Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is Literature Dead?

theparisreview.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 74 posts

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#41

Post by harperlee »

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…

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.

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#42

Post by nearmuse »

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…

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.

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#43

Post by jdck1326 »

anoncoward111 wrote: post #35
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.

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.

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#44

Post by CM30 »

awild wrote: post #37
coldtea wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah. What's more, most authors of past eras probably wouldn't be writing books or plays nowadays either. I mean, look at William Shakespeare. His plays may be famous, but in their time they were the popular culture of the day, not some sort of 'high art' reserved for the elite. If he was around today, he'd probably be creating TV series or YouTube videos, not plays.

Both the seemingly higher popularity of reading and writing in the past came from a lack of other viable options.

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#45

Post by CM30 »

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…

> 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.

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#46

Post by coldtea »

puranjay wrote: post #39
coldtea wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Does literature specifically have to be something written? If yes, then is a screenplay literature? A blog post?

No, neither are. And it's not just "something written", it's something written in a particular form (and as part of a particular historical legacy).

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#47

Post by nearmuse »

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?

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#48

Post by coldtea »

awild wrote: post #37
coldtea wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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.

They obviously wouldn't.

The important question though is not whether they would, but whether they should.

In other words, the victorian times people reading might very well have been a byproduct of them not having TV, games, internet, etc. In fact it totally was.

But that's totally uninteresting, and not an argument as to whether losing that kind of activity is bad or good.

In other words, just like etymology doesn't tell us what a word means, just how it got started, the historical factors that led to people reading and revering books back in the day don't tell us whether doing so is good or bad, and whether we'd be better of continuing it even if the conditions that made it popular have changed.

The conditions that made physical activity for the cavemen popular (collecting food, not being eaten by lions, etc.) have changed totally, but physical activity is still good for us. To the point that sitting still most of our days kills us prematurely compared to what we could achieve given our advancements in medicine.

Things can be historical accidents, and still be better than the items that replaced them (either through conscious effort or as historical accidents themselves).

(To quote Hoare on a similar issue: "[ALGOL 60] is a language so far ahead of its time, that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors, but also on nearly all its successors").

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#50

Post by LegendaryPatMan »

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

Post reply on HN