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Is Literature Dead?

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Re: Is Literature Dead?

#31

Post by B1FF_PSUVM »

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…

> 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 ...)

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#32

Post by BjoernKW »

coldtea wrote: post #24
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…

> 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.

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#33

Post by akullpp »

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.

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#34

Post by scandox »

michaelmrose wrote: post #25

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 w…

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.

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#35

Post by anoncoward111 »

jdck1326 wrote: post #17

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.

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.

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#36

Post by teh_infallible »

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.

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#37

Post by awild »

coldtea wrote: post #26
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".

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.

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#38

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

austhrow743 wrote: post #30
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.

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.

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#39

Post by puranjay »

coldtea wrote: post #26
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".

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.

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#40

Post by paganel »

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…

> 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.

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