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Is Literature Dead?

theparisreview.org

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Re: Is Literature Dead?

#2

Post by doctorpangloss »

> 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.

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#5

Post by zitterbewegung »

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.

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#6

Post by genericone »

ravenstine wrote: post #4

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.

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.

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#7

Post by kajecounterhack »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #5

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.

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.

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#8

Post by lmm »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #2

> 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 mag…

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.
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