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

51–60 of 74 posts

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#51

Post by puranjay »

coldtea wrote: post #46
puranjay wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

That's a pretty shaky definition. A series of fictional letters that chart a narrative are also "Literature" (there have even been books based entirely on this letter format). The letters writers wrote are often considered a part of their canon. Some novels contain fictional or even real news clippings. Some beloved novels today were once considered "cheap", quickly churned out crap (aka "blogspam"), such as the pulp thrillers from the Chandler era. Some great Victorian writers (notably, Dickens) mostly serialized their work.

There is no authority proclaiming something as or as not literature.

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#52

Post by coldtea »

puranjay wrote: post #51
coldtea wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

That's a pretty shaky definition. A series of fictional letters that chart a narrative are also "Literature" (there have even been books based entirely on this letter format). The letters writers wrote are often considered a part of their canon. Some novels contain fictional or even real news clippings. Some beloved novels today were once considered "cheap", quickly churned out crap (aka "blogspam"), such as the pulp…

>A series of fictional letters that chart a narrative are also "Literature" (there have even been books based entirely on this letter format)

That's because it's been explicitly written as such (e.g. Dostoyevsky's Poor Folk). Those letters are in fact just chapters of a novel telling a story. A series of non fictional letters wouldn't be considered literature (and generally hasn't).

>Some beloved novels today were once considered "cheap", quickly churned out crap (aka "blogspam"), such as the pulp thrillers from the Chandler era.

The weren't considered worthy (or high) literature. They however had literary form (and often pretentions).

The same goes for the serialized Victorian (and of course 19th century French) works, whether their initial outlet (newspapers or whatever), they still followed the same overall structure.

Tons of others wrote lots of different formats even then (from manifestos, once a very popular form of expression, to dadaist word collages, lettrism, newspaper joke columns, quips (e.g. from Karl Kraus, or Ambrose Bierce, Brecht, etc.), published travel correspondence, and so on.

But unless they told a story over an extended number of pages they weren't considered literature (whether good or bad).

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#53

Post by TuringTest »

BjoernKW wrote: post #32
coldtea wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 argues against Twitter sagas as literature though is their inherent transience.

Just like poems, then?

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#54

Post by your-nanny »

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.

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#55

Post by BjoernKW »

TuringTest wrote: post #53
BjoernKW wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 argues against Twitter sagas as literature though is their inherent transience. Just like poems, then?

Poems aren't transient. Oral tradition is.

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#56

Post by TuringTest »

BjoernKW wrote: post #55
TuringTest wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What argues against Twitter sagas as literature though is their inherent transience. Just like poems, then?

Poems aren't transient. Oral tradition is.

But Twitter isn't "oral tradition" by any definition of the word.

I dare you to find any property that can be said of written poems with respect to those being transcendent, which can't also be said of Twitter threads (other than "they've existed since the beginning of writing").

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#57

Post by twelve40 »

michaelmrose wrote: post #29

"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 l…

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.

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#59

Post by agumonkey »

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 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.

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#60

Post by awild »

coldtea wrote: post #48
awild wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, bu…

I agree with you, but it's pretty obvious to me, that most people generalize over media in a very broad fashion, and romanticize reading books, going to the theater etc, while talking down on video games/television in a purely dogmatic fashion, ie, the question of a medias inherent qualities is never considered.

Because I'd personally agree with most people that video games and television are relatively shitty, but that's not a function of the artform, but the artists, who themselves are a function of the culture they are embedded in. And additionally there is a lot of pulp or generic genre lit that's similarly devoid of meaning as most vidyas or tv series.

Post reply on HN