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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies
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The Death of Literature (Paperback, New Ed)
Price: R136
Discovery Miles 1 360
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The Death of Literature (Paperback, New Ed)
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Price R136
Discovery Miles 1 360
Expected to ship within 2 - 4 working days
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Literature has passed through a crisis of confidence in recent
decades-a radical questioning of its traditional values and its
importance to humanity. In this witty and eloquent book, a
distinguished professor of humanities looks at some of the agents
that have contributed to literature's demise and ponders whether
its vitality can be restored in the changing circumstances of late
twentieth-century culture. Other critics, such as E. D. Hirsch and
Allan Bloom, have also explored the growing cultural illiteracy of
modern society. Alvin Kernan probes deeper, relating the death of
literature to potent forces in our postindustrial world-most
obviously, the technological revolution that is rapidly
transforming a print to an electronic culture, replacing the
authority of the written word with the authority of television,
film, and computer screens. The turn taken by literary criticism
itself, in deconstructing traditional literature and declaring it
void of meaning in itself, and in focusing on what are described as
its ideological biases against women and nonwhites, has speeded the
disintegration. Recent legal debates about copyright, plagiarism,
and political patronage of the arts have exposed the greed and
self-interest at work under the old romantic images of the
imaginative creative artist and the work of art as a perfect,
unchanging icon. Kernan describes a number of the crossroads where
literature and society have met and literature has failed to stand
up. He discusses the high comedy of the obscenity trial in England
against Lady Chatterley's Lover, in which the British literary
establishment vainly tried to define literature. He takes alarmed
looks at such agents of literary disintegration as schools where
children who watch television eight hours a day can't read,
decisions about who chooses and defines the words included in
dictionaries, faculty fights about the establishment of new
departments and categories of study, and courtrooms where criminals
try to profit from bestselling books about their crimes. According
to Kernan, traditional literature is ceasing to be legitimate or
useful in these changed social surroundings. What is needed, he
says, if it is any longer possible in electronic culture, is a
conception of literature that fits in some positive way with the
new ethos of post-industrialism, plausibly claiming a place of
importance both to individual lives and to society as a whole for
the best kind of writing.
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