I think some of the issue is in terminology. For instance Left is often a blanket for Democrat, leftist, progressive, and liberal (and vice versa at times). Yet leftists often think liberals are akin to fascists, progressives hold values antithetical to actual liberalism, people who call themselves (or insult others as) liberal have never heard of Mill, and nobody knows what the Democratic Party in the US even stands for. I wonder what percentage of writers (and readers) actually fall into the classical liberal category, where for instance I could see Hemingway or Bret Easton Ellis residing.
I was in an Ivy League PhD program in Russian literature back in the 1990s. At that point, we were conscious -- and almost universally grateful -- that we were a department unlike the other major lit departments (French, English, Comp Lit, etc.). They had largely moved away from studying literature and were using it mostly as an excuse for political and social revolution. In our field there was were scattered Marxist and feminist interpretations of works -- some with genuine insights -- but the focus was still on literature. We thought that our department and our field were immunized from what had infected the others by the general awareness of what Socialist Realism had done to art in the Soviet Union. They had mostly killed art -- to say nothing of killing many artists, literally -- in their insistence that literature serve ideology.
I can't say authoritatively whether that immunity has survived to this day (my department didn't), because I left my dissertation unfinished and have not worked in academia for years. But the leftward march of lit departments was well advanced even then.
Notably, in that context the distinction -- the gulf -- between liberals and leftists was clear even then. Now it is unmistakable in American society generally. Actual liberals now have more in common with conservatives than with leftists, and the left calls both camps the far right, among other names -- as the Soviet Left did then, come to think of it.
That is a good insight regarding Soviet Realism killing art. One could make a similar argument that today Progressive Realism (or something similar) has killed art. Certainly popular film has broken horribly under the dictum that art serve ideology.
As a bona fide professor of literature, I regretfully have to agree with this analysis - but also to disagree. I have taught critical theory, genre theory, and even postcolonial studies for many years, using them as a way to engage my students in critical thinking. But it is only in the last ten years of so that pressure of ideological conformity has become intolerable in American universities and colleges. I emphasize "American" because when ten years ago I gave a long and critical talk on communist utopias in China, nobody batted an eye. In fact, students came over to thank me! I suspect it would be different in China today, but even so, the ideological pressure in the US is worse than in many Third World countries. And the ideology in question is not merely left. It is specifically woke left, focused on race, gender (particularly queer theory), and disability - not class. And engaging in any kind of open debate about its premises means you are cruel. Words and arguments are now "violence" directed at the "victims", which is a way to stop any conversation in its tracks. Somehow, in the course of my career, critical theory that was supposed to foster an open and intellectually provocative discussion of literature, has mutated into an Orwellian monster.
Instead of left/right, it would be better if people focused more on up/down. Because the real divide in society is between the rich and powerful and all the rest of us.
I am 83 and a voracious reader. The unmistakable leftward slant in literature has caused many of us in my family of readers to return to the classics and fiction in the mid twentieth fiction or earlier.
Believe it or not the thriller writer Frederick Forsyth used to be my neighbour. I’ve seen him give poetry readings (yes, really) and book signings in the local pub. To describe him as “not really a leftist” would be a huge understatement.
I’m not neighbours with Tom Clancy, Wilbur Smith or Robert Ludlum but from their novels I’d suggest they’re not really leftists either. But their genre - I’ll call it the middlebrow thriller - has more or less disappeared from bookstores over the last 20 years. I believe it’s taken a segment of the audience with it, as well as contributing to a change in the overall political balance.
Robert Harris - who I’d put in the same genre - blames Netflix.
Liza’s articles make me think the issue is not demand, but supply: this kind of book just doesn’t now get published. Which is a problem for getting men into reading and “literature” I believe. Without Robert Ludlum I wouldn’t have got to Joseph Conrad.
I suspect this is why so few journals that publish newer and unpublished writers use anonymity in judging and acceptance. The desire for "unheard" voices is vast among those who value identity above literary merit, despite there being so many outlets for exactly that, and so many from supposed outside groups being published more now than ever.
It wasn't that long ago when Thom Wolfe and P.G. Wodehouse were household names.
Greetings from Brazil. I am more conservative. Your point is very interesting, but I don't know. Maybe left dominance in literature may explain why some people read less. However, looking at history (at least brazilian history), we were never a nation of readers. Literature was mostly an activity of the elite. People who are poor concern themselves more about survival, and less about literature or "high culture". The educational system is very bad and presents literature as a domain separated from life. People see classics as boring, can't understand them and thus lose interest in reading. Maybe if literature was presented in another way, this reality would be different. As you said, cinema, internet and social media also impacts people's attention span. I agree that politics has flooded the literary department and editorial market. This has to stop, since this rewriting of culture is being used as a weapon to express and normalize new values and the "deconstruction" of reality and everything that we hold dear. My 5 cents on this discussion.
As you alluded to, I think literature has almost always leaned left, at least slightly, with many other voices as well. Now, it's a concerted effort to turn literature into a far-left or progressive bubble. This has shunned writers, not just conservatives or centrists, but liberals who aren't far enough left, or even progressives who may have expressed one forbidden thought. This has also shunned readers, of all varieties, who tired of having progressive politics (also known as religion) shoved at them in every form of art and entertainment.
I'm a middle-aged (okay, I'm being generous now) guy with none of the intersectional virtues and privileges, who has searched for agents -- almost all of whom attended Columbia and are specifically seeking "marginalized and oppressed voices." I'm with a small press, thank goodness, that values story and writing, but will never break out into the big time (or even into the medium-time). I don't write political diatribes, although there are politics in some of my novels -- I doubt most readers could tell what my personal politics are from reading my books. I've had many reviewers specifically state that, in fact, and appreciate it.
I don't write Christian fiction, but I may have a Christian character (or a few), some of whom are genuinely compassionate and devout, and some of whom are severely flawed or hypocritical. But that's all too much for the literature world these days.
Very well put. The problem I think isn't that so many writers today are "liberal," they really aren't--they are far better identified as "woke progressive." It's hard to believe how many poets, novelists, essayists, playwrights, etc see themselves as political activists--and their activism isn't separate from their creative output, it defines it. I see literary magazines now with litmus tests that demand submissions meet certain activist guidelines! Literature doesn't work that way--you don't stimulate creativity by censoring disagreeable viewpoints! This activist trend of course has severely reduced the publishing opportunities for writers who either hold or are willing to entertain unfashionable ideas. We need new outlets for such nonconformist writers, which is why I'm experimenting with a new Substack journal, The Hodge Review. There is no litmus test except this:
"We are especially interested in literary fiction (short stories to full novels), poetry, essays and plays that, for a variety of reasons, find little welcome in today’s presses and journals. We have no mission mandates nor a set of beliefs or loyalty oaths. We are eclectic perhaps to a fault but we are not censorial. We do, however, not unlike our skeptical mascot Hodge, frown on work that trumpets its benevolence, virtue, correct thinking, and irreproachable morality."
Hodge, by the way, was Samuel Johnson's beloved cat whose statue can be found in London. Full disclosure: As of now I am the sole voice of the Hodge Review. So far, all the submissions are my own. But Hodge and I are seeking fellow violators of thought crimes. Meet us at thehodgereview.substack.com.
This is what I’ve been looking for. I wonder how long it will take before they are on their own tiny island and the dominant culture is conservative again, even in literature.
I think the association of the left and the arts goes back no further than the 1960s. Before then, perhaps there was a majority of the left in the arts, but there was still a substantial minority of conservatives. That's why I don't think there's anything inherent in the arts or in creatives that attracts progressives. It's just how we're told culture is, so many people go along with it.
To be honest, I don't pay any attention to University English Departments or most book reviewers. On the other hand, I don't find most new books to be worth reading - I find streaming series to be generally better written with more interesting characters.
"UCLA English majors must now take one course in each of the following categories: “Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability and Sexuality Studies,” “Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies,” and “Genre Studies, Interdisciplinary Studies, Critical Theory.” Yet not one course mandates the study of Shakespeare, Chaucer, or Milton."
I agree with the spirit of your thesis here, but I wonder about the assessment that people aren’t reading. I am pretty sure I read fewer *books* per year than I one did, but I am reading all the time. Maybe more than ever. I subscribe to 30+ newsletters here on Substack for example (including yours). I subscribe to the Atlantic and the New Yorker and the Athletic. I read them all and a lot more.
Great job as usual, Liza. But I had trouble with this: "...the average American now reads 12.6 books a year..."
HUH??? What Bizarro-World alternative-universe are we talking about here? In the America that I live in, outside of traffic signs, no one ever reads anything at all. And everyone knows it.
Of course, I have been working-class my whole life, with time spent as an Emergency Room nurse, inpatient psychiatric nurse, New York City policeman, UPS driver, cater waiter, pizza parlor counterman, deli-clerk and supermarket stock-boy. But, c'mon, now! It was even a long-running joke I had with the Critical Care doctors I worked with, since not a single one of them, and there were a LOT of them, read any books at all, and this wasn't exactly Appalachia I am talking about: it was at a major ER/Trauma Center in the main hospital of one of the biggest health systems in the country. I would even bust this one poor attending doctor's chops unmercifully, since one of my recommendations to him, A Confederacy of Dunces (which isn't exactly Proust), was too 'hard' for him: "Man, Rob, you've had almost twelve more years of school than I've had, and you can barely read anything upwards of SEE SPOT RUN!"
But seriously, that Gallup poll statistic sounds extremely suspect, and might itself be the perfect example of the 'bubble', liberal or otherwise, that educated people live in- just where the heck did that sample population come from anyway? It sounds like WEIRD-type-bias on steroids. No one ever reads books in the so-called 'real' United States of America (Exhibit A: November 6th, 2024); we are, and always have been, a country of functional-illiterates- see Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, Richard Hofstadter's Anti-intellectualism in American Life, or the most important recent work about the much-discussed 'cultural divide' in this country: Charles Murray's terrific 2012 book Coming Apart, with it's fun multiple-choice quiz to test whether or not you actually live in a 'bubble' (HINT: if you watched Judge Judy at least once in the past month, you're off the hook!)
Sir, that is such a good point it made me go look at the source Gallup poll. Turns out you're absolutely right! But I don't think it's bias or bubble; I think they're using the wrong "average". Bear with me....
Half way down the article is the following break down of U. S. Adults based on the number of books they read in a year.
None: 17%
1-5 books: 40%
6-10 books: 15%
11+ books: 27%
57% of US adults read 5 or fewer books per year. The (Median) "average" US adult as we imagine them - the dude stood right in the middle on the 50th percentile - is reading fewer than 5 books a year. Not more than 12.
Only the top 25% (the upper quartile) read as many as 12.6. It's not unpacked in the article, but I'd guess the (Mean) "average" of 12.6 comes from dividing the total number of claimed books by the total number of respondents. And that's likely pulled upwards by a very small cohort of people claiming a very high number of books. This is the wrong math: it's like saying "if 1 person has $1m and 99 people have $1 then the average person has $10k".
And the overall decline comes from decline in the group claiming a very high number of books. Which maybe feels like a different issue to the one we're all discussing above....
You have a great sense for connecting numbers to the actual world. Gallup should employ more people like you!
Hey thanks for taking my comment seriously, Martin. With all of the PhD's on this forum, I felt like I was, to quote from Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance, "a blasphemer in the holy-of-holies"! Feels good to be right about something.
I think some of the issue is in terminology. For instance Left is often a blanket for Democrat, leftist, progressive, and liberal (and vice versa at times). Yet leftists often think liberals are akin to fascists, progressives hold values antithetical to actual liberalism, people who call themselves (or insult others as) liberal have never heard of Mill, and nobody knows what the Democratic Party in the US even stands for. I wonder what percentage of writers (and readers) actually fall into the classical liberal category, where for instance I could see Hemingway or Bret Easton Ellis residing.
Quite! I doubt most people realize that “liberal” as a political adjective comes predominantly from Adam Smith.
We should make up a term for people who want to live and let live, and to help one another, but don't believe in complete nonsense.
We need the balance of both sides, or the whole thing goes off the rails. As seen from this election.
Love this: "We should make up a term for people who want to live and let live, and to help one another, but don't believe in complete nonsense"
I had to stand up and applaud before writing this comment. Chapeau, sir.
Thanks for an excellent article.
I was in an Ivy League PhD program in Russian literature back in the 1990s. At that point, we were conscious -- and almost universally grateful -- that we were a department unlike the other major lit departments (French, English, Comp Lit, etc.). They had largely moved away from studying literature and were using it mostly as an excuse for political and social revolution. In our field there was were scattered Marxist and feminist interpretations of works -- some with genuine insights -- but the focus was still on literature. We thought that our department and our field were immunized from what had infected the others by the general awareness of what Socialist Realism had done to art in the Soviet Union. They had mostly killed art -- to say nothing of killing many artists, literally -- in their insistence that literature serve ideology.
I can't say authoritatively whether that immunity has survived to this day (my department didn't), because I left my dissertation unfinished and have not worked in academia for years. But the leftward march of lit departments was well advanced even then.
Notably, in that context the distinction -- the gulf -- between liberals and leftists was clear even then. Now it is unmistakable in American society generally. Actual liberals now have more in common with conservatives than with leftists, and the left calls both camps the far right, among other names -- as the Soviet Left did then, come to think of it.
That is a good insight regarding Soviet Realism killing art. One could make a similar argument that today Progressive Realism (or something similar) has killed art. Certainly popular film has broken horribly under the dictum that art serve ideology.
The leftist/liberal distinction goes back a long way. Like the leftist Phil Ochs singing mockingly, in the 60s, “Love me, I’m a liberal.”
For that matter, you could trace it back to Bolsheviks vs Mensheviks.
Or even Jacobins vs Girondists.
They killed literature.
They weren't that nice to painting and sculpture, but there are Socialist Realist paintings and sculptures that have some attractions.
As a bona fide professor of literature, I regretfully have to agree with this analysis - but also to disagree. I have taught critical theory, genre theory, and even postcolonial studies for many years, using them as a way to engage my students in critical thinking. But it is only in the last ten years of so that pressure of ideological conformity has become intolerable in American universities and colleges. I emphasize "American" because when ten years ago I gave a long and critical talk on communist utopias in China, nobody batted an eye. In fact, students came over to thank me! I suspect it would be different in China today, but even so, the ideological pressure in the US is worse than in many Third World countries. And the ideology in question is not merely left. It is specifically woke left, focused on race, gender (particularly queer theory), and disability - not class. And engaging in any kind of open debate about its premises means you are cruel. Words and arguments are now "violence" directed at the "victims", which is a way to stop any conversation in its tracks. Somehow, in the course of my career, critical theory that was supposed to foster an open and intellectually provocative discussion of literature, has mutated into an Orwellian monster.
Instead of left/right, it would be better if people focused more on up/down. Because the real divide in society is between the rich and powerful and all the rest of us.
I am 83 and a voracious reader. The unmistakable leftward slant in literature has caused many of us in my family of readers to return to the classics and fiction in the mid twentieth fiction or earlier.
There is a reason my best friend is my 90-year-old grandmother. Your generation gets it.
Believe it or not the thriller writer Frederick Forsyth used to be my neighbour. I’ve seen him give poetry readings (yes, really) and book signings in the local pub. To describe him as “not really a leftist” would be a huge understatement.
I’m not neighbours with Tom Clancy, Wilbur Smith or Robert Ludlum but from their novels I’d suggest they’re not really leftists either. But their genre - I’ll call it the middlebrow thriller - has more or less disappeared from bookstores over the last 20 years. I believe it’s taken a segment of the audience with it, as well as contributing to a change in the overall political balance.
Robert Harris - who I’d put in the same genre - blames Netflix.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4852426/amp/Netflix-box-sets-killing-novels-says-author.html
Liza’s articles make me think the issue is not demand, but supply: this kind of book just doesn’t now get published. Which is a problem for getting men into reading and “literature” I believe. Without Robert Ludlum I wouldn’t have got to Joseph Conrad.
Publishers: Ludlum, Harris and Clancy need some queer black plotlines! 😒
I suspect this is why so few journals that publish newer and unpublished writers use anonymity in judging and acceptance. The desire for "unheard" voices is vast among those who value identity above literary merit, despite there being so many outlets for exactly that, and so many from supposed outside groups being published more now than ever.
It wasn't that long ago when Thom Wolfe and P.G. Wodehouse were household names.
Greetings from Brazil. I am more conservative. Your point is very interesting, but I don't know. Maybe left dominance in literature may explain why some people read less. However, looking at history (at least brazilian history), we were never a nation of readers. Literature was mostly an activity of the elite. People who are poor concern themselves more about survival, and less about literature or "high culture". The educational system is very bad and presents literature as a domain separated from life. People see classics as boring, can't understand them and thus lose interest in reading. Maybe if literature was presented in another way, this reality would be different. As you said, cinema, internet and social media also impacts people's attention span. I agree that politics has flooded the literary department and editorial market. This has to stop, since this rewriting of culture is being used as a weapon to express and normalize new values and the "deconstruction" of reality and everything that we hold dear. My 5 cents on this discussion.
As you alluded to, I think literature has almost always leaned left, at least slightly, with many other voices as well. Now, it's a concerted effort to turn literature into a far-left or progressive bubble. This has shunned writers, not just conservatives or centrists, but liberals who aren't far enough left, or even progressives who may have expressed one forbidden thought. This has also shunned readers, of all varieties, who tired of having progressive politics (also known as religion) shoved at them in every form of art and entertainment.
I'm a middle-aged (okay, I'm being generous now) guy with none of the intersectional virtues and privileges, who has searched for agents -- almost all of whom attended Columbia and are specifically seeking "marginalized and oppressed voices." I'm with a small press, thank goodness, that values story and writing, but will never break out into the big time (or even into the medium-time). I don't write political diatribes, although there are politics in some of my novels -- I doubt most readers could tell what my personal politics are from reading my books. I've had many reviewers specifically state that, in fact, and appreciate it.
I don't write Christian fiction, but I may have a Christian character (or a few), some of whom are genuinely compassionate and devout, and some of whom are severely flawed or hypocritical. But that's all too much for the literature world these days.
Very well put. The problem I think isn't that so many writers today are "liberal," they really aren't--they are far better identified as "woke progressive." It's hard to believe how many poets, novelists, essayists, playwrights, etc see themselves as political activists--and their activism isn't separate from their creative output, it defines it. I see literary magazines now with litmus tests that demand submissions meet certain activist guidelines! Literature doesn't work that way--you don't stimulate creativity by censoring disagreeable viewpoints! This activist trend of course has severely reduced the publishing opportunities for writers who either hold or are willing to entertain unfashionable ideas. We need new outlets for such nonconformist writers, which is why I'm experimenting with a new Substack journal, The Hodge Review. There is no litmus test except this:
"We are especially interested in literary fiction (short stories to full novels), poetry, essays and plays that, for a variety of reasons, find little welcome in today’s presses and journals. We have no mission mandates nor a set of beliefs or loyalty oaths. We are eclectic perhaps to a fault but we are not censorial. We do, however, not unlike our skeptical mascot Hodge, frown on work that trumpets its benevolence, virtue, correct thinking, and irreproachable morality."
Hodge, by the way, was Samuel Johnson's beloved cat whose statue can be found in London. Full disclosure: As of now I am the sole voice of the Hodge Review. So far, all the submissions are my own. But Hodge and I are seeking fellow violators of thought crimes. Meet us at thehodgereview.substack.com.
This is what I’ve been looking for. I wonder how long it will take before they are on their own tiny island and the dominant culture is conservative again, even in literature.
I think the association of the left and the arts goes back no further than the 1960s. Before then, perhaps there was a majority of the left in the arts, but there was still a substantial minority of conservatives. That's why I don't think there's anything inherent in the arts or in creatives that attracts progressives. It's just how we're told culture is, so many people go along with it.
100% agree. It's definitely a cultural product. Well said.
To be honest, I don't pay any attention to University English Departments or most book reviewers. On the other hand, I don't find most new books to be worth reading - I find streaming series to be generally better written with more interesting characters.
Right—there's a reason most books published today are not worth reading...
I’m sure you’re aware that Critical Theory infects history departments as well as literature. If I were a writer, i’d try to recover American history.
It's pretty universal across the humanities, though I'd say that it's the worst in literature departments because it's egregiously out of place.
Another great one, thank you for sharing!
"UCLA English majors must now take one course in each of the following categories: “Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability and Sexuality Studies,” “Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies,” and “Genre Studies, Interdisciplinary Studies, Critical Theory.” Yet not one course mandates the study of Shakespeare, Chaucer, or Milton."
Absolutely insane.
I agree with the spirit of your thesis here, but I wonder about the assessment that people aren’t reading. I am pretty sure I read fewer *books* per year than I one did, but I am reading all the time. Maybe more than ever. I subscribe to 30+ newsletters here on Substack for example (including yours). I subscribe to the Atlantic and the New Yorker and the Athletic. I read them all and a lot more.
Great job as usual, Liza. But I had trouble with this: "...the average American now reads 12.6 books a year..."
HUH??? What Bizarro-World alternative-universe are we talking about here? In the America that I live in, outside of traffic signs, no one ever reads anything at all. And everyone knows it.
Of course, I have been working-class my whole life, with time spent as an Emergency Room nurse, inpatient psychiatric nurse, New York City policeman, UPS driver, cater waiter, pizza parlor counterman, deli-clerk and supermarket stock-boy. But, c'mon, now! It was even a long-running joke I had with the Critical Care doctors I worked with, since not a single one of them, and there were a LOT of them, read any books at all, and this wasn't exactly Appalachia I am talking about: it was at a major ER/Trauma Center in the main hospital of one of the biggest health systems in the country. I would even bust this one poor attending doctor's chops unmercifully, since one of my recommendations to him, A Confederacy of Dunces (which isn't exactly Proust), was too 'hard' for him: "Man, Rob, you've had almost twelve more years of school than I've had, and you can barely read anything upwards of SEE SPOT RUN!"
But seriously, that Gallup poll statistic sounds extremely suspect, and might itself be the perfect example of the 'bubble', liberal or otherwise, that educated people live in- just where the heck did that sample population come from anyway? It sounds like WEIRD-type-bias on steroids. No one ever reads books in the so-called 'real' United States of America (Exhibit A: November 6th, 2024); we are, and always have been, a country of functional-illiterates- see Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, Richard Hofstadter's Anti-intellectualism in American Life, or the most important recent work about the much-discussed 'cultural divide' in this country: Charles Murray's terrific 2012 book Coming Apart, with it's fun multiple-choice quiz to test whether or not you actually live in a 'bubble' (HINT: if you watched Judge Judy at least once in the past month, you're off the hook!)
Sir, that is such a good point it made me go look at the source Gallup poll. Turns out you're absolutely right! But I don't think it's bias or bubble; I think they're using the wrong "average". Bear with me....
Half way down the article is the following break down of U. S. Adults based on the number of books they read in a year.
None: 17%
1-5 books: 40%
6-10 books: 15%
11+ books: 27%
57% of US adults read 5 or fewer books per year. The (Median) "average" US adult as we imagine them - the dude stood right in the middle on the 50th percentile - is reading fewer than 5 books a year. Not more than 12.
Only the top 25% (the upper quartile) read as many as 12.6. It's not unpacked in the article, but I'd guess the (Mean) "average" of 12.6 comes from dividing the total number of claimed books by the total number of respondents. And that's likely pulled upwards by a very small cohort of people claiming a very high number of books. This is the wrong math: it's like saying "if 1 person has $1m and 99 people have $1 then the average person has $10k".
And the overall decline comes from decline in the group claiming a very high number of books. Which maybe feels like a different issue to the one we're all discussing above....
You have a great sense for connecting numbers to the actual world. Gallup should employ more people like you!
https://news.gallup.com/poll/388541/americans-reading-fewer-books-past.aspx
Hey thanks for taking my comment seriously, Martin. With all of the PhD's on this forum, I felt like I was, to quote from Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance, "a blasphemer in the holy-of-holies"! Feels good to be right about something.