
Is Literature Dead? - jriot
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/08/27/is-literature-dead/
======
michaelmrose
In 1800 out of a population of a billion people about 12% could read
[https://ourworldindata.org/literacy](https://ourworldindata.org/literacy)

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.

~~~
Merrill
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.

~~~
mo1ok
Eh, I can read significantly faster than I can listen. And listening is far
more annoying.

Could you imagine, for example, a door constantly bleeping "Fire Exit, Do Not
Open" for illiterates?

~~~
Merrill
I would rather read news on web sites than listen to TV news channels. But
that is probably not the average case.

There are standard pictographs for "fire exit" and "do not open door" that are
used where not everyone reads the same language.

------
puranjay
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
Well, the medium is what makes literature what it is.

Else, we can just say that "fiction is not dead".

~~~
awild
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.

~~~
coldtea
> _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
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.

------
jdck1326
So she agrees with her son that “This is why reading is over. None of my
friends like it. Nobody wants to do it anymore.”?

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
Where they at though? How much do they spend on books per year?

I like reading free stuff and it's mostly non fiction.

You couldn't convince me to read something like Paper Towns.

~~~
jdck1326
People all over the world read and pay for literature. You can find online
communities on sites like 4chan (boards.4chan.org/lit) and reddit
(reddit.com/r/literature and reddit.com/r/AskLiteraryStudies) with a strong
focus on classics and contemporary literature. Also communities at any
university with a solid humanities department of course.

I'd never heard of Paper Towns and I suspect it isn't what people would call
literature in the sense the linked article meant the word, but a quick Google
tells me it sold millions of copies.

------
ravenstine
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.

~~~
genericone
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.

~~~
kajecounterhack
Some datapoints:

* Many of my conversations with friends now go "did you see that new show X on netflix?" << Usually I reply that I did! Usually because it was conveniently recommended to me or advertised to me when I turned on the TV before bed.

* I got turned onto the japanese reality TV show "Terrace House" thanks to a NYT op ed [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/25/magazine/letter-of-recomm...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/25/magazine/letter-of-recommendation-terrace-house.html)

* NYT book review and the front bookcase of today's bookstores still have impact. I buy books based on that sometimes.

* Amazon's best sellers list is important now the same way netflix's front page is important; if you open your kindle or go to buy books on amazon, you'll get recommendations.

* My youtube habits are mostly thanks to subscriptions + recommended videos based on my watch history and subscriptions.

> 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?

To me it definitely seems like my bandpass is a mix of old tastemakers +
recommendation algos, the algos being the relatively new addition.

------
TuringTest
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.

~~~
coldtea
> _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.

~~~
BjoernKW
> 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 latter definition probably is the best one can come up with without
resorting to notions like "stuff that I like".

Other than that, literature often means a body of works that have been
canonized because somebody thought they have artistic or intellectual value,
in other words: What does and what doesn't constitute literature is highly
subjective.

What argues against Twitter sagas as literature though is their inherent
transience. Literature usually is thought of as something that has literary
value not just for the current generation but for future generations, too.

~~~
TuringTest
> What argues against Twitter sagas as literature though is their inherent
> transience.

Just like poems, then?

~~~
BjoernKW
Poems aren't transient. Oral tradition is.

~~~
TuringTest
But Twitter isn't "oral tradition" by any definition of the word.

I dare you to find any property that can be said of written poems with respect
to those being transcendent, which can't also be said of Twitter threads
(other than "they've existed since the beginning of writing").

~~~
BjoernKW
The two don't really compare. Poetry is a form of literature. I can use
Twitter as a medium for writing and publishing poetry.

A poem written on Twitter and deleted the next day is no more permanent or
long-lasting than a poem that's solely available in the oral tradition,
perhaps much less so.

Why are epics such as Beowulf or the Epic of Gilgamesh considered literature
while others aren't? It's because someone at some point recorded them in a
more permanent manner so future generations could read them in their
unadulterated form (as much as that can be said of stories that probably had
been changed and embellished multiple times already before someone wrote them
down).

A thread on Twitter however can be deleted, added to, remixed, retweeted and
forked at any time, which certainly are very interesting properties for
creating art but I'm not sure if that art should be called literature or
rather something else entirely.

Anyway, as originally stated what does and doesn't constitute literature isn't
very precisely defined. So, this probably is hairsplitting anyway.

~~~
TuringTest
You can burn the Library of Alexandria, and you can make copies of tweets.
There's nothing _inherent_ to the art form in the way that copies are stored.

My point is that there is a form of literature that is native to Twitter (or
public IM in general), which takes advantage of the specifics of the medium
(in particular, unfolding the story at piecemeal bits in real time, and
reacting to users comments to tweak the next elements of the story).

The end result may be transcribed to more persistent written storage, but it's
not the whole experience (just like reading The Three Musketeers as a book is
slightly different to what people waiting for the next chapter in the
newspaper would have experienced).

------
doctorpangloss
> 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.

~~~
lmm
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.

~~~
kajecounterhack
> But the pile of dreck it's buried under is bigger than ever.

Maybe that's not so bad: in the past you were either famous or not. Now I
think we get these common interest communities that all read the same blogs /
follow the same people on twitter and great art proliferates in those niches.
Maybe it doesn't enter the total public consciousness; maybe it doesn't have
to.

~~~
lmm
That's true up to a point. But I do think the average quality of "published"
writing has gone down as the barriers to entry have - really how could it not?
For every story that a gatekeeper would've rejected because they couldn't
understand its brilliance within its niche, there must be tens or hundreds
that said gatekeeper would've rejected simply for being bad.

------
LegendaryPatMan
Her talking with her son;

>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
If you're interested in sci-fi, for example - literature is the best choice
'cause only 2-3 Cinema/TV projects per year are good.

~~~
prithee
One's likely adapted from novels as well.

------
DanielBMarkham
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.

I'm not sure that's the case anymore.

~~~
stewbrew
"Do authors explicitly write subtext?"

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".

~~~
DanielBMarkham
If these questions were rhetorical, I think we're agreeing.

I will assume that they were not.

Do authors explicitly write subtext? Sure. In the same way that you can
purposefully decide what your subconscious will focus on. But it wanders here
and there. Over time, authors coalesce around a narrative to the universe that
feels pleasing to them.

So there is only one subtext to a text? Not at all. Stephen King used to say
that there was no subtext to any of his work. Of course there was -- but it
was nothing he ever recognized, organized, or struggled with mentally (I
assume).

If a subtext was intended by the author and never discovered by any reader, is
it still a subtext? Sure. It very well can be. Authors that begin organizing
their subconscious around a topic may purposefully add subtext. Nobody may
ever catch it.

If a reader constructs a subtext that contradicts the intentions of the
author, is it a subtext or a vision? It is a process of subconscious
transferal. It's not a math problem. There's no correct subtext.

How do you define subtext? I don't think you can, at least in way people want
it defined. I read somewhere once that fiction was actually more true than
nonfiction. This, of course, sounded like idiocy to me as a programmer. But
then I got it. It's true because we're sharing impressions of life in a way
that can't be explicitly said. It's one thing to say "Local man escapes
execution". It's another to read "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"

To clarify, if the questions were rhetorical, we're agreeing. That's because
those are exactly the questions to ask as you begin to absorb the author's
world. Is this the way they feel about the world in general, is it only in
this situation? Is what I'm experiencing intentional? Do others experience
these same insights? Does the author have a way of looking at things that
nobody else does (or can see)? And so on..

There's no one answer to your questions for any one book/reader combination.
Making the questions universal just makes it into nonsense.

------
otabdeveloper1
No, of course not.

Virtue signaling via books is dead, however, and that's a good thing.

------
akullpp
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.

------
Talyen42
We live in a golden age of storytelling.

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
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.

~~~
kajecounterhack
1\. s/persuit/pursuit/r

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
"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.

------
georgeecollins
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.

------
nearmuse
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?

------
gozzoo
_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.

------
tanilama
Dead? Not likely. People will always have the urge to express themselves, only
that it will in various medium right now, not just paper.

------
your-nanny
meh. I have an anecdote too. my 9 yo daughter's an obsessive reader who wants
to become a writer.

but my anecdote is only going to get published as a hn comment. neither the
skill nor interest to do more, and it's not angsty enough to generate
handwringing.

------
rkagerer
I still read Pratchett audiobooks every night - does that count?

------
benbristow
It's not dead, plenty of people read.

I just personally don't bother reading as there's just more engaging forms of
media out there (for me).

------
michaelmrose
"This is why reading is over. None of my friends like it. Nobody wants to do
it anymore.”

This is the words of a child self absorbed, with both the limited perspective
and the illusion of knowledge that childhood provides to us all.

It's not profound or insightful writing an eloquent blog post around it
doesn't make it so.

This entire thesis is a shallow waste of time designed to provoke passionate
refutations. Its like a young girl who cries I'm so ugly hoping for a chorus
of praise to bolster her ego.

~~~
twelve40
The problem is still there even for the best of the kids, if you haven't
noticed: when the earlier generation was growing up, there were 1-2 screens in
the whole house and everyone was reading books, now it's dozens of devices in
every hand (even the school now stupidly mandates ipads - forced a replacement
down our throat for what was always carefully done with pen and paper), and it
takes the current-gen kids a superhuman amount of willpower to get away from
the devices, casual games, etc etc. Heck, even 90% of adults can't fight that
constant dopamine stream from news or FB likes, even the most intelligent
ones. So blame the kids all you want, it's a problem even for the best of
them.

------
TuGuQuKu
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

------
teh_infallible
Back in the days of the romantic poets, when Wordsworth published folios of
his poems, they were the bestsellers of their day. By the time Kurt Vonnegut
wrote his novels, you could probably say that poetry was dead. But now we have
hiphop and graphic novels, so I would argue that “Literature” falls under a
broader category of artistic human storytelling, which is now most popular in
various multimedia formats.

