“A Whole New Literate Public” | Louis Menand

We are Big Idea Hunters…

We live in a time of information abundance, which far too many of us see as information overload. With the sum total of human knowledge, past and present, at our fingertips, we’re faced with a crisis of attention: which ideas should we engage with, and why? Big Think is an evolving roadmap to the best thinking on the planet — the ideas that can help you think flexibly and act decisively in a multivariate world.

A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of Big Think

Big ideas are lenses for envisioning the future. Every article and video on bigthink.com and on our learning platforms is based on an emerging “big idea” that is significant, widely relevant, and actionable. We’re sifting the noise for the questions and insights that have the power to change all of our lives, for decades to come. For example, reverse-engineering is a big idea in that the concept is increasingly useful across multiple disciplines, from education to nanotechnology.

Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate Big Think. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.

Big Think Features:

12,000+ Expert Videos

Browse videos featuring experts across a wide range of disciplines, from personal health to business leadership to neuroscience.

Watch videos

World Renowned Bloggers

Big Think’s contributors offer expert analysis of the big ideas behind the news.

Go to blogs

Big Think Edge

Big Think’s Edge learning platform for career mentorship and professional development provides engaging and actionable courses delivered by the people who are shaping our future.

Find out more

Transcript

Question: Where do we stand today in relationship to modernism and postmodernism?

Louis Menand: Yeah, well, that’s one of those questions that you can’t answer. I mean, yeah, we’re probably post-postmodernism? But what was postmodernism such that we’re post of it? So it’s pretty tricky.

But I think that the period of the 50’s and 60’s was a period of kind of high veneration of the modernists, like Eliot, and comparable figures in the world of art, and so on. And the 60’s and the 70’s kind of replaced that with a different canon. So when I started out, I was actually a Victorianist, that was my field. I did 19th Century British literature, but by some fluke of the job market, I got a job teaching modern literature and ended up writing a book on T. S. Eliot, who was, in those days, sort of king of modern literary form, and criticism as well.

But now the canon’s very different from that period, people don’t write about Eliot and Pound any more, so that’s really changed a lot. And I think our sensibility is not modernist anymore, that is, sensibility of people who are interested in art and literature.

Question: Are we experiencing a broader decline in cultural literacy?

Louis Menand: I wouldn’t say that. I mean, it’s, decline’s a funny word to use about any cultural moment. I think things are different from the way they were 40 or 50 years ago, but the media are different, interests are different, you know, the demographics are different. It’s just a different world.

Just in higher education alone, more people go to college now, by enormous amounts, than went to college in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s. So that represents a whole new literate public that’s a consumer of literature, of news, of print, of, you know, opinion. And that’s a bigger audience and much more diverse audience than it used to be. So it’s really hard to talk about decline. I think it’s just things do shift. And then when things shift, one’s own role in the culture shifts along with it and you have to adjust to that.