[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)