The Future of Literature Belongs to Amateurs

Metadata

Author: Naomi Kanakia from Woman of Letters
Full Title: The Future of Literature Belongs to Amateurs
Category: #articles

Highlights

I learned that to write this kind of piece, you really need to love the underlying material and feel like it has enduring literary merit. I don’t really know where this journey leads for me. I am fairly positive it won’t lead to, you know, a career as an eminent woman of letters. I am not going to become Lionel Trilling—I’m not even going to become Merve Emre. As I’ve written about before, I think we’re entering a world in which literature is going to be just another fandom—one amongst many—and it won’t necessarily have the privileged position that it’s held for at least the last hundred and fifty years. That means a lot of the work of discussing literature is going to be work that people do for free. I don’t think that’s the way it should be, I just think that’s the way it is going to be. When we talk about the collapse of the magazine world, and the collapse of professional book reviewing, and the collapse of the academic humanities, then what does that add up to? It adds up to a world where very few people are paid to write about literature, and where the vast majority of literary work is conducted for free, for an audience of passionate fans. I think the tradition embodied both by the remaining mass-market magazines (like The New Yorker) and by the niche intellectual magazines (like The Point) is a great one, but I learned from my years of pitching that my help wasn’t necessarily needed to continue those traditions. These types of magazines didn’t really want my labor. Thankfully, I am now proud to be part of a very different tradition—the fanzine tradition—that I think will play an increasingly important role in the twenty-first century. With these nonfiction pieces, I really do think like a fan. My aim is to capture whatever I enjoyed and find some way of transmitting that enjoyment to other people in a way that hopefully does justice to the underlying material. I am proud of the work I’ve done on the nonfiction side of Woman of Letters, particularly over the last year, and I feel lucky that so many other people have responded to that work.