Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature

[Mark Kohut]

A. Yes, Pynchon would. 
B) He was audible when he won Faulkner Award for "V."....which Roth, others have won.....it is still given out. 
C) lots.....(and lots more as good as not in B & N)

Contrary to what the media says, more books than ever are being published AND are selling...................
BUT, that the best are HEARD, IS the hard part. 

Publish (from the Greek) =  to make public

 


----- Original Message ----
From: "kelber at mindspring.com" <kelber at mindspring.com>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2009 12:54:09 PM
Subject: Re: Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature

There's a lot in the list that's perturbing.  If Pynchon were a young writer just starting out now, could he get his manuscript read, published, sold?  Would his (or any promising new writer's) signal be audible amid the noise?  How many novels are there in Barnes and Noble that never get bought or read in any appreciable numbers?

That being said, it's too easy to reduce the reading and writing world to only the affluent portions of the planet.  Kindle books aren't about to take over in impoverished countries, where books are still sought after.  Doris Lessing made the point eloquently in her Nobel Prize speech:

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2007/lessing-lecture_en.html

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>

>
>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.