I like negative reviews and New Republic Literary Editor Leon Wieseltier's essay on the subject, but I do want to ask what Wieseltier is talking about when he identifies "the sick desire of a technologically intoxicated and economically panicked society to see its highbrow institutions hobbled or dead." Maybe I've missed someone out there arguing that there's no place in the world of the future for high-end social thought, but these fears are prematurely defensive.
I'm confident that good literature and the public discussion around it can compete digitally -- I found this excellent negative review of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom on Twitter, after all. It's especially confounding when TNR has one of the better online book reviews around. I'm guessing it's a generational thing, perhaps combined with a distaste with the democratizing Internet (the word "institutions" is telling) and the proliferation of niche cultures and low-brow dreck that can make it appear that the traditional high-culture conversation is being drowned out. If anything, we're simply recognizing the reality that elite conversations about culture were never central to a plurality of the populace. At the same time, technology is making it easier for more people to access that conversation.
Courage, Leon. Important, and let's hope, vicious, arguments about literature and the arts aren't going anywhere.
-- Tim Fernholz
