Death of Adult Literature

The two biggest parts of being an adult are 1. dealing with suffering, and 2. devoting your life to someone else. How often do you think the average person does either of these in an average day?

Our lives are nothing but an infantile game of budget management.

The irony is that she brags about reading shit that the pseuds here would consider laughably middlebrow. Stay out of the culture wars, kids, they're a joke. Just read what you like.

says who? your not the boss of me :^)

the amount of butthurt in that slate article is incredible:

"Oh, please! Get off your high horse. I am working on my master's in English literature and I read everything from the works of the ancient Greeks, to the Romans, to writers of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Enlightenment, Romantic and Victorian periods and beyond. I still read YA fiction, mostly because I like to write stories for children and young adults, and also because I unashamedly love escapism. Who do you think writes these stories? Adults, that's who. I can't imagine anyone who would snub their nose at reading Lewis Carrol's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" or Rowling's "Harry Potter" simply because they are targeted at children. Lame! Any such person has completely lost their sense of imagination and fun. They are dull. This was a horrible article."

Thank you for making me feel like utter trash. I am 17 turning 18 in a week and you are saying I should be ashamed? The government may deem me as a legal adult, but one does not turn it over night. I will not be voting, I don't drink and I am still indeed a teenager. I still have another 1.5 years of secondary school left before I have to think of college( and I will still be a teenager). I suffer from age anxiety since I was 10 and now you have sent me reeling into an abyss of despair and sadness. To be honest, I'm crying as a write this. I will still be a young adult (YA) into my twenties. Child psychologists have moved their patients age limit up to 23 as they finally realized that no human being has their life together by 18. People say I look 15, I'm one of those young looking ones, but I don't mind! Who doesn't want eternal youth? I know, that you were most likely aiming this post towards people older than 25, but you, not the people who enjoy the art and pleasure of reading,should be ashamed. I commend people who are still living their youth as I believe "We do not grow up, we just simply grow". I hope I am still reading skullduggery pleasant, maximum ride series, Michael Grant's Gone series and The Mortal instruments saga in the long future and I pray to God that I do not become someone as bitter as you. We should be ashamed? Now that, Ladies and Gentleman, is discrimination.

Don't be a fool, post-modernism had nothing to do with that. It's easy when you're not blithering retard to forget that the average person has no idea what the fuck the intellectual left is up to. How many fucking times do we have to go through the same shit, intellectualizing at peasants, and obviously failing when they get distracted by a butterfly or shiny object or insert escapism here. God damnit Glauber Rocha you faggot why the FUCK would a peasant want to watch a film about how shitty their life is holy FUCK.

Anyway, this behavior from adults has been around since time immemorial. Go take a look at all the trash that was selling as pulp novels in the first half of the 20th century. It's probably better than just drinking and gambling, which is what that demographic did back when they were illiterate.

Fucking hate Gladwell. What a reductive shithead. Up there with Alain De Botton.

ughh I wish I was alive in ASOIAF/medieval times, life made so much sense then and was so easy. Plzzzz OP

NEO-Romanticism 2BH

the Times piece is pointless. We all know entertainment is moving further and further from art, and there are a million ways to gauge it or explain it, this guy's chosen a feminist/maturity angle, part of the picture I guess.

One could also run the same beads of different media (that are arranged more or less from old and better to new and shitty) with a string made out of declining education standards, or the fall of the manufacturing labor class, or the saturation of lives with media consumption.

...

>old man yells at book

>Any such person has completely lost their sense of imagination and fun
Implying that young adult is the only imaginative genre is fucking retarded. Joyce was a billion times more creative than any shitty youth fantasy writer is.

Also Alice's Adventures in Wonderland isn't Young Adult, it's just a children's book, written by someone who could actually write (i.e., not a young adult author).

Reminds me of all those intellectually deformed redditors who refuse to believe the past can be better than the future

...

thats already a thing

this is a copypasta right?

id give up reading for snake goblets and opium anyday

Yeah, It's from that slate article. As I read it, I hoped to god that it was a ruse.

Glauber Rocha is god tier, you cuck. Too kino for you?

This. I imagine most are decompressing or embarking on a read that has a campy dedicated base with which they can engage easily over drinks.

Christ with egg in his beard man, in a thread discussing the average level of adult readers you had to out yourself as slobbering retard didn't you.

>read some contemporary "adult" literature in college
>it's just "YOU'RE A FUCKING WHITE MALE" for 300 pages

and they wonder why men are flocking to sci-fi and fantasy

...

i wonder how rare it is statistically to read proper literature.

we are in a constant struggle of the innocence versus the intellect.

WWIII when?

Kekked

Not post-post modernism, but a new paradigm altogether that has not yet been named might have the chance to exist in the future. Technology is going to backfire within a few hundred years, and lots of people are starting to get sick of their corporate masters. I can see something drastic happening, but don't hold your breath. Only drastic occurrences can topple such large and strong foundations of culture and civilization.

Agreed.

Also agreed though. I don't think intellectual communities are angered by the sheer separation of desires between the average person and a intellectual. The average man has relatively been the same and has had the same desires, and potential for thousands of years, we are all only held aloft by the scientific progress of geniuses.

I think what is going on in OP's post is that the market on literature towards the average person is effectively becoming slimmer and slimmer. No longer are there specific niches of genres, but only the genres that serve the Young Adult novel are being bought. There is less variety in the pool of escapist literature, a tighter grasp means less possibility for development towards the future in improving the literary community.

Tell me if I am wrong though, these are my quick thoughts.

Quantity over quality in general?

newscientist.com/article/2096542-evolutionary-forces-are-causing-a-boom-in-bad-science/?utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=SOC&utm_campaign=hoot&cmpid=SOC|NSNS|2016-GLOBAL-hoot

What emotion is the yellow person in this meme supposed to be feeling?

The people reading those books aren't innocent in the slightest. They read for social value, because the people in their circles read the same things. True innocence is quite rare, but I hope it manages to somehow emerge victorious.

The NYT is closer to the truth I think. Most adult YA readers are rejecting adulthood in the old fashioned American way: by conforming with something else.

A pile of adults essentially decide to talk about books for children with each other instead of doing adult things.

These people vote.

>doing adult things

???

Concealed deviousness.

Because the average joe already works a mentally exhausting full-time job. They buy these books as a way to decompress during their free time, which is difficult to do when you're picking your way through a philosophical essay or some shit.

Even then, it's not like all YA fiction is Hunger Games or Twilight tier. There are decent books out there in the YA section.

... Or there used to be, at least. It's been a while since I've read anything new since starting college. Mostly I've just been working on my old backlog.

>that first article

Jesus Christ, so much written about so little. I stopped reading when he started talking about male privilege and feminism.

He was a published author, which required setting up a writing regimen, encoding many layers of plot into his books, interacting with authority figures to get published, enduring rejection, enduring periods where he "didn't feel like writing" and so on. He chose to read fairy tales like an adult, not in order to not be an adult.

It's a very "dumb people can have good ideas too" type of article.

pretty much

>back in my day adulthood...

Guys help, I'm having a dilemma here. Is ASOIAF YA? I know it's pleb shit, but I've been enjoying it. I'm not saying it's high literature, but it's entertaining and it passes the time. Does this make me some man boy? I tend to enjoy classic literature like Les Miserables or the Count of Monte Cristo but I gave this one a go and I like it.

That's a rather monolithic view of the situation. People say a book is "good" or "bad", but that ultimately tells us rather little of their value judgement. It's like asking whether a mathematician considers a number or series of numbers "big" or "small". The book is good, but for what?

The answer here is most likely that the general public is interested in something highly accessible, fantastical, and sanitized of all offensive language, deeds and/or unconventional moral systems. They want to be able to talk about the books with a broad audience. The motivation for reading the book could encompass personal pleasure, but the demographics reading books to peer with their children, and subsequently the demographics reading books to peer with those peering with their children, should not be understated. They can't wait for the next movie.

In short, the modern reader is looking for something that goes down easy, like a TV drama in book form. They're also looking for an opportunity to identify and peer with others, prizing volume over quality of these associations. They are not looking for experimentation with the medium, philosophical discussion, conundrums or even brilliant storytelling. They're looking for something they can download on Audible to get them through their road trip.

There's nothing wrong with any of that. They are reading for the purpose of enjoyment, so if they enjoy it, it IS good.

...

newsflash: most "serious" literature is fucking boring and is mostly read by people to feel superior.

>There are decent books out there in the YA section
Can you name a couple authors then?

they take less time to finish maybe? i cant make it through ya stuff myself, so dont know

but let's assume that's true, maybe real writers should write slimmer tomes? im not a fan of massive, bloated novels. it's fine with someone like pynchon, fits his baroque style, but say jonathan franzen? id rather break a limb than finish one

i wonder what the average length is of say the top twenty or top forty best-selling lit novels from 1950 onward, or how the top ten of the eighties compare to the top ten of the 00's in length and in sales

>people acting like this is somehow new

Almost every person I know over sixty still talks about Winnie the Pooh, for God's sake.

People always consider the time in which they live, in some way, less good than other time periods. This in itself is a form of escapism, an effort in pathologizing away very real problems that you or people in your life might have in the present. There are articles like this every year, and they're always written by the same sort of person: people who are disgruntled that they aren't part of the Elite, and feel they ought to be in those rings.

These books aren't good, mind. I'm not giving them carte blanche to be horrible works. A supermajority of all media consumed is simplistic and derivative. There is still value in those things, if only to call attention to their many failings and general dearth of ideas.To claim it's somehow more infantilizing than being swaddled in the booming, bald-faced fictions in our sociopolitical ideologies is laughable, though.

Well, I'm sure plenty of the people reading books for kids have jobs too, and do the "adult things" required for those jobs. You don't have to read a certain type of book to be an adult.

Harry Potter is a bad book series

it's not in the "Teen" section of Barnes and Noble.

It is, however, in the "fantasy/sci-fi" section...

Go read Ficciones by Borges, or The Nonexistent Knight by Calvino, or Death With Occasional Interruptions by Saramago

>People always consider the time in which they live, in some way, less good than other time periods. This in itself is a form of escapism, an effort in pathologizing away very real problems that you or people in your life might have in the present.
fucking this.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publishers_Weekly_list_of_bestselling_novels_in_the_United_States_in_the_1980s

scrolled down this for eight seconds, looks like complete shit

if we go back to modernism then in a century we'll be back in post-modernism again

Shock and awe

oh man geez

hahahahaha

postmodernism is also a continuation of modernism ya dolts

also 'going back' to other time periods in terms of art is also postmodernism

so suck it

I don't think this is the proper Hegelian point to make
I think the right one would be something like trying to go back to modernism and forget the late 20th century already turns it on another thing in itself, not modernism
that being said I only have read tertiary literature on Hegel

I think the problem is a bit broader
It's the Death of the Adult, Puer Aeternus

This.

>member for 26 minutes
>1488 words

The first part is true but only to the extent that most of everything is shit. The second one is just your inferiority complex speaking.

>The two biggest parts of being an adult are 1. dealing with suffering, and 2. devoting your life to someone else

lol look at this brainwashed faggot

Nah, it's good. It's our modern classic children's book.

But medieval and Victorian times are objectively shittier than our age.

>also 'going back' to other time periods in terms of art is also postmodernism

>the PreRaphaelites are postmodern
k

I'd expect this from a side character in Always Sunny, tbqh

preraphs didn't really 'go back' since they were rejecting some aspects of academic painting but retaining others. you'll notice that preraph painting doesn't really look at all like any other non-contemporary (to them) style, let alone the painting before raphael

>Why is children's literature so popular nowadays?
Culture of immediate gratification, postmodern "high brow culture is problematic pedantry anyway" sentiment, (((you know who)))

2spooky4me

Why are people surprised that the common folk read shit?

they don't talk to a lot of people

Because people here are mostly either in college or freshly graduated and are middle class?

Oh wow, most people like to read shit. What next will be discovered about plebs? They like McDonalds? Don't know how to appreciate good red wine? They just like going out and getting really drunk? They watch Eastenders because their pleb brains can't handle watching something that's not like them. Oh, well, I never, what a revelation!

How old were you when you when you figured it all out?

"Adult literature" is just pseudo-intellectual circle-jerking and social signalling.

J.K. Rowling

6.

A late bloomer, huh?

checked

I guess you can say that, but I only met common people when I was 6. I felt an instant, physical revulsion that has never since left.

It's cool dude. Some people just don't have the same opportunities as others. No need to beat yourself up over it. You did your best and that's all that matters.

If you guys could actually write maybe this would be fixed lol

Thank you, I appreciate it. Some of us need to keep the patrician blood blue, after all.

Okay buddy boys, out of either one of you, which one is going to write the seminal narrative-changing testament of the human condition??

SPOILER:
You aren't shit. I'm not shit. Put your shit on Periscope or it's not worth referencing in 200 years.

Speak for yourself

And lose the NYT bestseller meme descriptions, its bad form

Think I've spotted who the angry pleb is; who can't appreciate beauty for its own sake (and the passing transience of life) but is instead obsessed with leaving a 'legacy' as if that actually matters.

I wish I read fiction so I could have an opinion on this

Hah! I have no use for that city. I'm just equipment for other people's living, just like you.

I'll rephrase, your Periscope page will only matter to YOU and whatever small circle of people will follow you.

And that is wonderful. Believe me.