Transports of the imagination: some relations between globalization and literature.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: During, Simon
• Date: 01 January 2002

In the year 2000, as part of a program to 'encourage participation in, appreciation, value and enjoyment of reading' the ACNielsen company was commissioned by the Australian Government's primary cultural agency--the Australia Council--to survey what it called 'reading for pleasure' in Australia. (1) The results were unexpected. Television, of course, was found to be the most frequent leisure activity among the sample of just over 1500 (ninety-seven per cent of respondents watched it everyday), but reading came second, well ahead of the Internet, computer games or the movies. Seventy-eight per cent read for pleasure most days of the week, on average spending about eight hours a week doing so. Seventy-three per cent of all parents regularly read to their children. Furthermore, enjoyment of reading was only slightly linked to class and education: seventy-seven per cent of all 'upper white collar' respondents read for pleasure while sixty-nine per cent of the 'lower blue collar' segment did so. (2) Book purchasing was also surprisingly robust: about forty per cent of all books being read actually having been bought by their readers.

The ACNielsen survey indicates that in Australia at least, reading is probably as popular as it ever has been. Although Australia has historically been a nation where reading ranks high as a leisure behaviour in comparison even with other OECD nations, there are few reasons to suppose that reading for pleasure is in decline elsewhere. Books sales in most countries are steadily, if slowly, increasing, not least in those parts of the world undergoing modernization.

Why then is there so pervasive a sense that literature is in crisis? To begin with, a careful examination of the survey paints some shadows over the optimistic picture that the Australia Council presents. Reading is generational, being most concentrated in those over sixty-five. This, however, may mean that, as the population ages, reading will in fact increase its share of the leisure market--reading seems firmly enough established in the under thirty cohort to expand as that generation passes into retirement. (3) More to the point, reading for pleasure is not the same as literary reading. According to the survey, about a fifth of readers never read fiction, and men tend to read for information and knowledge, while women tend to read for pleasure and relaxation. Neither relaxation nor knowledge is exactly literature's primary aim or reward, especially from art-literature and academic literary-critical perspectives.

It is those who are professionally engaged in literature that feel intimations of decline most intensely. In the academy, conservative jeremiads such as Alvin Kernan's The Death of Literature (1990) reflect a sense not just that the discipline of English literary studies is paradigmless and drifting, but that students are less and less interested in the literary heritage. (4) There seems little doubt that in Anglophone countries at least the Humanities are gradually losing their overall share of student numbers as students, responding to the new economic environment and to new management policies in universities themselves, choose subjects with what seem to be more organized pathways into employment. Anecdotal evidence from East Asia--Korea and Taiwan--points in the same direction. In Australia especially but also the world over, English departments are becoming increasingly dependent on cultural studies and media programs to maintain numbers, although, in a complicating twist, creative writing is also becoming more popular. Certainly academic publishers are less interested in criticism; some are said to be abandoning the field altogether. Many are re-orientating their lists towards trade- and text-books.

Outside the academy, journalistic critiques like Sven Birkerts' The Gutenberg Elegies: the Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (1993) argue that literary reading (which for Birkerts means reading designed to develop the 'inner life') is being swamped by the pleasures of what are for him more superficial media, especially television and the Internet. (5) And the recent emergence of a genre of books in praise of literary reading--let Lynne Sharon Schwartz's Ruined by Reading: a Life in Books and Anne Fadiman's Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader stand as examples (6)--reveals an anxiety as to literature's status. In books like these, bibliophilia is being re-configured and marketed as a segment in the cultural mainstream while literary passion's aesthetic and ethical charge dims.

Important figures in the publishing industry are pessimistic about literary publishing's fate too. Book of the Month Club editors, as reported on by Janice Radway, have a depressed feeling that their kind of readers--serious middlebrow literary readers--are becoming harder to find. (7) Andre Schiffrin (one-time publisher of Pantheon Books and currently managing the New Press) and Jason Epstein (one-time editor at Doubleday and a founder of the New York Review of Books and the Library of America) have both recently argued that independent publishers with a mainly literary interest, and the stores and readerships that they service, are under real threat. (8)

They offer a number of reasons for this, of which the most important is the incorporation of many literary publishers into massive transnational media conglomerates--globalization at work. AOL Time Warner now owns Little Brown and Company, including Abacus; Bertelsmann owns Random House, Pantheon, Doubleday, Dell, Chatto and Windus, Heinemann, and Secker and Warburg, among many others; Holtzbrink owns St Martins, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Faber and Faber, and Picador; Longmans Pearson owns Viking, Penguin, Michael Joseph, Hamish Hamilton, and Putnam; News Corporation owns Harpers Row and William Morrow; and Viacom owns Simon & Schuster. So, for instance, the number of London publishers has fallen from about two hundred in 1950 to thirty in 2000. (9) And transnational companies apply new financial criteria to book production--publishing divisions are under pressure to approach the return on capital thresholds of other media enterprises, usually well over ten per cent as against the three to five per cent characteristic of old-style literary publishing. Hence the industry concentrates further on best sellers, mimicking film industry marketing techniques. Book production and consumption become more mediatized, that is, more systematically connected to film, television and newspaper markets. Each book is to be profitable as an individual accounting item, which means that the backlist (traditionally a major source of profit) plays a diminished role in maintaining financial viability. Another factor enters here too: across many countries in the West, the 'mallification' of book store chains has priced the display of backlists beyond possibility for an important sector of the retail trade. Reduction of state spending under neo-liberal governments has hurt literary publishing as well, since library purchasing has declined.

Nonetheless, it is certainly possible to dismiss some of this pessimism as structural, not least since many attempts to absorb publishers into large film and media companies do not reap the benefits anticipated by conglomerate managers. And as we know, literature, and even more so, literary criticism, thrive on an atmosphere of crisis and decline. Their value seems to depend on the sense that they are valiantly resisting cultural forces stronger than themselves--whether these be new technologies like television or the Internet, new modes of commercialization, or waves of philistinism. From its very beginning in the eighteenth century, market-driven modern literature was accompanied by a diagnosis of general cultural degradation, as well as a sense that true literary values were being marginalized. This was because modern literary institutions overwhelmed the aristocratic regime of polite letters that had been established in the Renaissance, and to which canons of cultural order remained bound. At a later date, one need only think of Henry James' conviction that he lived in a period in which what he called 'literary desire' was fast disappearing. This at a time when literary criticism and literary modernism were about to flower, and when middle-class public culture's incorporation of modern art literature through the extension of higher education and the introduction of quality paperback reprints lay almost half a century into the future.

For all that, I believe that literature is undergoing a radical mutation of barely less force than the transformation that accompanied the radical reorganization of the field of letters in the middle of the eighteenth century, or the emergence of the modern publishing industry at the end of the nineteenth. As we have begun to see, this mutation is linked, albeit indirectly, to that amorphous and multifaceted process we know as 'globalization'. Reading for pleasure is not under threat, nor is the book as a medium for print; nor is the publishing industry as such, nor even, for example, is the number of published art novels. Indeed the insecurity of bourgeois employment under globalizing forces and the rise of formalized creative writing courses is increasing the number of novelists, if not necessarily their readers. Certainly, to take one instance, more novels were published in the United Kingdom in the late than in the early 1990s. And new literary markets are emerging in the old 'Third World', especially in Asia.

My argument is, however, that what we can call 'modern literary subjectivity' is slowly dissolving along with the socio-cultural structures and ideological formations out of which it was...