With the rise of social media, AI, and the conglomeration of the publishing industry, readers, writers, editors, and critics of novels find themselves in a new literary landscape that de-emphasizes certain traditional aspects of book culture, such as in-depth reviews, textual analysis, and the long-term development of an author and their oeuvre. There has been a shift away from the text of novels and towards the more “clickable” and “shareable” aspects of novel production; this serialization involves a mining of the author’s biography and a heightened level of consumable comparison (if you like this Netflix show, you should buy this novel). As critic Wesley Morris points out, in the recent past, “we were students of the work — its devices, strategies, vision, achievements and problems. We were little deconstructionists. The makers’ personal story? Their intent? Those didn’t matter. The text was all. What has transpired in the past decade — the shifts in power, politics, media, higher education and economics; the calls for reckonings and representation of all sorts — might have transported us to an uneasy new place: post-text.” This symposium will explore how we create, interact with, and understand novels in a serialized post-text world.
I (Mesha Maren) began to develop this symposium through a series of conversations with Nancy Armstrong beginning in November 2024. Since the fall of 2024, the literary ecosystem has continued to be eroded at a steady pace through further conglomeration and incursion of AI among other troubling developments. Just in the past few weeks we have witnessed the death of The Washington Post’s Book World supplement. In the words of Adam Kirsch in The Atlantic, “When such critics and editors disappear, every part of the literary ecosystem suffers. Readers don’t discover new writers and new kinds of writing they might love. Publishers find it harder to connect with audiences, so they publish fewer and less adventurous books. Writers don’t get the public feedback they need to develop their talents (even if they don’t always like getting it). And of course, the odd characters who actually enjoy writing reviews find it harder to make a living.
Kirsch also notes that, “the most important thing that a daily book critic or a weekly book supplement does is bring a literary community into being—the kind of community that exists when people who don’t know one another are all thinking about the same thing at the same time. Concentrated attention is indispensable for civic well-being and meaningful political debate. It is just as important for literary life—maybe even more important, because people who take an interest in books are fewer in number and need more help finding one another.” It is in this spirit that I hope for us to convene in March, in the spirit of community building and concentrated attention.
