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Is Literature Dead?

theparisreview.org

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Re: Is Literature Dead?

#21

Post by lmm »

kajecounterhack wrote: post #12
lmm wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

That's true up to a point. But I do think the average quality of "published" writing has gone down as the barriers to entry have - really how could it not? For every story that a gatekeeper would've rejected because they couldn't understand its brilliance within its niche, there must be tens or hundreds that said gatekeeper would've rejected simply for being bad.

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#23

Post by TuringTest »

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.

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#24

Post by coldtea »

TuringTest wrote: post #23

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…

>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.

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#25

Post by michaelmrose »

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.

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#26

Post by coldtea »

puranjay wrote: post #13

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 it…

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

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

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#27

Post by michaelmrose »

TuringTest wrote: post #23

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…

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

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#28

Post by gozzoo »

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.

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#29

Post by michaelmrose »

"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.

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#30

Post by austhrow743 »

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.

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.

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