Category: ideas

Literary theory, argues one scholar, has got it all wrong. “Literary study, he argues, has been a random, unsystematic affair. For any given period, scholars focus on a select group of a mere few hundred texts: the canon. As a result, they have allowed a narrow, distorting slice of literary history to pass for the total picture. A canon of 200 novels, for instance, sounds very large for 19th-century Britain (and is much larger than the current one), but is still less than 1 per cent of the novels that were actually published: 20,000, 30, more, no one really knows — and close reading won’t help here, a novel a day every day of the year would take a century or so.” So what should replace it?

“While estimates suggest that in the next 100 years perhaps five per cent of species will be wiped out, Mark Abley’s ‘Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages’ argues that it is languages that are really under threat. The consensus seems to be that on current trends, between 50 and 90 per cent of the world’s 6,000 or so languages will cease to exist over the next century. Should we care?”

Does the language you speak affect the way you think? It’s not the conventional thinking – indeed, the accepted idea is that we’re born with some set of language templates already in place. But at least one linguist is playing with the idea that the structure of language helps structure how we think.

For advertisers, “neglect of the 40 per cent of adult population over 50 – sometimes known as the grey market – is nothing new.” But why? “Eighty per cent of the country’s wealth is controlled by the over-50s but 95 per cent of adspend targets people under-50; 86 per cent of over-50s say they don’t relate to most current advertising yet, for example, 66 per cent of new cars are bought by people over-45. The over-50s in employment outspend their under-50 counterparts by 20 per cent. And over the next 20 years the over-50s market in the UK will grow by 30 per cent, while the under-50s market will shrink by 5 per cent.”

Charles Rosen, responding to a reader of one of his earlier articles, writes that the internet is not the panacea of free-flowing information that many suggest it is. “I believe that the literary and musical tradition of a culture ought to be easily available in the best form as a matter of course, like street lighting or public transport. This is not such a radical notion: making it available is often given tax-exempt status as if it were a public service, but in the present economy this is no longer good enough. Record stores, above all the big chains, no longer offer the full range of classical records but have cut back; in most bookstores only the cheapest editions of works of the past are to be found on the shelves; and publishers and record companies no longer believe that keeping their products available for any stretch of time is economically justifiable.”

“Emerging from the domain of museums, galleries and textbooks, art seems to be a hot topic these days, appearing all around us in everyday culture. Walk into a bookstore, hit a movie, go to a play – and you may find yourself thinking about art.” From movies with titles like Mona Lisa Smile to bestsellers like The DaVinci Code to a new wave of novels whose plots evolve from the experience of looking at a single painting, fine art is sneaking its way back into middlebrow American culture.

The demise of Saddam Hussein’s authority has opened the floodgates of artistic expression, outspoken media and religious liberty. Painters, writers, academics and spiritual leaders are all finding new voice. But many Iraqis fear that the new freedom of expression is leading some to go overboard. They are concerned that pornography and other vices typically associated with Western societies are beginning to seep into their culture.”

“The golden age of cultural theory is long past,’ Terry Eagleton writes in his new book, ‘After Theory’ (Basic Books), to be published in the United States in January. In this age of terrorism, he says, cultural theory has become increasingly irrelevant, because theorists have failed to address the big questions of morality, metaphysics, love, religion, revolution, death and suffering.”

We all understand the concept of not wasting time. “But what is time? To paraphrase Justice Potter Stewart, we know it when we see it — but certainly, a few years into the 21st century, our understanding of time must be deeper than that. By now, you’d think, science must have figured out why time seems to flow, why it always goes in one direction and why we are uniformly drawn from one second to the next. The fact is, though, the explanations for these basic features of time remain controversial. And the more physicists have searched for definitive answers, the more our everyday conception of time appears illusory.”

There are some works of art that are unique – they can’t be repeated or recreated by others, writes Tim Page, who offers a list of “unique” music. “If there is any tie that binds, it is their un-repeatability. It is impossible to imagine a sequel to any of them; they create new forms, live out their lives and then break their own molds. (The same cannot be said of some of the most hallowed masterpieces – Shakespeare’s plays, Bach’s choral music, Mozart’s symphonies, Chaplin’s comedies – all of which fit gloriously into one continuum or another.) Indeed, it has been argued that the very uniqueness of some of the works on this list is a sign of sterility, that the avenues of expression they seemed to open have usually proven to be cul-de-sacs. Still, if you want these particular goods, there’s only one place to get them.”