anecdote too. my 9 yo daughter's an obsessive reader who wants to become a writer.

but my anecdote is only going to get published as a hn comment. neither the skill nor interest to do more, and it's not angsty enough to generate handwringing.

Talyen42• 8 years ago

We live in a golden age of storytelling.

Long-form TV and long-form podcasts have almost entirely replaced literature in my life, as someone who loves both grandiose fiction and nitty gritty non-fiction. Coincidentally, I don't watch many movies - they're too short to tell a great story.

The medium is not the thing.

georgeecollins• 8 years ago

My young kids read books all the time for pleasure, and some other kids their age do as well. Most kids probably don't, at least not in the long run. It always has been like this. We now expect most people to have more education so that they have "skills". Education used to be about imparting culture and sophistication as much about as about skills. But while most people need skills today, most people probably don't need more than a basic familiarity with literature. That's the way it has always been. Poetry has never been for everyone.

rkagerer• 8 years ago

I still read Pratchett audiobooks every night - does that count?

Is Literature Dead?

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