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 we have a population of 7.6 billion of which 85% can read. This is a population of almost 6.5 billion readers.
If people are 1/10th as likely to produce good works then we are apt to have 5 times the number of good writers.
For there to be half as many good writers we have to believe that multimedia has extinguished 99% of the inclination to write.
I think you're right...but knowing what glory hounds most writers are, it's possible we're overlooking an important factor: the motivating aim of the authors.
In 1800, say in England, there were probably some thousands of people whose opinion an author really cared about. Now authors measure success in much higher numbers. If, and it is a big If, the cultural significance of fiction erodes then it won't matter how many people can read words off a page. Most writers want the greatest audience that they can reach and they want to give them a meaningful experience.
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.
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.
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.
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 its narrative medium.
> serialized fiction that was popular in the Victorian Age
A little earlier than that (Balzac in the 1830s, Eugène Sue and George Sand in the 1840s) the same thing had happened in France. Other than that I totally agree with you, the TV series (Netflix especially) are the new Balzac and Tolstoy.
Is literature dead, or does nothing become classic anymore? There's such a bombardment of media now that I feel even the best of things are quickly forgotten.
Overabundance of choice means classics have a much harder time bubbling up organically. If everything can be published, since the costs in this day and age are greatly reduced, nothing is filtered, signal to noise ratio is much lower, and there are many signals available, which one(s) do you bandpass? It used to be editors and similar other tastemakers that filtered any media, but they don't get paid well anymore.
I believe the article was only talking about literature in the restricted definition of basically meaning "a classic".
It even acknowledges the ability of the written word to get huge readership numbers in the modern day, so I think think it would make much sense if it was about written works as a whole.
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 primal element.
Literature didn't even become popular as novels in the first place; many popular works were published as serials in newspapers, and before that there were booklets and romances. The article strikes me as a yell of nostalgia for a particular dying format.
>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 history, not just anything that uses words to tell a story.
>The article strikes me as a yell of nostalgia for a particular dying format.
And what's bad about this? Not every dying format is bad, and not every new format is better (or even "more fit for the times").
And if some particular format gave thousands of great works that influenced billions, whereas the new one has meager results at the level of young adult fiction (and in an age of reduced cultural impact of fiction anyway), it could very well be a regression (history has those too, it's not all a smooth path to increased greatness or equally good at all times).
In the end, it's a subjective value-judgment. But that's exactly what's attempted here.
Many of which were originally serials published in newspapers ... see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feuilleton - Herman Hesse, for one, griped about the "age of the feuilleton".
Gore Vidal, who for a while earned his living writing for TV and movies, used to argue that the post-1960 emphasis on film directors was misplaced, and that writers actually were the essential factor. But he also remarked that pretty soon speaking of a famous writer would be like speaking of a famous ceramicist.
Curiously, some of the recente movie/TV series are putting directors back in the hired-hand category that Vidal said was their place, and emphasizing producers-writers, e.g. Game of Thrones.
(People like tales, like continued tales with familiar characters, like having some sort of tag to identify what they're picking - an author name is best, and sometimes it is fake, as in "house names" used by publishers as a brand for stories actually produced by a stable of multiple writers. Which is not new either ...)
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.
> 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 magazines out of business.
I think Kurt Vonnegut is right here. The sad thing is, all those talented people working at Google didn't get us the quality of writing that magazines did or TV does. They gave us eHow.
I suspect there's more great writing being produced than ever before. I've seen wonderful insight and brilliant craft on random blogs, on people's Tumblr or Medium, on fanfiction sites, on 4chan, even in newspaper comment sections. But the pile of dreck it's buried under is bigger than ever.
> 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.
>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
This is a wonderful essay. Kudos to the author. There are several excellent points all working together supporting the thesis.
Do authors explicitly write subtext? As the author says, I don't think so. I think authors use writing and editing as a way to organize their thoughts over time such that all the subtext comes out naturally. For most, I think, this is a subconscious thing. That's why you can't teach it.
Milton (the real one, anyway) was part of a lineage, a conversation, in which books—indeed, print itself— made a difference in the world
This may be the most important point of all. As a society with lots of different interests, literature has allowed the "subconscious of man" to have a multi-generational conversation about what's important. You write a book, you pick up that conversation. The public at large reads the book, they begin participating in it.
I'm not saying people sit around and study books to determine deep understanding of universe, but that's what happens. It's just not evident. You spend many years dedicating large portions of your time to climb inside the minds of great people throughout history, eventually you get a gut feel for what it means to be human -- no matter what your circumstances. You begin to see the same dramas and questions arise. You see the mosaic of life itself.
Of course, you see all of that other ways too. You can probably go to YouTube right now and watch a video on any kind of deep topic you'd like. But the key point was this shared subconscious journey, created by dedicated time in a book where your concentration and imagination were required to follow along with the story. Doing that, you live inside the heads of great thinkers in ways the click-and-move on crowd never will.
That's not for everybody to do. Some folks gravitate towards that kind of thing. Some don't. But it has to be for somebody. And it has to be for enough somebodys that the conversation continues.
So there is only one subtext to a text? If a subtext was intended by the author and never discovered by any reader, is it still a subtext? If a reader constructs a subtext that contradicts the intentions of the author, is it a subtext or a vision? How exactly do you define subtext? Similar questions could be asked about the concept of "lineage".
This kind of post gives me a headache based on its premise and conclusion. There are unproductive questions like "is the world flat" or "was it created last thursday" where you don't even want to argue. Yes literature is dead, so let's keep on writing and let the next epoch decide on the classics.
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.
Literature is not dead. Google and Facebook are large adtech companies. To dominate their markets means they degrade the value of the written word. As a noble persuit classics will still be there but anything reliant on text or picture based advertisement will wither and die.
> To dominate their markets means they degrade the value of the written word.
I don't see how you draw that conclusion. Marketing copy is utilitarian. The existence of advertising has nothing to do with literature's value.
3. It's not hard to see the shift in literature's import to our society. There's more media to consume than ever today, and modern storytellers have more ways to convey their ideas than just written literature. If you're going to get gripey about something degrading the written word, ad copy should be at the bottom of your worries and TV / new media is a more likely culprit (...which is kind of the point of the article).
All that said there's a good argument to be made that television is one of the greatest storytelling mediums to date, with unprecedented reach and a lot of expressive latitude for artists.
"literature doesn’t, can’t, have the influence it once did"
Well yes, since books or print in general aren't the culutally defining medium any more. Anyway, I think some people will get bored with TV & movies and will learn to find new interesting things you can do in literature. Movies are much too complex to create in order to be truly innovative. Too much money is involved. So, I don't think literature is dead, but there will be fewer readers, it will be more difficult for authors to make a living from writing literature alone and the number of professional critics will probably decline. On the other hand, literature as a mass media for everyone was, in a historical perspective, a rather young intervention anyway.
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.
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?
Literature—at least the literature to which I respond—doesn’t work that way; it is conscious, yes, but with room for serendipity, a delicate balance between craft and art. This is why it’s often difficult for writers to talk about their process, because the connections, the flow of storytelling, remain mysterious even to them.
I guess this is the case with the 10x programmers.
[+] [-] michaelmrose|7 years ago|reply
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 we have a population of 7.6 billion of which 85% can read. This is a population of almost 6.5 billion readers.
If people are 1/10th as likely to produce good works then we are apt to have 5 times the number of good writers.
For there to be half as many good writers we have to believe that multimedia has extinguished 99% of the inclination to write.
[+] [-] scandox|7 years ago|reply
In 1800, say in England, there were probably some thousands of people whose opinion an author really cared about. Now authors measure success in much higher numbers. If, and it is a big If, the cultural significance of fiction erodes then it won't matter how many people can read words off a page. Most writers want the greatest audience that they can reach and they want to give them a meaningful experience.
[+] [-] agumonkey|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Merrill|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] harperlee|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] puranjay|7 years ago|reply
I'd say that literature isn't dead; it's just changing its narrative medium.
[+] [-] coldtea|7 years ago|reply
Else, we can just say that "fiction is not dead".
[+] [-] paganel|7 years ago|reply
A little earlier than that (Balzac in the 1830s, Eugène Sue and George Sand in the 1840s) the same thing had happened in France. Other than that I totally agree with you, the TV series (Netflix especially) are the new Balzac and Tolstoy.
[+] [-] jdck1326|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] anoncoward111|7 years ago|reply
I like reading free stuff and it's mostly non fiction.
You couldn't convince me to read something like Paper Towns.
[+] [-] ravenstine|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] genericone|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] austhrow743|7 years ago|reply
It even acknowledges the ability of the written word to get huge readership numbers in the modern day, so I think think it would make much sense if it was about written works as a whole.
[+] [-] TuringTest|7 years ago|reply
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 primal element.
Literature didn't even become popular as novels in the first place; many popular works were published as serials in newspapers, and before that there were booklets and romances. The article strikes me as a yell of nostalgia for a particular dying format.
[+] [-] coldtea|7 years ago|reply
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 history, not just anything that uses words to tell a story.
>The article strikes me as a yell of nostalgia for a particular dying format.
And what's bad about this? Not every dying format is bad, and not every new format is better (or even "more fit for the times").
And if some particular format gave thousands of great works that influenced billions, whereas the new one has meager results at the level of young adult fiction (and in an age of reduced cultural impact of fiction anyway), it could very well be a regression (history has those too, it's not all a smooth path to increased greatness or equally good at all times).
In the end, it's a subjective value-judgment. But that's exactly what's attempted here.
[+] [-] B1FF_PSUVM|7 years ago|reply
Many of which were originally serials published in newspapers ... see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feuilleton - Herman Hesse, for one, griped about the "age of the feuilleton".
Gore Vidal, who for a while earned his living writing for TV and movies, used to argue that the post-1960 emphasis on film directors was misplaced, and that writers actually were the essential factor. But he also remarked that pretty soon speaking of a famous writer would be like speaking of a famous ceramicist.
Curiously, some of the recente movie/TV series are putting directors back in the hired-hand category that Vidal said was their place, and emphasizing producers-writers, e.g. Game of Thrones.
(People like tales, like continued tales with familiar characters, like having some sort of tag to identify what they're picking - an author name is best, and sometimes it is fake, as in "house names" used by publishers as a brand for stories actually produced by a stable of multiple writers. Which is not new either ...)
[+] [-] nearmuse|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelmrose|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doctorpangloss|7 years ago|reply
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 magazines out of business.
I think Kurt Vonnegut is right here. The sad thing is, all those talented people working at Google didn't get us the quality of writing that magazines did or TV does. They gave us eHow.
[+] [-] lmm|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CM30|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] LegendaryPatMan|7 years ago|reply
>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
[+] [-] paulcarroty|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prithee|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|7 years ago|reply
Do authors explicitly write subtext? As the author says, I don't think so. I think authors use writing and editing as a way to organize their thoughts over time such that all the subtext comes out naturally. For most, I think, this is a subconscious thing. That's why you can't teach it.
Milton (the real one, anyway) was part of a lineage, a conversation, in which books—indeed, print itself— made a difference in the world
This may be the most important point of all. As a society with lots of different interests, literature has allowed the "subconscious of man" to have a multi-generational conversation about what's important. You write a book, you pick up that conversation. The public at large reads the book, they begin participating in it.
I'm not saying people sit around and study books to determine deep understanding of universe, but that's what happens. It's just not evident. You spend many years dedicating large portions of your time to climb inside the minds of great people throughout history, eventually you get a gut feel for what it means to be human -- no matter what your circumstances. You begin to see the same dramas and questions arise. You see the mosaic of life itself.
Of course, you see all of that other ways too. You can probably go to YouTube right now and watch a video on any kind of deep topic you'd like. But the key point was this shared subconscious journey, created by dedicated time in a book where your concentration and imagination were required to follow along with the story. Doing that, you live inside the heads of great thinkers in ways the click-and-move on crowd never will.
That's not for everybody to do. Some folks gravitate towards that kind of thing. Some don't. But it has to be for somebody. And it has to be for enough somebodys that the conversation continues.
I'm not sure that's the case anymore.
[+] [-] stewbrew|7 years ago|reply
So there is only one subtext to a text? If a subtext was intended by the author and never discovered by any reader, is it still a subtext? If a reader constructs a subtext that contradicts the intentions of the author, is it a subtext or a vision? How exactly do you define subtext? Similar questions could be asked about the concept of "lineage".
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] otabdeveloper1|7 years ago|reply
Virtue signaling via books is dead, however, and that's a good thing.
[+] [-] akullpp|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Talyen42|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] zitterbewegung|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kajecounterhack|7 years ago|reply
2. In re:
> To dominate their markets means they degrade the value of the written word.
I don't see how you draw that conclusion. Marketing copy is utilitarian. The existence of advertising has nothing to do with literature's value.
3. It's not hard to see the shift in literature's import to our society. There's more media to consume than ever today, and modern storytellers have more ways to convey their ideas than just written literature. If you're going to get gripey about something degrading the written word, ad copy should be at the bottom of your worries and TV / new media is a more likely culprit (...which is kind of the point of the article).
All that said there's a good argument to be made that television is one of the greatest storytelling mediums to date, with unprecedented reach and a lot of expressive latitude for artists.
[+] [-] stewbrew|7 years ago|reply
Well yes, since books or print in general aren't the culutally defining medium any more. Anyway, I think some people will get bored with TV & movies and will learn to find new interesting things you can do in literature. Movies are much too complex to create in order to be truly innovative. Too much money is involved. So, I don't think literature is dead, but there will be fewer readers, it will be more difficult for authors to make a living from writing literature alone and the number of professional critics will probably decline. On the other hand, literature as a mass media for everyone was, in a historical perspective, a rather young intervention anyway.
[+] [-] georgeecollins|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nearmuse|7 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] gozzoo|7 years ago|reply
I guess this is the case with the 10x programmers.
[+] [-] tanilama|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]