[AFAIK]

[youtube]3w478daLAZM[/youtube]

I found this discussion very interesting. I've certainly found my attention span shrinking and it's very tempting to pause my reading to check a website or open another book. Do you think Will Self is being pessimistic in his prediction or is literature destined to become a minor art form?

[Decky]

It will probably go the same way as jazz, people still listen to jazz and people still produce it but anyone who says that we are still in the jazz era would be laughed out of the room.

Reading books for leisure will continue but not as a majority thing that the whole of western society can embrace, it will be one hobby amongst many rather than something that exists at every level in society.

[Potemkin]

You mean there was a time when the majority of people read books every day and could discourse eloquently with each other on abstruse aspects of the poetry of Ezra Pound? When did this happen?

Face it, literature has always been a minority sport, and probably always will be. Homer didn't recite his epics to stadiums packed with the hoi polloi of ancient Greece; he recited them to a select audience of aristocrats. No-one else could have understood or appreciated his work, or even been interested in it. Things have not fundamentally changed since then.

I suspect that what Will Self is whining about is the fact that there has been a 'false dawn' of mass literacy from the late 19th century to the late 20th century. There was, briefly, a delusional hope that with mass literacy, the great literary classics of the past would become popular for the first time in human history, widely known and appreciated by the masses. For various reasons (eg, snobbery, ignorance and indifference, capitalist pandering to public taste, etc), it didn't happen. Too bad.

[Decky]

You mean there was a time when the majority of people read books every day and could discourse eloquently with each other on abstruse aspects of the poetry of Ezra Pound? When did this happen?

I read books every day.

Then again when I was at my course learning how to calculate how much cement you would need to fill a certain area (for foundations) yesterday one of the plebians from the impoverished north of the borough had to ask me what 6x4 was so maybe I see your point...

[Potemkin]

I read books every day.

You're not the majority of people, Decky. Whether you like it or not, you're actually one of the intellectual elite of British society. Don't let the fact that you're piss-poor and unemployed mislead you.

[Decky]

God now that is a depressing thought I wish I could say that you are talking out of your arse but I don't thing I can (he said modestly).

Have you looked at the best seller lists recently? Even the people who do read are mostly reding cookbooks, ghost written celebrity autobiographies and erotic fiction.

[Potemkin]

God now that is a depressing thought I wish I could say that you are talking out of your arse but I don't thing I can (he said modestly).

You must simply accept your fate as a déclassé intellectual, Decky. Hey, at least you'll get to feel superior to everyone around you as you sit huddled up in your unheated garret, reading Wittgenstein by the flickering light of a tallow candle....

Have you looked at the best seller lists recently? Even the people who do read are mostly reding cookbooks, ghost written celebrity autobiographies and erotic fiction.

It has ever been thus, Decky....

[Decky]

A garret is generally synonymous in modern usage with a habitable attic or small (and possibly dismal or cramped) living space at the top of a house.

My bedroom actually is a garret. That was well worth looking up, now I just need a chance to use it.

Hey, at least you'll get to feel superior to everyone around you

Meh I don't see the point, explain how that pays for books and puts cider in my glass?

[AFAIK]

You mean there was a time when the majority of people read books every day and could discourse eloquently with each other on abstruse aspects of the poetry of Ezra Pound? When did this happen?

Face it, literature has always been a minority sport, and probably always will be. Homer didn't recite his epics to stadiums packed with the hoi polloi of ancient Greece; he recited them to a select audience of aristocrats. No-one else could have understood or appreciated his work, or even been interested in it. Things have not fundamentally changed since then.

I suspect that what Will Self is whining about is the fact that there has been a 'false dawn' of mass literacy from the late 19th century to the late 20th century. There was, briefly, a delusional hope that with mass literacy, the great literary classics of the past would become popular for the first time in human history, widely known and appreciated by the masses. For various reasons (eg, snobbery, ignorance and indifference, capitalist pandering to public taste, etc), it didn't happen. Too bad.

Sure literature has never been mainstream but societies relationship to it has evolved over time. Russian classics are mammoth tomes and the protagonist of Anna Karenina doesn't even appear until the 19th(?) chapter. Nobody has the time to read contemporary novels like that. I've been an avid reader my whole life so I'm interested in how technology and social change will influence what content is produced and consumed.

[Potemkin]

Sure literature has never been mainstream but societies relationship to it has evolved over time. Russian classics are mammoth tomes and the protagonist of Anna Karenina doesn't even appear until the 19th(?) chapter. Nobody has the time to read contemporary novels like that.

Most people didn't have time to read such mammoth tomes even then - Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky et al. were writing for an elite class of wealthy landowners with plenty of time on their hands. Do you think the average 19th century Russian peasant or factory worker were reading Anna Karenina in their spare time? They didn't have any spare time, what with all those 16-hour days they were working. And the workers or peasants with did have any spare time on their hands - the unemployed - were too busy starving to death to be bothered to read about Anna Karenina's marital difficulties....

I've been an avid reader my whole life so I'm interested in how technology and social change will influence what content is produced and consumed.

It's clear that there will be an end to the concept of what Milan Kundera called "slowness", and which he regarded as a fundamental element of traditional European culture. Tolstoy's work, for example, or Wagner's operas, develop and unfold slowly, and this slowness is what gives them their depth and profundity - they unfold as a lifetime unfolds. However, I would submit that European culture lost this "slowness" long ago - it began to crack under the weight of the Industrial Revolution, and the tumultuous and rapid changes of the 20th century basically finished it off. As the Futurists proclaimed, we live in an era of speed now....

[Decky]

I considerd writing about my time with the other dole scum from the barren wastes of the estates but then I realised I would just have been rewriting the road to wigan pier.

[Zagadka]

Literature frequently isn't appreciated until a while after it was written.

That said, I think that film and television have had a negative impact on literature.

[slybaldguy]

Everything is on the decline since the liberals took over.

[Zagadka]

Depends. Do you consider people like Payne or Thoreau or Twain or any number of authors to be conservative to their contemporaries?

Much of the last generation (post-WW2) literature is aghast at the destruction of war and international conflict and encroaching government, typified by Vonnegut and Heller and Bradbury and Tennessee Williams and Capote and Orwell and Huxley and Sartre and Grass and Pasternak... or before that, Kafka and Steinbeck and Hemingway and Woolf and Wilde and Miller and Mann and Wells and Faulkner and Proust and Zamyatin and Joyce and Shaw...

I guess you always have Rand.

As a side note, my comment on film contributing to the decline of literature is not fully negative; film is a high impact art in its own right with its own genius. It is merely a change in the way society consumes stories, probably similar to how the printing press changed oral tradition and clerical teachings.

[slybaldguy]

By liberals i mean feminists.

[redcarpet]

Literature isn't in decline, not political literature. In my view. Nor historical literature. If anyone wants a titan book on history recently published try Piers Brendon's book The Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781-1997. Copyright of 2007, It rips the British, and US, Establishments to pieces.

[Decky]

And are the British people reading it en mass redcarpet?

[redcarpet]

And are the British people reading it en mass redcarpet?

If you mean it's a bestseller, you can find that out yourself easily enough, sir.

[Anna V]

My impression that at least Russian literature is experiencing a kind of renaissance.
After the gap in of the late 20th century , when nothing was written and did not read except tips like "how to become successful", we see the flowering of pretty good literature.

Viktor Pelevin (postmodernism) was the only readable writer in 90th. He is still writing and is still very popular.
Alexei Ivanov ("The heart of Parma", "The Geographer Drank His Globe Away" and others) is the best from my personal point of view. He has distinguished features of traditional Russian literature.

These are politically engaged authors (opposition ):
Maxim Kantor is a painter originally, however his 1,400-page novel, "The Drawing Textbook" roused a lot of discussions. The book of the USSR fall, of neoliberal Russian elite, of contemporary art. It is not written very skillfully from literature point of view but it has a lot of acute observations and it is easy to read. After this book he is passionately hated by many of the Russian liberals. (though he IS Russian liberal himself).
Dmitri Bikov (typical Russian Jewish liberal with its positives and negatives) is very popular among liberals.
Zahar Prilepin has a kind of extremist views ( member of National Bolshevik Party) but he has a good style and he is promising author.

These are a little bit less politically engaged authors (there are no russian authors without politics at all) with they large book:
Pavel Pepperstein and Sergei Anufriev "The Mythological Love of Castes". It is postmodern again. Someone crazy like their book, but I could not finish reading it. It is bright and pointless, I think.
Alexander Ilichevskii (physicist worked in Israel and USA before coming back to Russia ) "Matisse". This is extremely slow novel of a person voluntarily became homeless wandering.
Mikhail Shishkin "The Taking of Izmail". It is nothing about history. Beautiful but depressing book about the Russian hopelessness.

I have noticed that modern foreign literature is quite popular as well. Here are the names that I recommend several times by different people:
David Foster Wallace "Infinite Jest ", Mark Z. Danielewski "House of Leaves" , Thomas Pynchon "Gravity's Rainbow" (it is only recently translated to Russian), Neil Gaiman "American Gods" . I myself have read only the last one.

[psychlibsci]

Literature, just because it is being read on a digital device, is not losing steam. There will always be that thirst for knowledge in a select group of the population. They will find a way to get the books that their intellect craves.

My biggest concern, and call me a huge optimist (I am), is the problem of how to develop this thirst for knowledge. What can we do through our educational system to not kill this drive for knowledge?

Most kids are avid readers, and then something strange happens around 3rd-4th grade. They read much less. Maybe the books got more difficult. Maybe they go through some kind of phase of development. Or maybe something changes in the way we deliver literature through school.

How do we keep this love of literature alive beyond 3rd/4th grade for the majority of people? That is my biggest concern. When we can find that out, we can make the world a much better (and more interesting) place. And then, conversations like these (digital VS paper books) won't be so relevant.