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May 12, 2007
Are romantic and modern literature's "leading values the aesthetic versions of print logic? Remember the old Romantic dream of eradicating the distinction between perceiver and perceived and the symbol? Are these literary values destined to disappear as print is replaced by image?
Is this one way to understand the lament for the decline of print---the waning of book culture" even within the university---and the ascendancy of electronic media image-oriented culture. What is lost is the conception of reading as a revelatory experience that has its roots in religion and the faith in the transforming power of literature.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, evening, Cape Borda, Kangaroo Island, 2007
I guess I mean the the above that it is a liberal education, with literary studies at its core, that is decadent or dying. The action has shifted to cultural studies, and English becomes a minor department harboring a few aesthetes who like to read "a foreign literature written in a relatively familiar language". We no longer think that the use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we may move it. Literature is no longer understood, on the model of religion, as a body of inspired writings with discernible meanings.
As Alvin Kernan argued in The Death of Literature (1990) what has "died" are those high claims once made for the value of literature, and indeed other arts--claims of transcendent beauty, immutable meaning, and the precious creative potential of the individual. What has "died" is the view of literature that has prevailed from the high age of print in the eighteenth century through most of the twentieth century: the belief that the creative intelligence of an author is the source of literature, that there are such things as "works of art" and that these works of art convey aesthetic cultural inheritance which is beneficent.
Within the space of just thirty years, these once unquestioned and ostensibly permanent beliefs have been dispatched to the dustbin of historical fictions, where they now rest with such discarded concepts as the earth being flat and kings having a divine right to rule.This death is what many lament.
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Hi Gary....(and for us ignorant northern hemisphere types, where is Kangaroo island?).
Im not tracking this post. There is a political component in all this that seems to be ignored by most supporters of the view that literature is dead. The social and historical forces....even if we just examine the last 75 years, include the rise of mass marketing and mass media. Consolidation of media is now total....so (and this brings in Beller too)and this is the colonizing of consciousness that everyone from Debord to Adorno saw....and even a Norman O. Brown. The heteronomous thinking of today's media addict, the shrinking horizon for original reasoning, is not just the result of technology.....technology is a reflection of capital I think. Its also buried in the recieved truths of the Enlightenment.
So the death of literature is more like a murder. Advanced capital has goals....and creating consumers without self reflection seems one of these goals. Reading is not market friendly....unless its maybe Tom Clancy.
The irony is that a Cormac McCarthy wins a Pulitizer because he was on Oprah's list. Anyway, the transformative experience of reading has not died.....and I still think a McCarthy -- as author -- is the engine behind The Road (for example). What Im trying to get at is that capitalism...in its consumer phase...its most predatory phase, is more comfortable with data processing and information technology, than it is with private relfection. The problem with so much of the lit crit stuff I read is that this historical process is de-politicized. And its why i always return to Adorno.
The rise of TV created interruptions in narrative.....and increasingly fragmented character....and this is a boon to advertisers and marketers. But TV didnt evolve in an historical vacuum. Nor did any technology. So I worry a lot about notions like *the death of literature* because it seems to so completly leave out the political.