[HN Gopher] What we lose when literary criticism ends
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       What we lose when literary criticism ends
        
       Author : pseudolus
       Score  : 10 points
       Date   : 2021-05-30 12:35 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (thewalrus.ca)
 (TXT) w3m dump (thewalrus.ca)
        
       | puipjqxrkubfcgq wrote:
       | Books are a rather dry and old-fashioned way to experience a
       | story. Text in general works best for reference works and non-
       | fiction since it is so easily searchable. People quip that with
       | podcasting and audiobooks society is returning to an oral
       | tradition. I'm inclined to agree and can only encourage the
       | development. Narration adds such a richness to a story. Most
       | everyone subvocalizes when reading anyway.
        
         | tehnub wrote:
         | With text in front of you, you have the freedom to vary your
         | pace as you please. You can slow-read a critical section, or
         | skim a paragraph of fluffy description.
        
         | crooked-v wrote:
         | > Most everyone subvocalizes when reading anyway.
         | 
         | That's a huge assumption to make. Did you not know that not
         | everyone operates with an inner monologue?
        
         | nicoburns wrote:
         | That is quite an individual thing I think. Personally I can
         | quite easily lose myself in a book, but I struggle to keep my
         | attention on an audio book.
        
       | tqi wrote:
       | > The elevation of an undifferentiated mass of online voices has
       | instead resulted in a large-scale manifestation of what American
       | critic Elizabeth Hardwick, in 1959, referred to as "a sort of
       | democratic euphoria that may do the light book a service but will
       | hardly meet the needs of a serious book."
       | 
       | I'm not sorry that we no longer have a monoculture with a
       | generally agreed upon definition of what a "serious book" is,
       | bestowed upon us by "serious critics." I don't buy the idea that
       | literary criticism accomplished anything except act as gate
       | keepers that ensured only the right voices were celebrated.
        
         | ska wrote:
         | At it's worst, criticism (of any type) is mere gate keeping. At
         | it's best though, it's intelligent informed contextualization.
         | Which takes real work.
         | 
         | Your odds of finding the latter by randomly sampling the mass
         | opinion is approximately zero. But clearly it has value. So
         | it's a quandary, how do you tear down the institutionalized
         | gate keeping without reducing everything to superficial
         | opinion? How do you find a better way to pull signal out of all
         | that noise?
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2021-05-31 23:00 UTC)