…While “official” fiction has retreated into comforting nostalgia about kings and queens, or supposed tales of the contemporary rendered in an equally nostalgic mode of unexamined realism, it is funky architecture firms, digital media companies and brand consultancies that have assumed the mantle of the cultural avant garde. It is they who, now, seem to be performing writers’ essential task of working through the fragmentations of old orders of experience and representation, and coming up with radical new forms to chart and manage new, emergent ones. If there is an individual alive in 2015 with the genius and vision of James Joyce, they’re probably working for Google, and if there isn’t, it doesn’t matter since the operations of that genius and vision are being developed and performed collectively by operators on the payroll of that company, or of one like it.
Monday, March 09, 2015
The corporate scriptorium …
…The death of writing – if James Joyce were alive today he’d be working for Google | Books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
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Meh. If James Joyce were alive today, he'd probably still be unemployable in a corporate setting, and teaching ESL like Elberry. A better analogy might be to the "golden age" of TV: a lot of fairly interesting stuff supported by advertising, and often (as McLuhan said) not as interesting as the advertising.
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