Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature

[rich]

missing the obvious--that most contemporary lit sucks, is
narrow-minded, status and sex obsessed, suffers from pinched vision
and limited experience, and niche driven, incestous, and ultimately
really fucking boring

On 6/8/09, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2009/05/eighteen-challenges-in-contemporary-literature
>
>
> 1. Literature is language-based and national; contemporary society is
> globalizing and polyglot.
>
> 2. Vernacular means of everyday communication — cellphones, social networks,
> streaming video — are moving into areas where printed text cannot follow.
>
> 3. Intellectual property systems failing.
>
> 4. Means of book promotion, distribution and retail destabilized.
>
> 5. Ink-on-paper manufacturing is an outmoded, toxic industry with steeply
> rising costs.
>
> 6. Core demographic for printed media is aging faster than the general
> population. Failure of print and newspapers is disenfranching young
> apprentice writers.
>
> 7. Media conglomerates have poor business model; economically rationalized
> “culture industry” is actively hostile to vital aspects of humane culture.
>
> 8. Long tail balkanizes audiences, disrupts means of canon-building and
> fragments literary reputation.
>
> 9. Digital public-domain transforms traditional literary heritage into a
> huge, cost-free, portable, searchable database, radically transforming the
> reader’s relationship to belle-lettres.
>
> 10. Contemporary literature not confronting issues of general urgency;
> dominant best-sellers are in former niche genres such as fantasies, romances
> and teen books.
>
> 11. Barriers to publication entry have crashed, enabling huge torrent of
> subliterary and/or nonliterary textual expression.
>
> 12. Algorithms and social media replacing work of editors and publishing
> houses; network socially-generated texts replacing individually-authored
> texts.
>
> 13. “Convergence culture” obliterating former distinctions between media;
> books becoming one minor aspect of huge tweet/ blog/ comics/ games /
> soundtrack/ television / cinema / ancillary-merchandise pro-fan franchises.
>
> 14. Unstable computer and cellphone interfaces becoming world’s primary
> means of cultural access. Compositor systems remake media in their own
> hybrid creole image.
>
> 15. Scholars steeped within the disciplines becoming cross-linked
> jack-of-all-trades virtual intelligentsia.
>
> 16. Academic education system suffering severe bubble-inflation.
>
> 17. Polarizing civil cold war is harmful to intellectual honesty.
>
> 18. The Gothic fate of poor slain Poetry is the specter at this dwindling
> feast.
>