January 29, 2016

#BattleFest2015: From literature to Twitter - the death of the reader?

1 hour 14 minutes

From the Battle of Ideas 2015

When Roland Barthes infamously declared ‘the

death of the author’ in 1967, he also intended it as a celebration of

‘the birth of the reader’. And while literacy campaigners continue to

fight the Reading Wars over literacy rates, by most measures reading is

in a healthier state than ever. Polls indicate the number of Americans

reading books has doubled since the 1950s, and reading is increasing

among under-30s, while sales of printed books are proving remarkably

robust in competition with e-books. The announcement that Harper Lee

would be publishing her sequel to To Kill A Mockingbird generated

a storm of international media interest, as did Mark Zuckerberg’s

announcement that he was launching his own online book club with 31

million members. Meanwhile, that once-seemingly doomed literary form,

the essay, seems to have enjoyed a resurgence, as new media embraces the

‘long-read’ and serious literary journals and small publishers continue

to thrive rather than face extinction online.

Nonetheless, many others share Philip Roth’s concern over the

long-term health of ‘people who read seriously and consistently’. He

warned that ‘every year 70 readers die, and only two are replaced’.

Perhaps the stress should be on reading ‘seriously’: young people may be

reading more than before, but by far the largest spike comes from young

adult fiction, with no strong evidence they are moving on to more

serious material. Moreover, adult society seems increasingly ambivalent

about drawing the kind of sharp divisions between the nineteenth

century’s ‘men of letters’ and the ‘unlettered’, though a special type

of scorn seems to be reserved for the term ‘tabloid reader’. At the

same, where reading was once closely associated with liberation and

dangerous subversion – the prosecuting QC during the court case over Lady Chatterley’s Lover

famously asked whether the jury would tolerate ‘your wife or servant’

reading such a text - increasingly university students demand the right

not to read books that come with a real or imagined ‘trigger warning’.

Is the twenty-first-century reader facing a crisis of cultural

confidence like that of the author in the twentieth? Has the legacy of

the millennial Reading Wars been that we focus too much on reading as a

technical skill rather than on what we read? Can we still appeal to an

ideal of ‘the reading public’, or is the reality one of many discrete

audiences with only occasionally overlapping tastes? Is the digital age

undermining erudition or broadening our horizons? Is society losing the

ability to read serious and difficult literature, or are we simply

becoming more selective and discerning?

Speakers

Teresa Cremin

professor of education (literacy), Open University; trustee, UK Literacy Association; board member, Booktrust

Professor Frank Furedi

sociologist and social commentator; author, Power of Reading: from Socrates to Twitter, Politics of Fear, On Tolerance and Authority: a sociological history

Sam Leith

literary editor, Spectator; judge, Man Booker Prize 2015

Laurence Scott

lecturer in English and creative writing, Arcadia University; author, The Four-Dimensional Human: ways of being in the digital world (winner of Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for 2014)

Chair

David Bowden

associate director, Institute of Ideas

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