The Death of Literature

Introduction

The writer Alvin Kernan has predicted the death of literature. To support her claim has turned to Sir Walter Raleigh, which is the English pirate, but a modest teacher letters. “The prophets are useless, are disciples and imitators and trendsetting silly. May God forgive us all! If one day I am accused of having taught literature, I will say in my defense I never thought about it and had a wife and children to support … “

It was a good reason.

Kernan argues that just as Nietzsche said, the literature also die, as has happened to God. We see that everything is game, even the practice of literature, and above all give range of art, along with the visual arts, architecture, music and many other human activities without which man would spend the day sunbathing as other animals.

The announced termination of the Literature

What romanticism or modernism? What Shakespeare or Cervantes? What does the writer of today is a composition of words, to assemble them into bits and create a cultural collage of texts. No one may investigate the origin of creation unexpected cut in a closed room with little light.

The great authors seem incomprehensible today. His works are filled with endless ways or lack of any sense, it could be the same. The sixteenth-century language is strange and could only be rescued through the efforts of scholars and followers who profit from hermeneutics.

The thesis of literary expiration provides that the influence of earlier poets, the great creators of the word, is a source of anxiety and weakness. But this theory makes a slip when he says this: “Any sense that they can have (the literary works of the past) is purely provisional and conferred by the reader,” Here is revealed the inconsistency of Alvin Kernan, because the whole creation of the mind depends on the viewer or the listener: the one who will judge the work to self-understanding. The language may appear indeterminate or contradictory, and their structures are being juggled. That happens in all human activity: nothing has a single meaning. The interpreter is just give meaning to the literary text, as well as a pictorial or sculptural image.

Thinkers and communication industry have been attributed equally to the literature being elitist and repressive. In the background can be seen an ideological intention to defend the political power or wealth gained from the exploitation of mass media, represented in television and electronic transmission.

Ideologies do not express such ideas as: are the vehicle to perform, but has to be noted that no idea can be realized in full, because it is in itself an ideal project. The same thing happens with music: a performer can offer only some and certain aspects of music in a single run of the play. The distilled essence of an idea is infinite can never be enhanced.

The replacement of printed books, established as a means of communicating ideas and feelings and as idealized in the literature, it is the intention of the new era. Kernan says: “Literacy, which depend on literary texts, has declined to the point where it is commonplace to talk of ‘the crisis of illiteracy’.” The study of letters is confined to few areas scholars, departments literature in universities, and what has been called “serious literature” is intended to consumption of a small audience. It affirms that the authors of literary works have suffered from crisis of confidence in traditional values ​​of literary art.

The tradition imposed the continuity of its importance, and the qualities of the artist and the writer should be the implementation fervent love for real. The pattern of school dictated the meaning and forms in art, supported by the traditionalism embodied expressions: the homeland, the natural order. The usual terms were good taste, beauty, flair, trade, and deal with these categories were opposed bad taste, cosmopolitanism, decadence, the secrecy.

The fundamental principle was the power, symbolizing the good, compared to the expressions of evil that disturbed the stillness like a plot and a condemnation. The product of an eternal art ancient mythology opposed to new abstract tendencies in modern art and literature emerged in the early twentieth century. In the background was the political ideology, and those who oppose the new artistic expressions such productions claimed belonged to a small group of insiders, while the masterpiece should reach out and touch all men, either because it expresses or is the summary of a civilization, or they stimulate the opening of a new culture.

Is there a static tradition? The very name implies motion, movement, and can not defend the permanence of the ideas or customs that portray the lyrics.

The movement of language as an attribute of Literature

From the perspective of the ancient Greeks, the language is the way and attempt to explain the meaning of words. The main premise is the identity between word and thing she appoints.

This is the almost unanimous conclusion of the Greek conception about language: The correctness of the names. If you can set through the name is a direct relationship with the thing called, is there righteousness, and the name is true because it represents the essence of the thing signified.

The idea of ​​stable correspondence between the word and the thing it designates, is valid in the common language that serves to communicate the immediacy of life. The daily treatment social man needs to name things and it needs pressing.

But there is a righteousness of the names is not necessary, and, by contrast, is variable and contingent, are simple functions that puts the speaker, no necessary link with the designated thing, except the accidental relationship. Was the subject of a study of primitive linguistic Hermogenes, a disciple of Socrates, and called for him: conventional theory. It aims at reducing the rigor of the rule that directs the order or, as they say, the law as an imperative language and philosophical principle, to accommodate the convention or agreement between persons and peoples. According to this theory, such language has no absolute and necessary. Is the free expression of opinions, where lies the knowledge, the fleeting sense impression and the movement that gives the word passion and ambiguity ascribed different meanings.

Literature and art of poetry has that quality of voice with the signs of multiple meanings expressive language.

Freedom of opinion is the domain where you will find the metaphysical and the disciplines that deal with the spirit, and art. How do we explain with words to God if not for what is not God, and how we approach the art if not by the perplexity that leads to silence? What we see or hear, is there really a definitive way? That we express through words, then, are our individual opinions and the sense that they will have each granted apparently shared expression. And most of the time everything happens unconsciously.

George Steiner, in his book, After Babel, tried to change the meaning of verbal discourse: “Every speech act contains a temporal factor. Read a complete way is to restore everything you can to the immediacies of value amid the talk which actually occurs. No semantic form is timeless. “

Colored disquisitions

Kernan says that the disintegration of the literature has brought the Best Sellers. And the worst part of his statement is that it has looked at the authors of the classics: All these works were written by dead white men. This position of those advocating racist human purity around institutes has led scholars to replace writers like Homer and Dickens with books like The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir. It had taken a step to social criticism, not the literary equality between races and sexes, represented by works of lesser prestige.

The underlying problem is the deterioration of education, especially the letters. What should we read to acquire a culture more human and more spiritual and practical?

There are enough reasons to question many of the so-called classics: what Dante wrote in The Comedy of political opposition is between Guelph and Gobelins, in a human selection of human error, in a poetic style that readers today seem dark. Shakespeare has always been the model of creativity, and reading or compression stage is reserved for an elite that can access the symbol that does not state openly. Relativism has penetrated the formation of a new student who does not want to hear of the great themes of humanity and choose to stay in an area known and often inconsequential.