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>Economic opportunities for professional writers have declined dramatically. The two crucial pathways were mentioned for novel writers to support themselves eco
by scythe 1y ago
>Economic opportunities for professional writers have declined dramatically. The two crucial pathways were mentioned for novel writers to support themselves economically: (1) magazine writing and (2) academia. In the first case, magazine circulation has suffered because advertisers left for the internet, and in the second case, academic job oportunities have declined because of governmental cutbacks to universities, especially in the humanities.
>The second half of the article argues that authors have made a tradeoff, deciding to maximize critical praise instead of book sales, thereby turning off general audiences who don't share the obscure and trendy tastes of the critics.
I think that the second half of the article seems weak because the first half contains a critical flaw. Academia hasn't declined nearly as much as magazines. Government funding is down, but departments are open and there are still thousands of English professors out there. Meanwhile, enrollment is up and university budgets are broadly still quite healthy. The situation is much worse for traditional long-form entertainment media, which has been squeezed by the blogosphere and the algorithmic feed.
This is not to diminish the argument that the arts have suffered as a whole, but in order to look at changes within the field, we need to consider changes in the relative importance of various factors.
The expected consequence of this is that authors become more dependent on academic jobs, which often react more favorably to critical appraisal than book sales. The second argument in the article then follows.
There is a little more to say here: the old magazine audience was not quite the broad popular audience of the bestseller lists. Rather we have to hypothesize some particular "literary" interest among the magazine audience that creates a market for the writers of literary fiction in a way that today's media does not. But since I have only a passing familiarity with that world and I am not a big reader of literary fiction I do not have any useful insight here.
- lapcat 1y ago> departments are open and there are still thousands of English professors out there Wow, that's a pretty low bar. Ask newly minted PhDs about the job market. The submitted article even has a chart and a link about the job market, so which part of that are you disputing?
- scythe 1y agoThe answer to your question is just the next paragraph after the sentence you quoted.
- lapcat 1y agoNo, it's not? Could you please be more specific?
- allturtles 1y agoTo elaborate on lapcat's point, you have to look at this from the point-of-view of a young, would-be aspiring literary fiction writer. From that vantage, it doesn't matter what the steady state of English/MFA professorships is, all that matters is your ability/chances to get one of those stable professorships. And the odds are very, very low, because lots of new PhDs are being produced, the turnover on those jobs is tiny (they are very comfortable positions, and there are few other job opportunities that use the same skills), and ~no new jobs of that kind are being created. Even if you get into a top-tier PhD program, chances are you will never get a tenure-track position, much less achieve tenure. You will either scrape by on a series of poorly-paid, labor intensive adjunct teaching positions, or abandon academia. This is all very well-documented, search for "humanities phd job crisis" and you will find lots of information, e.g. [0]. [0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/upshot/academic-job-crisis-phd.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/upshot/academic-job-crisi...
- bonoboTP 1y agoIsn't it just math? How many PhD students are "minted" by a professor over their career? A very crude estimate is between 10 and 50. For each PhD to get a professorship, each generation the number of jobs would have to multiply by that number. Does anyone believe that can be possible? If not, you will end up with a "crisis" like this, regardless of the best of intentions or evil influences or whatever. I mean of course if you kept 10x-ing the available jobs, at some point the supply of students would thin out but probably only at a huge number.