This post is a response to a comment made by Andrew Goldstone in a comments thread on Joshua Landy's fascinating Arcade blog post, "Human Minds, Literary Texts, and CD Players." I was originally going to post this as a comment, but the response grew too long and unwieldy, so here it is as a stand-alone blog post. Suffice it to say, you should read Josh's provocative posting, and the comments thread before proceeding.
In his original post, Josh proposes that "[i]f we abandon our efforts to train minds" in the project of reading and appreciating poetry "certain kinds of human pleasure [i.e., poetry reading --LK] will eventually fall forever out of reach," and poetry will come to resemble CDs in a world without CD players. In my original comment, I agreed with this sentiment, and suggested that the source of poetry's public decline can be traced to changes in our educational institutions and reading priorities, which have also eroded the public position of literary fiction. Andrew asks, in response to my comment, about Mark McGurl's claim, in The Program Era, that university creative writing programs have radically enlarged the sphere of "good" writing.
I largely agree with Mark's claim that more good fiction is being produced now than has ever been produced before, though The Program Era reads texts (and careers) in relation to the institutional context of their production, and (understandably) doesn't do the empirical legwork of quantifying this big, provocative claim -- if such quantification is even possible. Still, I am enough of a vulgar materialist to believe that when the R&D-oriented university pours cash into the project of developing good fiction writers, it will yield fruit. It indisputably has.
The question Josh's post got me thinking about is the demand side of the equation, whether this flood of good fiction is connecting with readers, and -- if so -- how. Readers read, as they always have, even in an increasingly complex media environment, but what do they read? How do they read? In what direction is our reading culture heading?
I began thinking about these questions at last year's ACLA, where I was part of a panel called "Master of the Universe: Literature, Culture, and Finance Culture"; the panel organizer, Patrick Gallagher, gave a fascinating paper on the rise of conglomerate-owned publishers and the effect of media conglomeration on literary production. The short version is that midlist authors got killed. In the era of what we could call "neoliberal publishing," every book was now supposed to turn a profit; bestsellers no longer subsidized what editors deemed to be high-quality products. Editors became warier of taking risks "developing" young writers. The results are obvious for all to see. We now live in the era of gigantic-advance-getting celebrity authors. Even literary authors operate on the model of celebrity. These developments occurred alongside other developments, including the rise of creative writing, but I think they had a serious effect.
Literary scholars need to investigate this transformation in literary culture. My unsubstantiated hunch is that the reading public has begun a long-term process of parting ways with literary writers. I think, beyond the rise of the university creative writing program and the conglomeration of publishing, transformations in the broader US economy have had a serious effect on our public literary culture. My very sketchy thesis would go like so: When the American economy experienced its postwar boom -- across-the-board manufacturing-led growth -- readers sought to "sophisticate" themselves. Suburbs expanded, cars were purchased; the population was upwardly mobile on a number of fronts, including in the domain of literary consumption. Sometime around the early seventies, things began to change. Stagflation hit the economy; manufacturing fractured, and the service economy absorbed formerly high-wage upwardly mobile unionized workers; inequality began to increase, leading to social and educational stratification; an increasingly competitive media environment put downward pressure on the low-profit literary marketplace. For the "ambitious" literary writer, the University became appealing because it provided a shelter from the broader economy.
Thus: Time once put Updike on its covers; today, it features Dan Brown. Readers of the New Yorker needn't worry, though; they still enjoy interesting reviews of high literature (whether or not you like James Wood). Mysteriously, though, the copies of the New Yorker sitting open beside me as I type this post have advertisements for BMW, Louis Vuitton, and iPhones.
Whether the parting ways of reader and writer is good or bad remains unclear. If literature has a public mission -- if reading a well-crafted novel (or poetry) affords unique, serious, and vital pleasures for all people -- then we are moving in a bad direction, despite the profusion of good writing in creative writing programs. If long-form prose fiction gives us nothing that an engaging television show doesn't already give us -- and I in no way mean to disparage television; I've watched more than my fair share -- then there's no reason to worry; we can just renew our subscriptions to Netflix.
The truth may live somewhere between those two poles, but I must admit, I am a partisan to the idea that every person ought to have the capacity -- and the desire -- to occasionally sit down and read a long, difficult, rewarding novel. Many, many people still do. But we should not assume that they always will, even if great fiction continues to be produced in great quantities.
Lee--Thank you for this wonderful, rich post on contemporary readership and shifting socioeconomic conditions. Hurrah for materialist explanations! There's no shame in being a little vulgar, as long as we commit to doing the quantitative and sociological legwork to back our claims up; but that's a topic for another day. As you argue so well, what we have here is an incredibly rich topic for research into patterns of readership. The missing piece in The Program Era (and McGurl acknowledges that it is missing) is just this fuller picture of readerly "demand." And you make a compelling case for wondering, and worrying, about the status in contemporary culture of the kinds of reading we literary scholars practice, even if literary production (and consecration; James English's The Economy of Prestige, qv) continues to grow apace.
The death of the "midlist" in the face of the conglomeration of publishers and the obsession with higher margins in the book business are always on my mind when I think about contemporary literature. Those conditions have undoubtedly changed the shape of contemporary literature in English, favoring known names and basically conservative aesthetic choices and squeezing out some of the venues for relatively more autonomous production and consumption (small publishers, translations, independent bookstores, etc.). In your post, however, you identify this change in publishing conditions with a related but distinct phenomenon, the extinction of the middlebrow in American culture. Updike on the cover of Time, like Leonard Bernstein broadcasting to millions about classical music, is inconceivable now for just the reasons you say: the aspiration to acquire recognizably "high" forms of cultural capital really does seem to have declined in the US from its heyday in the postwar boom, if things like enrollments in humanities courses are any indication. Now whereas it seems to me that there is nothing inevitable or irreversible about the publishing-industry trends (they could well alter if the neoliberal order gets shaken up a little and the multinationals realize the book business isn't such a great investment anyway), the decline of high-literary connoisseurship as a widely-sought-after form of cultural capital isn't going to stop. The middlebrow isn't coming back.
But to my mind that isn't necessarily cause for despair. Updike on the cover of Time isn't my idea of cultural utopia, anyway; my tastes, shaped by modernism, run in a different direction. What I am wondering is whether we can think of possibilities for the health and flourishing of an interesting, experimental, diverse literary and artistic culture that don't look back nostalgically to the pop-high-cultural fusion of the middlebrow moment--which looks to me like it wasn't all that vibrant anyway, for poetry or fiction or music...
So, two ideas--and then I'll stop before this comment runs any longer.
Andrew, these exchanges have been extremely clarifying for me; thanks both for the above thoughts and for the comments on the earlier thread. I think we agree on the vital difference between universal acquisition and universal availability -- a good DuBoisian distinction! Where you and I differ is on the question of what it takes to make something available. (I wrote a little about that in reply to Harris on the other thread.) I also worry, I suppose, that if the wider world gives up on (say) the lyric, there will be a temptation even for the university to abandon its teaching. And then the shelter itself will collapse.
I think you're asking all the right questions, Andrew. At present, I don't have many answers.
My goal -- in future research -- is to begin thinking more systematically about the materialist sketch I outlined above with the hope of imagining alternatives to our present situation. As your response rightly suggests, this sketch needs much greater empirical elaboration than literary scholars are usually wont to provide. Part of this is understandable, given that we're trained to read texts, not to conduct economic or sociological research.
I am no great fan of Updike -- I had my tastes formed by "literary" science fiction and my university study of modernist fiction (especially Joyce), and so am probably just as middlebrow-disliking as the next elite reader -- nor do I think we should "require" anyone to read anything they don't want to read -- but I do think that if the state of our literary practice is institutional and cultural in origin, and if we don't like that practice, then we must work toward the project of building new institutions and cultures.
The problem transcends the middlebrow-modernist dialectic. A factory worker who gets a good income, works forty hours a week, and has six weeks of vacation per year is more likely to read long complex works (whether Updike, Joyce, or someone else) than a permatemp service worker who works erratic hours, has little job security, and whose only time off comes when he's downsized. At a more privileged level, a Stanford undergraduate who lives in a socioeconomic environment within which University life is all about acquiring market-worthy skills is less likely to study poetry (any poetry, by anyone) than a student who lives in a socioeconomic environment which consciously makes room for the arts, on the theory that literature plays a vital role in moral and civic education. Naturally, what I am describing here are probabilities, incentives, structures of influence, not determinations, inevitabilities, or fate.
No single literary future is inevitable, though we will inevitably make that future together. Academic literary scholars and critics are uniquely positioned to help shape that future, but only if we stop thinking that what we ought to be doing is cultivating specialized interpretive skills. What should that future look like? What should we be cultivating instead? I'm not sure yet.
I just discovered this project, and I wanted to share with you an experience of mine from graduate school. I mentioned a recent New York Review article that I found pertinent for some reason or another to a professor of mine, who then told me that he didn't read the NYR because it was middlebrow. I stood nonplussed, staring into the middle distance for some time, as I hadn't yet conceived of the full superciliary spectra.
I was reminded of this a bit when you called Updike "middlebrow," particularly relative to literary science fiction. I know that Updike was a regular in the New Yorker (even I had heard people call that middlebrow, but this was the Tina Brown era) and probably had his share of appearances on the Charlie Rose show (but so did Mark Leyner and Wallace. And Henry Kissinger!), but all the art criticism and introductions to Henry Green and references to Barth and Kierkegaard, Tertullian and Opus Pistorurm---I mean, is this Luce family middlebrow? Is it compared to Gene Wolfe or M. John Harrison?
I don't think we can abstract from the context of publication to the character of any particular writer. Good writers can publish in almost every conceivable venue. In my comment, I wanted to explain my personal disdain for Updike in terms of my University education in experimental and art-literarure (Joyce, Woolf, Conrad) and in terms of my love of genre fiction. I didn't mean to position literary science fiction "above" Upike, but rather to suggest that when you're interested in literature that takes you toward the end of time -- as I was, and remain -- Updike's concerns seem sort of dull and pedestrian, even or especially in a book like Toward the End of Time. There are many cultural positions from which to hate the middlebrow.
Lee, I'm deeply taken by your diagnosis (Dan Brown instead of Updike; Fox News instead of Sixty Minutes?), as well as with your account of what's at stake in the decisions with which we're now faced. I found one sentence in your reply to Andrew particularly beautiful: "No single literary future is inevitable, though we will inevitably make that future together." We're not just the passive recipients of cultural attitudes; we're also contributors to them. We become passive recipients only if we collectively choose to be. In short, I'm entirely in the Konstantinou camp!
One of the things that I find very interested here is what we might call a kind of "empirical turn," especially in Lee's posts. There seems to be an operative assumption that we will know more if we get more empirical--not just materialist in the sense of assuming that economic conditions lead to cultural elaborations, but in which we turn ourselves into something like sociologists. I'm not against, per se, such an empiricism, though I have a few questions about this:
1. Is an empirical turn in literary studies a turn away from theory, from, say, bridging textual analysis and conceptual thinking?
2. Is an empirical turn in literary studies a turn away from hermeneutics, from, say, textual analysis--and what would we gain from that?
The first question is in part fueled by what Lee provides as a sketchy thesis (his words) of what a more materialist-empirical study of postwar literary culture would look like. But that sketch seems to put into circulation any number of conceptual terms--"literary market," "reading public," "sophistication," "literary culture"--that are at best abstractions of empirical realities, at least if we are arguing about the postwar (and there's another abstraction--"postwar") from the perspective of...well, what?
I guess that's what I'm asking: what would it mean to be empirical, and to what degree should literary scholars be doing (just) that? I'm not, I should say, against this, but what does it mean exactly? I also ask this question because, as Louis Menand has indicated recently, one of the great achievements of the humanities in the last 30 years has been to disrupt any simple empiricism across the disciplines. While we often lament our decline, many more empirical disciplines in the social and hard sciences benefitted enormously from our critiques of objectivity (which may ultimately be distinct from empiricism, but which clearly is related). I have been doing some research into historical sociology for non-hermeneutic accounts of the event lately, and am struck by how enriched that work is by the turn to what we in the humanities call theory--potentially dead, based on Brian Reed's most recent post--among political scientists, historians, and sociologists. At base, however, I am struck by how even in these more empirical fields, there came a time when there was a real drive to theorize what had been naively assumed--here, the event, in both history and sociology.
My second question springs from a set of similar questions: Is empiricism the end of interpretation? Should it be? And again, what would that look like? David Bordwell makes powerful arguments against interpretation in his work in favor of a more scientific approach called historical poetics, and I could see this as a kind of empiricism we could pursue--the history of norms in forms and their effects--but is the empiricism that is being discussed about abandoning the text, or at least the text as we know it, as an object of study in favor of scenes of reading and writing, of what readers buy, what schools teach, who gets published, and who doesn't?
Finally: what does all of this have to do with the classroom? What kind of teaching would the empirical turn entail? Literature departments are as it is notoriously bad at making the normative and conventional ways in which their members read and write clear to students (empirical [!] studies into literary pedagogy have revealed this). So before we abandon forms of close reading--whether it is hermeneutical or oriented on patterns in and across texts--shouldn't we also examine what knowledge we already transmit, and how we might do it better?
I very much agree with Joel's cautions that a turn to empirical methods may represent a flight from theoretical complexity -- not that it need represent such a flight, but that it has the potential to do so if we fail to reflect adequately upon its implications.
I also wonder what is to be gained in mourning the passing of a genre or a medium. In The Anxiety of Obsolescence, Kathleen Fitzpatrick argues, I think rightly, that mourning the fall of the "literary novel," where the genre is identified with a particular sub-strain dominated by white men (let us say, the postmodern novelistic canon that Brian Reed has recently pointed out), claims an embattled position for writers who are otherwise quite privileged. (Frankly, I cannot help being alive to the dynamics of this particular critical conversation as well.)
No doubt my web habits are skewed toward the nerdy, but I was amazed to see the outpouring of tributes to Lucille Clifton -- yes, a poet! -- on mainstream blogs when she passed away a few weeks ago. Poetry does matter in people's lives. Jon Stewart has a Maya Angelou impression, for heaven's sake. Fiction writers like Jhumpa Lahiri, Zadie Smith, and Toni Morrison are not exactly suffering in obscurity either. I take Lee's point that they, too, are involved in a literary star system, and I very much agree that current U.S. publishing structures privilege the blockbuster, with unfortunate consequences. I'm not a particular Maya Angelou fan myself. But to claim that people in general are incapable of reading or unwilling to read serious fiction and poetry seems to me to demand that we define down a number of eminent contemporary women authors and authors of color as "not serious" in order to make that claim tenable. Do we define serious literature as precisely that which is not well received by the public, and thereby risk a tautology?
This is, of course, one of the classic problems with empirical methods in literary criticism; they require a certain ruthlessness with respect to generic boundaries that in practice are almost always highly contested. This has its uses, and its limitations.
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I'm really happy to hear what you say about Lucille Clifton! (And I love the allusion in your title line.) If you'll forgive me, though, I'm not yet convinced that Lee's view commits him to the belief that contemporary women authors and authors of color are "not serious." In the post to which Lee responds here, one of the things I was lamenting was my encounter with a person who claimed that Toni Morrison spends too long, in Song of Solomon, “getting to the point.” I guess I wasn't clear enough in that post, but let me say for the record that my deep dismay comes precisely from the fact that Toni Morrison's writing is unquestionably "serious" (however one wants to define seriousness); that it too is in danger of ceasing to be read, in the long run; and that this would, in my view, be a catastrophe. The same would absolutely apply to Lahiri, Smith, Condé, Césaire... the list goes on and on. I hope I'm wrong that this is going to happen. I agree that poetry still matters to many people -- hooray for that! -- and although the numbers are clearly dwindling, maybe there's still time to turn things around.
Thanks for your comment, Natalia. I am composing a longer response, which will appear as a new post, to deal with the questions of empirical study vs. theory, but I would say in short that theory can often be very simple -- it is often best when it is strikingly simple -- and empirical study can be incredibly complex, so I would shy away from a claim that complexity is in itself the virtue of theory (or empirical study), though I think that complex literature can be rewarding in unique ways.
As for Fitzpatrick's argument, I don't find it completely persuasive. The authors whom she studies do deal with questions of race and do express anxieties of obsolescence, but her reading of those anxieties as sorts of sublimation (my phrase; not hers) of racial anxiety often seems unpersuasive to me, except in the case of David Foster Wallace (explaining why I find it persuasive in his case would take me into another argument, so I won't elaborate).
You write, "But to claim that people in general are incapable of reading or unwilling to read serious fiction and poetry seems to me to demand that we define down a number of eminent contemporary women authors and authors of color as 'not serious' in order to make that claim tenable." I think this comment misunderstands what my claims are. It is undeniable that many readers still read writing by serious authors -- among them women, writers of color, along with plenty of white men. Many of these authors, from Morrison to Franzen, are part of the literary celebrity system, but this fact does not by definition cosign them to the camp of the unserious. I regard many literary celebrities as very serious writers.
I do not want to exaggerate the dire state of our literary situation, but what I fear is a long term transformation of our reading culture such that writers like Morrison and Lahiri and Smith -- not to speak of Franzen, Wallace, Diaz, Whitehead -- will stand in relation to the reading public -- by which I simply mean the whole population -- as contemporary poets stand in relation to the reading public. They will be the preserve of those lucky enough to have the time, resources, and education to read them. Literary academics and New Yorker subscribers will enjoy their ambitious works; much of the rest of the population will have no connection to them (for a variety of reasons).
My point is that reading publics don't spontaneously emerge from the ether. When activists in the sixties wanted to redress white, male oriented University curricula and canons, what did they do? They fought for and won new institutions and programs -- ethnic studies, women's studies, peace studies, gay and lesbian studies. As McGurl points out in The Program Era, creative writing programs worked very hard to become inclusive, multicultural, internationally oriented places. They largely succeeded. If we prefer readers read writers like Morrison and Lahiri rather than Dan Brown, I am suggesting we need to seek change at an institutional level; but we can't know how to seek that change unless we do the research necessary to understand our situation precisely. Ergo, the need for empirical investigation.
Thanks for your response, Lee. I think the point of our disagreement is a fine one; I'm very ready to believe that the public role of "serious" literature is affected by a variety of late-capitalistic structures. My questions are: given that the important variables are both quantities (how many people are reading X) and qualities (is X "serious"), what models exist for integrating the two? If the literary star system (or, alternatively, popularity) and seriousness are not mutually exclusive, how can we articulate their relationship? (Need we--can we--do so mathematically?) How can this relationship be understood historically and culturally (when does Dickens stop being "trashy," and to whom; what makes us decide it's time Philip K. Dick had a Library of America volume; how powerfully does the trope of "mass culture as woman" operate in our definitions)? These are familiar questions, but they're important for proceeding with any empirical study. Like yourself, I'm not interested in caricaturing empirical methods; rather, I hope to see their terms productively interrogated.
Natalia, thanks for your post, especially the questions you raise about empiricism, but let me take a moment to respond very briefly to one of your questions, as this is what my current book project is worrying over: What is to be gained in mourning the passing of a genre or a medium? Mourning the passing of, well, whatever, can lead to relatively rich trajectories--considerations of the relationship between the past and the present; trenchant critiques of how capitalism works (or doesn't); a resistance to the presentism of contemporary life; political and poetic models of how culture is unevenly developed; a sense of alternatives that have been rejected in the rush to embrace whatever seems innovative, progressive, and forward-thinking. These trajectories might begin in seemingly retrograde and reactionary places, but they don't have to be so forever. And on a side note: Kathleen's Fitzpatrick's account in _The Anxiety of Obsolescence_ is indeed pointed and at times persuasive. Her book did make me wonder, however, how the "anxieties," if we can call them those, that Toni Morrison and Ishmael Reid and Karen Tei Yamashita exhibit about television and media in their work might inflect her argument. In other words, anxieties about the obsolescence of the novel as a cultural form do not belong to the privileged alone as far as I read contemporary literature in its multicultural formation.
Perhaps another version of this question is: when it comes to literary history, what is the difference between mourning and melancholia?