Don DeLillo lays out in his novel" Mao 2": “The novel used to feed our search for meaning… It was the tremendous secular transcendence. The source of language, character, occasional new truth. But our desperation has led us toward something more extensive and darker. So we turn to news, which provides an unremitting mood of catastrophe.I'm sorry, but I don't see the fine literary novel ceasing to be what it was before — Bitter Crank
There are still plenty of Writer's Festivals around the world, where lots of people turn up just to hear authors talk about their work, their views on life, the universe and everything, and maybe read from their books. — andrewk
Authors are not able to compete with the directors and actors in shaping people minds, regardless of the authenticity of their thoughts.Furthermore, the directors and actors are so carefully stage-managed by their media minders that there is scarcely any opportunity to get an authentic thought about the world out of them publicly anyway. — andrewk
I think that the explosion of texting and social networking chatting as the smooth, familiar and enjoyable way of communicating and expressing one’s immediate thoughts and feelings deserves our attention as an essential socio-cultural phenomenon of our digital time. (Curiously, isn’t it the highest chain in the evolution of the epistolary genre, at the beginning of which one could find Seneca’s Letters to Luciliius?) Some thinkers assume that behind this phenomenon there is an imperative to force one to expose herself, to speak incessantly, to take part in numerous public and normative communications.If people were even remotely paying attention these days, they would realize that the vast majority of what gets posted on the web these days is pure bullshit on steroids, as life and the problems we face, just aren't so simple that they can be resolved with a 100 word post on twitter, google, or facebook. — LD Saunders
So literature, or print, as we conceive of it now, is actually a relatively recent and brief phase in the history of human civilization. Already, if we group together all the new forms that came to prominence in the 20th-21st centuries, this new age is comparable in length to the age of print. — SophistiCat
I agree, and that is in line with your OP. However my comment about the position of writers was in response not to the OP but to this post that quotes Will Self, which was not about novelists being the most influential people - I doubt they were ever that - but about their being seen as the highest and deepest artists. If we are talking about power to shape people's minds then neither novelists, directors nor actors have anywhere near as much of that power as advertising executives, populist politicians and their spin doctors. But I don't know anybody that views them as the repository of high culture.Authors are not able to compete with the directors and actors in shaping people minds, regardless of the authenticity of their thoughts. — Number2018
For all that novels only reach a minority of the population, and perhaps a smaller proportion now than it was forty years ago, I don't think any medium has replaced it as the closest in people's minds to that ideal. — andrewk
So, the novel isn't eternal. The Elizabethans didn't write novels. Other forms had popular preeminence--verse and drama.
What cultural forms will be most celebrated in 20 years is uncertain, let alone what will be most celebrated 200 years from now. Who in 1940 would have anticipated the beat movements of the 1950s? Or the 'psychedelic art' of the 1960s? What will the state of (big C) Cinema be in 20 years?
Cultural Cassandras are always wringing their hands and bemoaning the decline of [music], [art], [manners], [writing], [you name it]. With some justification, of course. Culture, like a glacier, is always declining. It always heading down and ending up in the sea. But at the other end it's always being renewed. — Bitter Crank
We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. — Winston Churchill
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