4 ms·

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

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.

coldtea 8y ago
Well, the medium is what makes literature what it is. Else, we can just say that "fiction is not dead".
- awild 8y ago
  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 then. It being the most accessible medium etc The remaining question should then be if our new media are lacking something compared to old media and if it's a ~bad~ for them to be lacking.
  - CM30 8y ago
    Yeah. What's more, most authors of past eras probably wouldn't be writing books or plays nowadays either. I mean, look at William Shakespeare. His plays may be famous, but in their time they were the popular culture of the day, not some sort of 'high art' reserved for the elite. If he was around today, he'd probably be creating TV series or YouTube videos, not plays. Both the seemingly higher popularity of reading and writing in the past came from a lack of other viable options.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    >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, but whether they should. In other words, the victorian times people reading might very well have been a byproduct of them not having TV, games, internet, etc. In fact it totally was. But that's totally uninteresting, and not an argument as to whether losing that kind of activity is bad or good. In other words, just like etymology doesn't tell us what a word means, just how it got started, the historical factors that led to people reading and revering books back in the day don't tell us whether doing so is good or bad, and whether we'd be better of continuing it even if the conditions that made it popular have changed. The conditions that made physical activity for the cavemen popular (collecting food, not being eaten by lions, etc.) have changed totally, but physical activity is still good for us. To the point that sitting still most of our days kills us prematurely compared to what we could achieve given our advancements in medicine. Things can be historical accidents, and still be better than the items that replaced them (either through conscious effort or as historical accidents themselves). (To quote Hoare on a similar issue: "[ALGOL 60] is a language so far ahead of its time, that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors, but also on nearly all its successors").
    - awild 8y ago
      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.
- puranjay 8y ago
  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.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    >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).
    - puranjay 8y ago
      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.
      - coldtea 8y ago
        >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).
- mannykannot 8y ago
  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.
paganel 8y ago
> 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.

coldtea 8y ago

Well, the medium is what makes literature what it is. Else, we can just say that "fiction is not dead".

awild 8y ago
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 then. It being the most accessible medium etc The remaining question should then be if our new media are lacking something compared to old media and if it's a ~bad~ for them to be lacking.
- CM30 8y ago
  Yeah. What's more, most authors of past eras probably wouldn't be writing books or plays nowadays either. I mean, look at William Shakespeare. His plays may be famous, but in their time they were the popular culture of the day, not some sort of 'high art' reserved for the elite. If he was around today, he'd probably be creating TV series or YouTube videos, not plays. Both the seemingly higher popularity of reading and writing in the past came from a lack of other viable options.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >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, but whether they should. In other words, the victorian times people reading might very well have been a byproduct of them not having TV, games, internet, etc. In fact it totally was. But that's totally uninteresting, and not an argument as to whether losing that kind of activity is bad or good. In other words, just like etymology doesn't tell us what a word means, just how it got started, the historical factors that led to people reading and revering books back in the day don't tell us whether doing so is good or bad, and whether we'd be better of continuing it even if the conditions that made it popular have changed. The conditions that made physical activity for the cavemen popular (collecting food, not being eaten by lions, etc.) have changed totally, but physical activity is still good for us. To the point that sitting still most of our days kills us prematurely compared to what we could achieve given our advancements in medicine. Things can be historical accidents, and still be better than the items that replaced them (either through conscious effort or as historical accidents themselves). (To quote Hoare on a similar issue: "[ALGOL 60] is a language so far ahead of its time, that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors, but also on nearly all its successors").
  - awild 8y ago
    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.
puranjay 8y ago
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.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >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).
  - puranjay 8y ago
    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.
    - coldtea 8y ago
      >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).
mannykannot 8y ago
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.

paganel 8y ago

> 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.