/lit/ - Literature

>>1791020
is this like postmodernism or something?

>>1791026
It's a reprinted essay that originally ran in a special edition of the New Yorker. It's about the demise of Serious Culture in the developed world because of Television. I thought the idea was silly when I first heard of the essay, but after reading it Trow's ideas make perfect sense.

Yeah, I've read it.

Weirdly, the late Mr Trow used to write comedy pieces for the National Lampoon in the 70s. But as far as bleak erudite media criticism goes, it's worth reading. Still, I think the climate has changed so rapidly and completely----he's writing pre-Internet---that it's a little dated.

>>1791032
I agree that it's worth reading. I disagree that it's dated. There's this great passage where Trow writes that he can't wear a fedora these days without a hint of irony. I get the sense that Trow hates Irony because it's kind of like the "fake love" that he believes Television promotes. Nowadays there's entire subcultures based around a context of no context. Take the Hipster. A stereotypical hipster wears clothes from the '80s and listens to pitchforkcore and wears ironic branded t-shirts. Their whole lifestyle revolves around irony because they spent their childhoods plugged into either TVs or Video Games. But, ugh, don't call them a hipster. Commitment to any aspect of life is the opposite of everything they stand for.

>>1791046
I haven't read this essay but maybe the reason he can't wear a fedora without being ironic is that fedoras are out of style? Fedoras only live on as a fashion statement because of Indiana Jones and prewar hard-boiled private investigators. No one wears jeans ironically.

>>1791223
It turns out the essay was written before the release of "Raiders of the Lost Ark." My point still stands, though.

>>1791030
That sounds very Mcluhanish.

>>1791243
Mcwho?

>>1791383
Marshall McLuhan, his work is part of the foundation of media theory.

>>1791030
I haven't read that but it sounds a lot like a piece david foster wallace wrote in 1990 (jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf). I gotta agree, at first I was ready to chalk it up to old people going "kids these days" but it was really an enlightening read, I recognized a lot of stuff in my own life that I hadn't even thought about being connected to television, but really makes a lot of sense. He talks a lot about irony too and how its gone from a sparingly-used literary technique to our primary mode of mass-cultural interaction, and really hits on a lot of points that have been hovering in the haze of my mind for some time now, especially wrt our generation, namely, how do you rebel against a system that's so thoroughly co-opted and subsumed the very concept of rebellion? Is that why our generation is so apathetic, so unashamed about kowtowing to a system that is clearly harmful to nearly everyone participating in it, because passionate acts of rebellion based on absolutist-ethics are so completely labeled as naive or misguided in our media? I dunno but it makes a lot of sense.

>>1791383
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faK9HUvH2ck

>>1791440

The last and most significant attempt at a total and systematic critique of society, coupled with an outline for hopefully unrecuperable forms of rebellion with which to contest it, was formed by the Situationist International. They should be far more widely taught/discussed than they are. Guy Debord's 'Society of the Spectacle' for instance is what has been a 'perfect' book, in that it is both true and unacceptable; since it was published in 1967 it's only got more and more accurate, and yet what it details is still completely unacceptable.

A really good place to start with them would be Sadie Plant's 'The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age', which is both a great introduction, and at the same time a brilliant argument for how essentially everything since the SI that we would call 'postmodern' philosophy and cultural theory is really just taking what the SItuationists had already said, but replacing the key parts - the firm belief that commodity relations could never enroach on and alienate ALL of human social relations, that there is always a base left from which we can work to contest this alienation - with an aimless nihilism which is no longer even directed to some useful end like destruction.

here's a link for it anyway: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=5TTF71LK

and there's some of Debord's stuff here: http://itsnotworking.mezoka.com/debordtext/index.html

and the Situationist Raoul Vaneigem's 'Revolution of Everyday Life' here, which is a very different book and more like an outline of what the 'radical subject' needed to overthrow the society of the spectacle might be like, while Debord's SotS is a much more sober critique: http://itsnotworking.mezoka.com/vaneigemtext/index.html

>>1791542
Awesome, thanks.

This is the most culturally informative thread on /lit/ in awhile.

Bump!

>>1791542
Posts (and threads) like this one make /lit/ great.
Thanks very much, good sir. A thousand internets to you.