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

71–74 of 74 posts

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#71

Post by mannykannot »

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".

It might be helpful to identify what difference the medium makes, and one significant difference is that, as one cannot show, one has to tell. It turns out that this is a strength, not a weakness.

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#72

Post by bitwize »

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?

You know those long treadmills at airports that you walk on to move faster through the concourse? They have speakers at either end constantly repeating a warning that the end is coming and to watch your step.

Re: Is Literature Dead?

#73

Post by coldtea »

jrumbut wrote: post #69
coldtea wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 illum…

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

That's not the distinguishing point though. It's the form (of the story), not the medium. It could be clay tablets or bits on an SSD too.

But if we say "Breaking Bad" is literature then we lose distinguishing characteristics, which is not just "telling a story".

In we call TV or games "literature", we we could just go on an call "Breaking Bad" architecture or music too, why not? Like music, it evokes emotions and is shifting. Like architecture it has a structure and certain tolerances, etc.

We give more restrictive names for a reason, to not lose track of concepts and things in an amorphous blob.

>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.

Actually it sounds very easy, and every literary criticism magazine for example has managed to achieve it in its review section...

Post reply on HN