5 ms·

The Death of Literary Culture

8 points by vwoolf 5y ago

causi 5y ago
because the literary culture is going away fast, if it’s not already gone away. When John Updike was in his prime, millions of people read him (or they at last bought Couples and could spit out some light book chat about it on command). The number of writers working today who the educated public, broadly conceived of, might know about is small I would argue he's missing what's really going on: literary culture hasn't gone away; it's just become personalized. Publishing is so much easier now that people can find authors they truly adore and aren't forced to read anything they don't really like. When I was younger, almost all of the books I read were written by dead people. These days, the books I read are mostly written by living people and I eagerly mark their next release date on my calendar. Nobody I know offline has ever read anything by any of them, and that's ok.
- AlbertCory 5y ago
  I don't think you understand what "literary culture" means. It can't become "just more personalized." How tragic for you that you had to read things by dead people. As he says: Much of what passes for social media discourse makes little or no sense, until one considers that most assertions are assertions of identity, not of factual or true statements, and many social media users are constructing a quasi-fictional universe not unlike the ones novels used to create. A "literary culture" transcends identity. So you're a member of <X> (I use "X" to avoid triggering anyone): who TF cares? Making a true statement about the human condition that's relevant in Periclean Athens or 17th Century France or now is what enabled those dead people to live on through their books.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    Volume of output and universality of experience are inherently at odds. Everyone can't read everything. A small fraction of the population reads at all, and for many it's likely only a book or two per year. Someone reading ten books is a marked outlier. And yet we have ever more literary outlets, even if most are online. Dropping of the editorial gatekeeper role means that much of that is unvetted, which means for the reader that offerings are very hit-or-miss. An editor is someone who wastes their time on crap so that you don't have to, and assessment costs are high. "Personalised literature" is one possible outcome. It means, though, as with micro-targeted television or online content, that there is little by way of a common touchstone for the larger population, or even that subset which does enjoy reading. Too, the whole concept of a "literary culture" in the sense of anyone but the wealthiest members of society buying and reading books is almost entirely a 19th--20th century phenomenon. It was born roughly in the 1850s (aided by magazines, themselves often glorified book catalogues and teaser reels, advertising and mass goods), and persisted through about 1950, with some nostalgic inertia carrying through until the 1970s or early 1980s, though television had all but completely supplanted reading as a popular entertainment by that point. (Exceptions such as Harry Potter were just that, another niche was genre fiction, though that rarely had any real literary content.)
    - AlbertCory 5y ago
      I share the disdain (if that's the word) for modern literary fiction, and in fact I don't read much, if any. I'm currently reading (and loving) The Count of Monte Cristo. And yet, I wrote some! [1] Why? I suppose that, contrary to what I said about universal human truths, I thought that the subjective experience of living through the graphical UI revolution was worth capturing. No one's done that, and honestly, since I'm retired I just felt like it. Inventing the Future isn't exactly "identity" but I doubt people will be reading it in 300 years, any more than they're reading Balzac now. I'd love to write a timeless novel but I don't think I'm up to it. I think you're wrong about the emergence of literary culture, though, by 100 years or so. The first "novels" in England were in the 1700s. It wasn't quite as "mass" as now, of course, but there was a middle class who could read. [1] https://www.albertcory.io https://www.albertcory.io
      - dredmorbius 5y ago
        So, there's "first", and there's "was a widespread cultural thing". For numerous reasons, reading books as a popular pastime didn't take off before 1800: - Literacy rates were low. Not as low in England as elsewhere, but on the order of 25% or so. (In other parts of Europe, that could be 5--10%.) By the end of the 19th century, 90--95% literacy rates were widespread. - Education. Free public education is also a 19th century thing, emerging in England and Germany principally (the Prussian school system), the latter of which strongly influenced US education. Keep in mind that as of 1900 high school graduation rates were about 6% in the US, virtually exclusively white males. The current PhD attainment rate is higher than that. - Printing presses. Through 1800, these were still largely constructed of wood, and little changed from Gutenberg's original design. Cast-iron, and later steel presses were introduced in the early 1800s, followed shortly by powered (first steam, later electric), rotary, and web presses. Impression per hour increased from about 60--120, to over 100,000 by the end of the century. - Paper. Cheap wood-pulp (rather than cotton-rag) paper emerged in the early 1800s as well. Much of this was high-acid, and suffered from longevity problems (yellowing, cracking, and ultimately breaking apart), which was addressed in the 20th century. - Railroads. Printed books and newspapers could be cheaply distributed throughout a region or country. The upshot is that a copy of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations cost about £5, when a workingman's wages for a year might be £30, in 1776.[1] By the 1850s, "penny dreadfuls", running 8--16 pages and costing 1p, were popular (and decried as a dissolution of the youth). Wages remained on the order of 30--110£/yr (labourer and engineer, respectively), but the cost of books had fallen ... tremendously. I'm not quite sure what price a book fetched by 1850, though extrapolating from 1p/16pp, a 320 page book would be about 1 shilling, or 1/100th the cost of Wealth of Nations when originally published. Books, short stories, and articles had also become the sweetener for advertising-supported publications and magazines (I recommend again, Hamilton Holt's excellent 1909 short book, Commercialism and Journalism, describing the rise of advertising-supported media: https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft). Serialised fiction (see especally Dickens, who largely invented the formula) "brought reading to the masses". ________________________________ Notes: 1. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=ucm.5319377541&view=1up&seq=110 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=ucm.5319377541&view=1...
- cafard 5y ago
  You will notice the expression "in his prime". John Updike was not then among the dead people. And nobody was forcing anyone to read his books. I don't think he was on anyone's curriculum in those days. Having said that, you are on to something: literary culture has definitely undergone some fragmentation. Time can't run a book review and set the agenda for book buyers across the country--anyway, I think they can't.
dredmorbius 5y ago
I'm wondering where people are going for literary fiction, particularly shorter literary fiction, these days. I tend to follow "Selected Shorts", which is pretty good, though I'll often find myself not especially engaging with the stories. (The ones I do are often older, dating from the 1920s -- 1970s or so). The selections seem to be largely from America's Best Short Stories, which publishes an annual anthology. I've picked up a few years' editions, and found a few winners, but even amongst the best the pickings seem slim. There's genre fiction, though there's little of that I particularly care for. Cypherpunk is my usual exception (Stephenson, Dick, a handful of others), and perhaps some of the better-written Grisham novels. Most of my reading is nonfiction, which I find interesting and egaging (much of it is autodidactic, and I've absolutely no shortage of material). But outside that ... fiction just seems pale.
8bitsrule 5y ago
>When John Updike was in his prime, millions of people read him. I read one of Updike's books (Run, Rabbit) and it seemed about one notch up (not a compliment) from Jacqueline Susann (3 of her novels once simultaneously topped the NYT bestsellers list). At about the same time, Philip Dick was very productive and being ignored (as he was until after his death, when he was suddenly 'recognized'). Since then, 'millions of people read' 50 Shades of Grey. Topped international lists, translated into 52 languages. Not 'literary'? Neither was Moby Dick, while its author was alive. Looks like the critics were wrong. (Am I suggesting them to be comparable? Hell no.) When I do a search on 'literary culture' not much of consequence turns up. Not surprised; it's hard to get anyone to commit to a definition of 'literature'. Maybe the author means 'Literary fiction'. Maybe 'deconstruction' killed off that whole distinction. Maybe two world wars and a Cold War did. Maybe that lode was mined out - maybe it was a chimera. It maybe that, now, genuine human voices are preferred over mannered, learned voices. Maybe we're waiting for a new voice to appear. Maybe we now see our pretenses too clearly. "We will declare frankly that nothing is clear in this world. Only fools and charlatans know and understand everything." - Chekhov "I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of imagination." - Keats

8 points by vwoolf 5y ago

because the literary culture is going away fast, if it’s not already gone away. When John Updike was in his prime, millions of people read him (or they at last bought Couples and could spit out some light book chat about it on command). The number of writers working today who the educated public, broadly conceived of, might know about is small I would argue he's missing what's really going on: literary culture hasn't gone away; it's just become personalized. Publishing is so much easier now that people can find authors they truly adore and aren't forced to read anything they don't really like. When I was younger, almost all of the books I read were written by dead people. These days, the books I read are mostly written by living people and I eagerly mark their next release date on my calendar. Nobody I know offline has ever read anything by any of them, and that's ok.

AlbertCory 5y ago
I don't think you understand what "literary culture" means. It can't become "just more personalized." How tragic for you that you had to read things by dead people. As he says: Much of what passes for social media discourse makes little or no sense, until one considers that most assertions are assertions of identity, not of factual or true statements, and many social media users are constructing a quasi-fictional universe not unlike the ones novels used to create. A "literary culture" transcends identity. So you're a member of <X> (I use "X" to avoid triggering anyone): who TF cares? Making a true statement about the human condition that's relevant in Periclean Athens or 17th Century France or now is what enabled those dead people to live on through their books.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Volume of output and universality of experience are inherently at odds. Everyone can't read everything. A small fraction of the population reads at all, and for many it's likely only a book or two per year. Someone reading ten books is a marked outlier. And yet we have ever more literary outlets, even if most are online. Dropping of the editorial gatekeeper role means that much of that is unvetted, which means for the reader that offerings are very hit-or-miss. An editor is someone who wastes their time on crap so that you don't have to, and assessment costs are high. "Personalised literature" is one possible outcome. It means, though, as with micro-targeted television or online content, that there is little by way of a common touchstone for the larger population, or even that subset which does enjoy reading. Too, the whole concept of a "literary culture" in the sense of anyone but the wealthiest members of society buying and reading books is almost entirely a 19th--20th century phenomenon. It was born roughly in the 1850s (aided by magazines, themselves often glorified book catalogues and teaser reels, advertising and mass goods), and persisted through about 1950, with some nostalgic inertia carrying through until the 1970s or early 1980s, though television had all but completely supplanted reading as a popular entertainment by that point. (Exceptions such as Harry Potter were just that, another niche was genre fiction, though that rarely had any real literary content.)
  - AlbertCory 5y ago
    I share the disdain (if that's the word) for modern literary fiction, and in fact I don't read much, if any. I'm currently reading (and loving) The Count of Monte Cristo. And yet, I wrote some! [1] Why? I suppose that, contrary to what I said about universal human truths, I thought that the subjective experience of living through the graphical UI revolution was worth capturing. No one's done that, and honestly, since I'm retired I just felt like it. Inventing the Future isn't exactly "identity" but I doubt people will be reading it in 300 years, any more than they're reading Balzac now. I'd love to write a timeless novel but I don't think I'm up to it. I think you're wrong about the emergence of literary culture, though, by 100 years or so. The first "novels" in England were in the 1700s. It wasn't quite as "mass" as now, of course, but there was a middle class who could read. [1] https://www.albertcory.io https://www.albertcory.io
    - dredmorbius 5y ago
      So, there's "first", and there's "was a widespread cultural thing". For numerous reasons, reading books as a popular pastime didn't take off before 1800: - Literacy rates were low. Not as low in England as elsewhere, but on the order of 25% or so. (In other parts of Europe, that could be 5--10%.) By the end of the 19th century, 90--95% literacy rates were widespread. - Education. Free public education is also a 19th century thing, emerging in England and Germany principally (the Prussian school system), the latter of which strongly influenced US education. Keep in mind that as of 1900 high school graduation rates were about 6% in the US, virtually exclusively white males. The current PhD attainment rate is higher than that. - Printing presses. Through 1800, these were still largely constructed of wood, and little changed from Gutenberg's original design. Cast-iron, and later steel presses were introduced in the early 1800s, followed shortly by powered (first steam, later electric), rotary, and web presses. Impression per hour increased from about 60--120, to over 100,000 by the end of the century. - Paper. Cheap wood-pulp (rather than cotton-rag) paper emerged in the early 1800s as well. Much of this was high-acid, and suffered from longevity problems (yellowing, cracking, and ultimately breaking apart), which was addressed in the 20th century. - Railroads. Printed books and newspapers could be cheaply distributed throughout a region or country. The upshot is that a copy of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations cost about £5, when a workingman's wages for a year might be £30, in 1776.[1] By the 1850s, "penny dreadfuls", running 8--16 pages and costing 1p, were popular (and decried as a dissolution of the youth). Wages remained on the order of 30--110£/yr (labourer and engineer, respectively), but the cost of books had fallen ... tremendously. I'm not quite sure what price a book fetched by 1850, though extrapolating from 1p/16pp, a 320 page book would be about 1 shilling, or 1/100th the cost of Wealth of Nations when originally published. Books, short stories, and articles had also become the sweetener for advertising-supported publications and magazines (I recommend again, Hamilton Holt's excellent 1909 short book, Commercialism and Journalism, describing the rise of advertising-supported media: https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft). Serialised fiction (see especally Dickens, who largely invented the formula) "brought reading to the masses". ________________________________ Notes: 1. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=ucm.5319377541&view=1up&seq=110 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=ucm.5319377541&view=1...
cafard 5y ago
You will notice the expression "in his prime". John Updike was not then among the dead people. And nobody was forcing anyone to read his books. I don't think he was on anyone's curriculum in those days. Having said that, you are on to something: literary culture has definitely undergone some fragmentation. Time can't run a book review and set the agenda for book buyers across the country--anyway, I think they can't.

dredmorbius 5y ago

I'm wondering where people are going for literary fiction, particularly shorter literary fiction, these days. I tend to follow "Selected Shorts", which is pretty good, though I'll often find myself not especially engaging with the stories. (The ones I do are often older, dating from the 1920s -- 1970s or so). The selections seem to be largely from America's Best Short Stories, which publishes an annual anthology. I've picked up a few years' editions, and found a few winners, but even amongst the best the pickings seem slim. There's genre fiction, though there's little of that I particularly care for. Cypherpunk is my usual exception (Stephenson, Dick, a handful of others), and perhaps some of the better-written Grisham novels. Most of my reading is nonfiction, which I find interesting and egaging (much of it is autodidactic, and I've absolutely no shortage of material). But outside that ... fiction just seems pale.

8bitsrule 5y ago

>When John Updike was in his prime, millions of people read him. I read one of Updike's books (Run, Rabbit) and it seemed about one notch up (not a compliment) from Jacqueline Susann (3 of her novels once simultaneously topped the NYT bestsellers list). At about the same time, Philip Dick was very productive and being ignored (as he was until after his death, when he was suddenly 'recognized'). Since then, 'millions of people read' 50 Shades of Grey. Topped international lists, translated into 52 languages. Not 'literary'? Neither was Moby Dick, while its author was alive. Looks like the critics were wrong. (Am I suggesting them to be comparable? Hell no.) When I do a search on 'literary culture' not much of consequence turns up. Not surprised; it's hard to get anyone to commit to a definition of 'literature'. Maybe the author means 'Literary fiction'. Maybe 'deconstruction' killed off that whole distinction. Maybe two world wars and a Cold War did. Maybe that lode was mined out - maybe it was a chimera. It maybe that, now, genuine human voices are preferred over mannered, learned voices. Maybe we're waiting for a new voice to appear. Maybe we now see our pretenses too clearly. "We will declare frankly that nothing is clear in this world. Only fools and charlatans know and understand everything." - Chekhov "I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of imagination." - Keats