> The elevation of an undifferentiated mass of online voices has instead resulted in a large-scale manifestation of what American critic Elizabeth Hardwick, in 1959, referred to as “a sort of democratic euphoria that may do the light book a service but will hardly meet the needs of a serious book.”
I'm not sorry that we no longer have a monoculture with a generally agreed upon definition of what a "serious book" is, bestowed upon us by "serious critics." I don't buy the idea that literary criticism accomplished anything except act as gate keepers that ensured only the right voices were celebrated.
>I'm not sorry that we no longer have a monoculture with a generally agreed upon definition of what a "serious book" is
I am. Instead of having something for people reading to aspire to and get to something better, and people serious about books and literature, we just have each person's arbitrary "taste".
Plus leisure reading being at an all time low.
Personal taste is not a bad thing. But it's something people develop, among other things by having guidance and a compass.
Instead, today we build a god of our whims and facile enjoyment, and declare our personal uniformed and under-developed taste the ultimate arbiter.
At it's worst, criticism (of any type) is mere gate keeping. At it's best though, it's intelligent informed contextualization. Which takes real work.
Your odds of finding the latter by randomly sampling the mass opinion is approximately zero. But clearly it has value. So it's a quandary, how do you tear down the institutionalized gate keeping without reducing everything to superficial opinion? How do you find a better way to pull signal out of all that noise?
Literary criticism isn't it though, the reason people don't care is that those critics doesn't laud the books people like. If they dug up new Harry Potters to take the world by storm people would care, but as is there is little value in their work. If you think that Harry Potter isn't good then you are one of the bad gate keepers since that kind of book is what people wants to read.
> I don't buy the idea that literary criticism accomplished anything except act as gate keepers that ensured only the right voices were celebrated.
Go back to 1959 then. You had serious literary critics. You also had the New York Times bestseller list. How much overlap was there? I can't be sure, since that was a bit before my time, but I strongly suspect that the answer is "not much". The public didn't pay much attention to the highbrow critics back then, either.
What the highbrow critics did was gatekeep what the highbrow people read. Or perhaps what they admitted to read, or claimed that they read. The general public may have read the highbrow reviews - aspirational high-brow-ism was more of a thing in that day than it is now, I suspect - but I doubt it swayed the public's actual buying and reading habits all that much.
It's hardly a monoculture, the canon of literary classics is pretty diverse.
It's about attention again. You are saying that we shouldn't give all the attention to a few arbitrarily selected writers. That it is better that our attention is shattered into innumerable fragments and dusted across the vast landscape of democratised content.
This is replacing literature with social media, and I can't agree it is a good thing.
That's a facile comparison. Novels written by people who aren't millionaires isn't "replacing literature with social media" any more than teaching the classics is replacing literature with religion. More creatives having more opportunity to reach an audience is a good thing. People being able to read what makes them happy is a good thing.
I had a starling Revelation today. People just don't read anymore, instead they buy a book so they can take some photos for Instagram and then shove it under a couch or something.
The biggest problem with so much access to information, is it's simply impossible to absorb it all. You can read tweets from hundreds of people before you can get through the first chapter of Harry Potter.
I fear this has caused a permanent dumbing down of society
> I had a starling Revelation today. People just don't read anymore, instead they buy a book so they can take some photos for Instagram and then shove it under a couch or something.
There's some selection bias here, because you wouldn't know about all the people who do read but don't post it to instagram.
Perhaps it has to do with the type of fiction and maybe a little bit with school? When I was done with high school one of the things I celebrated was that I would never (have to) read a fiction book ever again. Literature class turned me so off from reading that I was fairly convinced about this.
A couple of years later I stumbled across Light Novels, which led to Web Novels, and eventually more fiction of other types. Nowadays I sometimes wish that I would read less. Sometimes my binge reading can get out of hand.
Perhaps there are others that have been turned off from reading? Perhaps they simply haven't come across the type of fiction that would grip them? Fiction is about entertainment after all. Books will offer you the widest variety of stories. More so than any other entertainment medium. There should be something for most people.
Functional literary is quite high, but it is both a subject of research and social criticism that American culture is reverting to an oral - rather than literate - culture.
When the Internet really took off in the mid 1990s I thought to myself with all the websites, IRC, email, blogs more people than ever are reading. Sure it's not books which are the crafted thoughts of writers instead the Internet is a million concepts.
I would like to read the last 10 books I bought none of which I finished and only a couple of which I've started. Instead I find myself scrolling hacker news and Twitter.
Twitter isn’t really better than Facebook, it’s short content designed to provoke an emotional reaction. HN really isn't either, although the emotional reactions here are a lot fewer and far between.
Pick up the book on the top of the stack and read the first chapter right now. You’ll be happy you did!
I actually question the premise. The NYRB and LRB are alive and well afaik. I read reviews all the time in the Guardian.
At a second tier, honest customer reviews exist in kindle. Sometimes they are dreck, but you can apply critical faculties to what people say.
I agree in principle there is "less" than there used to be but there isn't "none" and I think I have bought at least three books recently purely on the strength of in-depth reviews I read online
(they were Ross King: the Bookseller of Florence, Emma Southon: A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Geraldine Brooks: Year of Wonders And, the first two which I have read, had merits and issues, and the review highlighted both as I recall)
My takeaway from the article wasn't that there aren't people reviewing books anymore, but that fewer people today can make a living writing informed criticism about style and technique, as opposed to about how a book makes them feel, or how it fits into an ongoing cultural conversation.
Yea, maybe because I buy more non fiction i mistake review for literary criticism. I'm probably unaware of the change in eng. Lit. as a field. I always found other peoples take on a lyrical quality in somebody's writing as less useful than "it's a coherent narrative" -I know how Rushdie or Vikram seth write: i want to know how concretely plausible or accurate their story is regarding Indian social affairs of the time.
Readit News
I'm not sorry that we no longer have a monoculture with a generally agreed upon definition of what a "serious book" is, bestowed upon us by "serious critics." I don't buy the idea that literary criticism accomplished anything except act as gate keepers that ensured only the right voices were celebrated.
I am. Instead of having something for people reading to aspire to and get to something better, and people serious about books and literature, we just have each person's arbitrary "taste".
Plus leisure reading being at an all time low.
Personal taste is not a bad thing. But it's something people develop, among other things by having guidance and a compass.
Instead, today we build a god of our whims and facile enjoyment, and declare our personal uniformed and under-developed taste the ultimate arbiter.
That's basically arrested literary development.
cocks gun
https://i.imgur.com/iRtrBOr.png
Always has been
Your odds of finding the latter by randomly sampling the mass opinion is approximately zero. But clearly it has value. So it's a quandary, how do you tear down the institutionalized gate keeping without reducing everything to superficial opinion? How do you find a better way to pull signal out of all that noise?
Go back to 1959 then. You had serious literary critics. You also had the New York Times bestseller list. How much overlap was there? I can't be sure, since that was a bit before my time, but I strongly suspect that the answer is "not much". The public didn't pay much attention to the highbrow critics back then, either.
What the highbrow critics did was gatekeep what the highbrow people read. Or perhaps what they admitted to read, or claimed that they read. The general public may have read the highbrow reviews - aspirational high-brow-ism was more of a thing in that day than it is now, I suspect - but I doubt it swayed the public's actual buying and reading habits all that much.
It's about attention again. You are saying that we shouldn't give all the attention to a few arbitrarily selected writers. That it is better that our attention is shattered into innumerable fragments and dusted across the vast landscape of democratised content.
This is replacing literature with social media, and I can't agree it is a good thing.
No, actually what I'm saying is we no longer need some Oxbridge Harold Bloom knockoff to select those few arbitrary writers for us.
Literary criticism ended?
Leisure reading is at an all-time low, and that's even worse.
And most of the "reading" going on concerns self-help snake-oil crap, get-rich-quick books, and of course, heavy skimming.
The biggest problem with so much access to information, is it's simply impossible to absorb it all. You can read tweets from hundreds of people before you can get through the first chapter of Harry Potter.
I fear this has caused a permanent dumbing down of society
There's some selection bias here, because you wouldn't know about all the people who do read but don't post it to instagram.
A couple of years later I stumbled across Light Novels, which led to Web Novels, and eventually more fiction of other types. Nowadays I sometimes wish that I would read less. Sometimes my binge reading can get out of hand.
Perhaps there are others that have been turned off from reading? Perhaps they simply haven't come across the type of fiction that would grip them? Fiction is about entertainment after all. Books will offer you the widest variety of stories. More so than any other entertainment medium. There should be something for most people.
But at least I'm not on Facebook and Instagram!
Pick up the book on the top of the stack and read the first chapter right now. You’ll be happy you did!
At a second tier, honest customer reviews exist in kindle. Sometimes they are dreck, but you can apply critical faculties to what people say.
I agree in principle there is "less" than there used to be but there isn't "none" and I think I have bought at least three books recently purely on the strength of in-depth reviews I read online
(they were Ross King: the Bookseller of Florence, Emma Southon: A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Geraldine Brooks: Year of Wonders And, the first two which I have read, had merits and issues, and the review highlighted both as I recall)
It’s been several years but the book is great and the title summarizes the work of a literary critic, at their best, in my opinion.
Dead Comment