The Death of Literature
In 1990 Alvin Kernan in his book “The Death of Literature” solemnly proclaimed the dramatic change in the Western Culture: “ For good or for bad, television and other forms of electronic communication have replaced the printed book, especially its idealized form, literature, as more enticing, efficient, and authoritative sources of knowledge and culture. This change has necessarily affected literature, which could be as dependent on print culture as bardic poetry and heroic epic were on tribal oral society. In the electronic age, literature may simply disappear or dwindle to a merely ceremonial role, like Peking opera.”
Today, 28 years later, we live in the digital age, when not only the physical book in decline but also the whole practices of reading and writing have been profoundly transformed. Has literature finally lost its privileged place in our culture, pushed to the role of “the other,” of the embodiment of old things, old beliefs, and old values?
Today, 28 years later, we live in the digital age, when not only the physical book in decline but also the whole practices of reading and writing have been profoundly transformed. Has literature finally lost its privileged place in our culture, pushed to the role of “the other,” of the embodiment of old things, old beliefs, and old values?
Comments (43)
Technology has made possible a more eco-friendly method of passing stories and information. While I own over four-hundred physical books and enjoy the smells, the nostalgia and textures, I also use and enjoy other mediums of acquiring information and stories. Movies, documentaries, video clips, articles even wiki; as long as we use and teach skepticism and multi-sorce verification, we'll be okay.
There are eight billion humans and thus more readers than ever (although I wouldn't be surprised if the percentage of readers has dwindled). I see no reason to fear for our future, at least for now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_music_industry_market_share_data
Global revenue for books is about 8 times more than music in 2017.
That might be due to the fact a large percentage people pirate their music ( https://www.statista.com/topics/3493/media-piracy/ ). In addition to books costing 10-40 times more than songs. Although it is hopeful, statistics can be misleading.
Many writers think that serious literature is going to become extinct under the market’s pressure. Thus,
Will Self pointed out: “There is one question alone that you must ask yourself to establish whether the serious novel will still retain cultural primacy and centrality in another 20 years. This is the question: if you accept that by then the vast majority of text will be read in digital form on devices linked to the web, do you also believe that those readers will voluntarily choose to disable that connectivity? If your answer to this is no, then the death of the novel is sealed out of your own mouth
It might be, but over 8 times reduced revenue due to piracy in music looks like a stretch to me. Even if you double the amount of people who admitted music piracy according to that study and assumed that people who pirate music only pirate music that still leaves extra revenue for books. Music revenue/0.3 is still 2-3 times less than books.
Regardless, there's no evidence people are reading comparatively less books. The death of literature as a position has to come from a (somewhat conservative) cultural stance; something about digital books being worse than paper ones.
I do prefer paper books personally, especially ones that you study and return to. Over years of use the deterioration of pages opposing the spine gives you a good measure of which parts are most important and most difficult for you.
Such a conservative stance is being taken by Number2018. I see no reason to believe artistic merit dies with increasing popularity of the art form - absent a well developed theory of artistic merit and its relation to digitalisation and increasing popularity. So far, we're just sneering.
Quoting Grey Vs Gray
It is not a matter of nostalgia, and definitely, the digital age provides us with a lot of new possibilities. The problem is that the practices of reading and writing have changed. You are right, much more people are reading nowadays, but their reading
has become fragmental and instantaneous – and the process of reading is inseparable from the way we are writing.
The cinema is the modern community novel. It takes more people to make it, and a wider audience experiences it (usually). A movie is like a multi-dimensional novel, including actual humans, real sound and color. Although they aren’t directly comparable, a good movie is better than a poor novel. And vice verse, because many movies are more product than art. But the potential is there. When a film “gets it right”, it is almost transcendent.
Why conservative? I would say - realistic. Do you know anybody, who is reading “Don Quixote” or “Peace and War”? I do not know. Though, very few classic novels are read by students, forced by curriculum and their teachers. Without the readers, these books will become just museum artifacts.
Appreciating 'the classics' is fine, reducing good literature to them is silly. In 200 years perhaps people will be lamenting that not enough people read Danielewski and Palahniuk. There's already something similar happening with Borges and Eco, last time I spoke to literature snobs anyway.
All the forms of electronic communication -- the telegraph, telephone, film, radio, television, computer, internet, etc -- have changed life. Abraham Lincoln hung around the War Department's telegraph office to get the latest reports from the field before anybody else saw them. Photographs of battle scenes brought home to people just how bad the carnage of the Civil War was. That was 160 years ago. All the technological innovations since then have continued to change the way we produce, distribute, and consume information.
The way people wrote changed when typewriters replaced pens. When the 'word processor' replaced the typewriter the experience of writing changed again. Seeing one's words on a print-like page (typewriter) or a screen (word processor) was different than handwriting. War and Peace was written in long hand.
Quoting fdrake
Most of the books printed since Guttenberg have been forgotten. Every year the conveyor belt of produced works dumps old product into the pulping machines. There are really very few books from the past that we still want to read. That's most likely going to be true for today's works too. Most of them will be forgotten fairly soon -- you won't have to wait for 200 years.
Classics are rare, because most old books don't fare well as time passes. Not a lot of people still read Chaucer, but thousands do. Far, far fewer (scores of people) read Chaucer's contemporaries Gower, Langland, or Boccaccio.
Furthermore, there are too many books to read, from the very ancient to merely old to new yesterday. There is far, far, far too much short-form writing to read, as well--fiction or factual. Too much music to listen to, too many films to see, too many web sites to visit. There are more cute cat videos than one has time to watch.
I am quite surprised; I think that ”essential insights into the nature of humankind” have become meaningless.
“To all those who still wish to talk about man, about his reign or his liberation, to all those who still ask themselves questions about what man is in his essence, to all those who wish to take him as their starting-point in their attempts to reach the truth, to all those who, on the other hand, refer all knowledge back to the truths of man himself, to all those who refuse to formalize without anthropologizing, who refuse to mythologize without demystifying, who refuse to think without immediately thinking that it is man who is thinking, to all these warped and twisted forms of reflection we can answer only with a philosophical laugh – which means, to a certain extent, a silent one.”
? FOUCAULT MICHEL, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
That was one reason I put it in scarequotes.
Thousands - are not bad at all, I assumed less.
Quoting Bitter Crank
You are right - too much of everything! As far as I know, most teenagers do not read books at all.
There has always been a large demographic of people who do not read books; some of them can not read; some of them find it too difficult to read for it to be a pleasure; and some people could but just don't.
There has always been a demographic of eager readers; it has varied over time, but it has included the educated elite who like to read; the upward aspirational immigrants who want to partake of the Anglo-American culture; ordinary educated people (not elite) who like to read, and then a few people who read for a living: book editors and reviewers. The chattering classes read because they need fresh fodder to chatter on about.
Then there is a demographic who is well educated, literate, affluent, and who take pride in claiming that they haven't read a book since college. Conversation with these people validates their claim that they haven't read a book in the last 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years.
Here's a ranking of reading: At least the US is not on the bottom.
1. India — 10 hours, 42 minutes
2. Thailand — 9:24
3. China — 8:00
4. Philippines — 7:36
5. Egypt — 7:30
6. Czech Republic — 7:24
7. Russia — 7:06
8. Sweden — 6:54
8. France — 6:54
10. Hungary — 6:48
10. Saudi Arabia — 6:48
12. Hong Kong — 6:42
13. Poland — 6:30
14. Venezuela — 6:24
15. South Africa — 6:18
15. Australia — 6:18
17. Indonesia — 6:00
18. Argentina — 5:54
18. Turkey — 5:54
20. Spain — 5:48
20. Canada — 5:48
22. Germany — 5:42
22. USA — 5:42
24. Italy — 5:36
25. Mexico — 5:30
26. U.K. — 5:18
27. Brazil — 5:12
28. Taiwan — 5:00
29. Japan — 4:06
30. Korea — 3:06
I don't think so. Even the physical book isn't going to fade away: it's simply still so useful and handy. If one argues that the hey-day of book reading is over, that less people read books than earlier, I'm not sure about that.
(Yet what has profoundly changed is writing physical letters. First dramatic change was of course the telephone. Then came the internet. All the ease that we have with various kinds of chats, text messages and apps have change how we use the media. We write a lot more, but what will stay for later?)
Historically, the book not always has mediated the relationship with self. For example, for ancient Stoics and Epicureans, the spoken word of a teacher was the most important. And, one can doubt the private character of the process of the ancient “care of self.” Nevertheless, you are right that we experience the dramatic decline of the book culture, and reading cannot provide us with our own private and intimate space.
I agree with you. But the point is that literature, authors, their critics, book's reading have lost their privileged position in our culture, they do not generate and translate the most advanced meanings and values anymore.
One could argue about the quality of reading and about its importance.
Please expand on this. I'm not sure what you mean.
Will Self:" In the early 1980s, and I would argue throughout the second half of the last century, the literary novel was perceived to be the prince of art forms, the cultural capstone and the apogee of creative endeavor. The capability words have when arranged sequentially to both mimic the free flow of human thought and investigate the physical expressions and interactions of thinking subjects; the way they may be shaped into a believable simulacrum of either the commonsensical world, or any number of invented ones; and the capability of the extended prose form itself, which, unlike any other art form, is able to enact self-analysis, to describe other aesthetic modes and even mimic them. All this led to a general acknowledgment: the novel was the true Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk."
We chatter here, for sure. So do monkeys, but that doesn't make the primates members of the chattering classes.
We aren't at any risk of being mistaken for taste makers, trend setters, opinion leaders, and blah blah blah. Not that we would want to be. I mean, god forbid that we should have a mass following. It would ruin everything.
Despite there being much more money in Cinema, TV and gaming, we don't see Directors' Festivals or Actors' Festivals. Sure we have the Oscars, but nobody would ever accuse them of being Deep. Nobody expects Quentin Tarantino or Ryan Gosling to have anything particularly interesting to say about the world, but they do expect that of JM Coetzee and Hilary Mantel. Furthermore, the directors and actors are so carefully stage-managed by their media minders that there is scarcely any opportunity to get an authentic thought about the world out of them publicly anyway.
So literature, or print, as we conceive of it now, is actually a relatively recent and brief phase in the history of human civilization. Already, if we group together all the new forms that came to prominence in the 20th-21st centuries, this new age is comparable in length to the age of print.
The age of the serious writer as a public intellectual carrying wisdom and moral authority is even shorter than the age of print - that started roughly in the middle 19th century in the Western world, and is on the vane now. I think you are wrong about Tarantino and Gosling, given our celebrity culture.
The Book is dead. Long live the Book!
M
Don DeLillo lays out in his novel" Mao 2": “The novel used to feed our search for meaning… It was the tremendous secular transcendence. The source of language, character, occasional new truth. But our desperation has led us toward something more extensive and darker. So we turn to news, which provides an unremitting mood of catastrophe.
This is where we find emotional experience not available elsewhere. We don’t need the novel.”
Yet, it is not just that the novel cannot compete with other media, which are using more intensive means affecting human minds. “Crime and Punishment” or “In the Search of Lost Time” were neither written nor read for pleasure or satisfying some intellectual or emotional utility needs. They were true experimental laboratories of human existence for both writers and readers, where writing and reading constituted the ways of becoming with the unknown outcome. When DeLillo and Self say that the novel has no future, they probably try to express their intuition that it loses its fundamental functions.
Quoting andrewk
Authors are not able to compete with the directors and actors in shaping people minds, regardless of the authenticity of their thoughts.
Jeffrey Nealon in his book “Post-Postmodernism” takes the point that "media images have taken over the very resistant, interruptive power of the “thought from outside,” that for so long was the privileged territory of literary language, that has made literature a privileged ethical discourse within modernism and postmodernism… writers have become the last believers – not in any positive content or anything as predictable as “meaning,” but writers are the lust believers in language’s ability to be the primary driver in the interruption and reshaping of subjectivity (which is also to say, the resisting and disrupting of so-called normative subjectivity)"
I think that the explosion of texting and social networking chatting as the smooth, familiar and enjoyable way of communicating and expressing one’s immediate thoughts and feelings deserves our attention as an essential socio-cultural phenomenon of our digital time. (Curiously, isn’t it the highest chain in the evolution of the epistolary genre, at the beginning of which one could find Seneca’s Letters to Luciliius?) Some thinkers assume that behind this phenomenon there is an imperative to force one to expose herself, to speak incessantly, to take part in numerous public and normative communications.
You are right in stating the objective facts as they are. Much more difficult to imagine the world where the book (you call it" print") was the primary source of knowledge, meanings, and values and to understand how the disappearance of this world affects our thought and the way of being.
Quoting Number2018
I agree, and that is in line with your OP. However my comment about the position of writers was in response not to the OP but to this post that quotes Will Self, which was not about novelists being the most influential people - I doubt they were ever that - but about their being seen as the highest and deepest artists. If we are talking about power to shape people's minds then neither novelists, directors nor actors have anywhere near as much of that power as advertising executives, populist politicians and their spin doctors. But I don't know anybody that views them as the repository of high culture.
I like your reference to Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk. For all that novels only reach a minority of the population, and perhaps a smaller proportion now than it was forty years ago, I don't think any medium has replaced it as the closest in people's minds to that ideal.
I think that most of my disagreement with others about the situation with literature, the novel, and reading has been rooted in the incorrect use of the critical terms applied here.
We do not have the same art, literature, authors, readers as it was in the past.
The cultural practices have changed dramatically and applying the same signifiers
just lead us to confusion and misunderstanding.
What cultural forms will be most celebrated in 20 years is uncertain, let alone what will be most celebrated 200 years from now. Who in 1940 would have anticipated the beat movements of the 1950s? Or the 'psychedelic art' of the 1960s? What will the state of (big C) Cinema be in 20 years?
Cultural Cassandras are always wringing their hands and bemoaning the decline of [music], [art], [manners], [writing], [you name it]. With some justification, of course. Culture, like a glacier, is always declining. It always heading down and ending up in the sea. But at the other end it's always being renewed.
If global warming turns out to be as bad as expected, I would expect the state of the arts in 200 years to be really lousy. One thing for sure: people won't be writing apocalyptic novels. They'll be living the apocalypse.
You are right in everything, no doubt that new generations will be doing well without the serious novel and other cultural forms will be invented. I just try to figure out how “the death of literature” affects my talking and writing.
“Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story” (Hamlet V,2).
What is the way of telling a story today?
Churchill did two things here: first, he described the anticipated invasion of Great Britain, but what was emphasized was "we shall fight". Second, the emphasized the fight. One could think that the fighting would be on somebody else's beaches, landing grounds, fields, streets and hills, and think of victory.
Another rhetorical device they discussed was the rule of three, like "veni, vidi, vici". The rule of three is still essential in all sorts of speech.
Point is, some things never go out of style.
the unabridged edition of War and Peace has a sales rank of 43,486 on Amazon--not bad for a book nobody is reading, when sales ranks run into the hundreds of thousands.
Now, now... let's not be stealing sheep.