Literature, Activism and Politics

A few days ago, Jennifer Nix launched an online conversation with a post on her life in the literature world and her move to activism in recent years. Here is the online conversation in chronological order:

1) Jennifer Nix at HuffingtonPost: Resurrecting Literature: Sustenance for the Progressive Soul

2) Chris Bowers on Openleft.com : The Rise Of The Non-Fictional Aesthetic

3) Emptywheel of Firedoglake.com : The Count of Monte Cristo Was Not Fiction

4) Chris Bowers responds: More On The Shifting Aesthetic

5) Jennifer Nix's response published at Openleft: Sustenance For The Progressive Soul

I also read an offshoot post that I am still making sense of. Tales of the City IS Fiction-And Mythos (also at Openleft). If you haven't you heard of Tales of the City, it is a series of books written in the 70s and 80s in San Francisco and that were serialized in their local papers.

In Jennifer Nix's response at Openleft she writes,

During the Gilded Age, in America and Europe, newspapers ran short stories and serialized novels. The greatest novelists of the time, including Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Henry James, Mark Twain, William Thackeray and Joseph Conrad published their works of fiction in installments in daily newspapers. Because this format was more affordable, people outside of the upper class had access to books for the first time. The publishing phenomenon sparked a growth not only in the number of people desiring to read, but also in literacy rates.

With newspapers cutting book sections and reviews-and entire news operations shrinking by the day-progressive political blogs could help to integrate literature back into American life. We know the value of pulling people out of their consumer-driven television comas, and getting them reading, informed and connected. Bringing literature back into people's everyday lives will provide sustenance for the progressive soul and lead to more hope, engagement and action.

This needs to be connected to the free culture movement and the few examples of serializing books online that I've started to see online. We need to start talking about making available more of these books online for free. Some authors have started doing that, notably Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture. This is a great way to drive sales of books because people read a bit of it online and prefering to reading a book in print, they go out and buy it.

All in all, a great conversation that occurred online in the last few days that has started to connect various threads. I discovered a whole bunch of new fiction that I want to read and hopefully more political blogs will take Jennifer up on her offer to help sites tie more fiction and build further ties with some literary blogs. I might even contact her and read The Lazarus Project.

~BT