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Is Literature Dead?

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Re: Is Literature Dead?

#61

Post by BjoernKW »

TuringTest wrote: post #56
BjoernKW wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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").

The two don't really compare. Poetry is a form of literature. I can use Twitter as a medium for writing and publishing poetry.

A poem written on Twitter and deleted the next day is no more permanent or long-lasting than a poem that's solely available in the oral tradition, perhaps much less so.

Why are epics such as Beowulf or the Epic of Gilgamesh considered literature while others aren't? It's because someone at some point recorded them in a more permanent manner so future generations could read them in their unadulterated form (as much as that can be said of stories that probably had been changed and embellished multiple times already before someone wrote them down).

A thread on Twitter however can be deleted, added to, remixed, retweeted and forked at any time, which certainly are very interesting properties for creating art but I'm not sure if that art should be called literature or rather something else entirely.

Anyway, as originally stated what does and doesn't constitute literature isn't very precisely defined. So, this probably is hairsplitting anyway.

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#62

Post by Talyen42 »

We live in a golden age of storytelling.

Long-form TV and long-form podcasts have almost entirely replaced literature in my life, as someone who loves both grandiose fiction and nitty gritty non-fiction. Coincidentally, I don't watch many movies - they're too short to tell a great story.

The medium is not the thing.

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#63

Post by TuringTest »

BjoernKW wrote: post #61
TuringTest wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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").

The two don't really compare. Poetry is a form of literature. I can use Twitter as a medium for writing and publishing poetry. A poem written on Twitter and deleted the next day is no more permanent or long-lasting than a poem that's solely available in the oral tradition, perhaps much less so. Why are epics such as Beowulf or the Epic of Gilgamesh considered literature while others aren't? It's because someone at so…

You can burn the Library of Alexandria, and you can make copies of tweets. There's nothing inherent to the art form in the way that copies are stored.

My point is that there is a form of literature that is native to Twitter (or public IM in general), which takes advantage of the specifics of the medium (in particular, unfolding the story at piecemeal bits in real time, and reacting to users comments to tweak the next elements of the story).

The end result may be transcribed to more persistent written storage, but it's not the whole experience (just like reading The Three Musketeers as a book is slightly different to what people waiting for the next chapter in the newspaper would have experienced).

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#64

Post by Merrill »

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…

Within some decades, text-to-speech and speech-to-text will make it unnecessary for the average person to know how to read and write. Reading and writing as we know them will be limited to a fraction of the population that engage in high-level symbolic manipulation. Literacy could go back to 12%, especially as a myriad of mundane administrative jobs are obsoleted by AI.

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#65

Post by mo1ok »

Merrill wrote: post #64
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…

Within some decades, text-to-speech and speech-to-text will make it unnecessary for the average person to know how to read and write. Reading and writing as we know them will be limited to a fraction of the population that engage in high-level symbolic manipulation. Literacy could go back to 12%, especially as a myriad of mundane administrative jobs are obsoleted by AI.

Eh, I can read significantly faster than I can listen. And listening is far more annoying.

Could you imagine, for example, a door constantly bleeping "Fire Exit, Do Not Open" for illiterates?

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#66

Post by gammatrigono »

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.

I hate these blurred lines.

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#67

Post by georgeecollins »

My young kids read books all the time for pleasure, and some other kids their age do as well. Most kids probably don't, at least not in the long run. It always has been like this. We now expect most people to have more education so that they have "skills". Education used to be about imparting culture and sophistication as much about as about skills. But while most people need skills today, most people probably don't need more than a basic familiarity with literature. That's the way it has always been. Poetry has never been for everyone.

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#68

Post by Merrill »

mo1ok wrote: post #65
Merrill wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Within some decades, text-to-speech and speech-to-text will make it unnecessary for the average person to know how to read and write. Reading and writing as we know them will be limited to a fraction of the population that engage in high-level symbolic manipulation. Literacy could go back to 12%, especially as a myriad of mundane administrative jobs are obsoleted by AI.

Eh, I can read significantly faster than I can listen. And listening is far more annoying. Could you imagine, for example, a door constantly bleeping "Fire Exit, Do Not Open" for illiterates?

I would rather read news on web sites than listen to TV news channels. But that is probably not the average case.

There are standard pictographs for "fire exit" and "do not open door" that are used where not everyone reads the same language.

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#69

Post by jrumbut »

coldtea wrote: post #52
puranjay wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I would say that many things we consider (early) literature today were hand written on scrolls and not typeset on pages.

If handwritten scrolls, newsprint released a few pages every week, and pages printed out of a wordprocessor and bound can all be literature I'm not sure why hypertext on a website can't be (even using links and embedded media, the same way scroll authors added marginalia and early book makers illuminations, of course contemporary book makers also include marginalia (like page numbers and the book/chapter title). Even pseudo-links appear in works like Nabokov's Pale Fire.

My point is that extension and experimentation with form are part of any creative tradition. It's really hard to create a useful and consistent definition of literature that includes everything that's similar to War and Peace and excludes everything that's similar to Breaking Bad. It might be more fun to cast a wide net.

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#70

Post by michaelmrose »

Merrill wrote: post #64
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…

Within some decades, text-to-speech and speech-to-text will make it unnecessary for the average person to know how to read and write. Reading and writing as we know them will be limited to a fraction of the population that engage in high-level symbolic manipulation. Literacy could go back to 12%, especially as a myriad of mundane administrative jobs are obsoleted by AI.

The written word is still optimal for education and we will continue to teach it.

Even it it were feasible to get by without reading it would take 50 years for this change to happen and in between a and b the groups that allowed this would be out competed for resources by those less stupid.

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