Gothic lit is bad, a sign of corrupted youth: it's an old charge, and only one of the things wrong with this Washington Post screed. Ron Charles argues that kids today - sorry, traditional-age college students - have poor literary taste, especially when compared with what the boomer generation read.
The article is anecdotal, nearly ahistorical, weirdly unsourced... but what I wanted to pick on here is its use of the Gothic to stand in for "bad reading habits." Listen to the first comparison Brown offers, an intergenerational synechdoche:
The Gothic appears not once, but twice, and exclusively in this passage. No other genre or representational figure appears here. It's not sports stories, romances, historical fiction, adventure, spy thriller, mystery, fantasy or science fiction which stands in for Generation Y's bad reading.
Brown keeps hitting the Gothic, before moving on:
Interesting gendering there. No normative male Gothic readers or writers?
And even:
There are a lot of ways to tear this apart. For example, Brown doesn't address the Twilight series' huge adult readership. He doesn't see a categorical similarity in political biography (Obama and Cleaver aren't the same, obviously). There's no sense of different sexual mores over 40 years (!), whereby Nin loses much of her "transgressive" punch in 2009. Changes in college prep curricula, shifts in college attendance demographics, the movements of genre history, the persistence of middlebrow culture (which predates the boomer moment), changes in the academic perception of pop culture, the very different set of censorship norms between two or more generations, the boom in young adult fiction, political differences within the boomer generation... are all left untouched.
Brown won't even go near the content of what's being read online. For instance, the authors he cites (the "Germaine Greers, the Jerry Rubins, the Hunter Thompsons, the Richard Brautigans") often published in short forms, such as poetry or articles, and are in exactly the most popular format to be read digitally. Are there columnists, essayists, poets read online to compare? The column is disdainfully silent... although this description of Brown's authors does sound a lot like the way people discuss the blogosphere:
Brown does pause to smack the digital world several times, but at a very outside level:
It's enough to evoke the internet as a simple figure for young stupidity. There's no need to reflect about it (say, are boomers online?). Moreover, no political activity is allowed online, apparently. 1960s cinema and television didn't matter, it seems (boomers only read, see? they're cooler!). The constructivist practices of social media don't matter - in fact, from the way the article focuses only on professional authors, only consumption is cool.
Unless it's the Gothic. Gothic lit is inherently uncool. Good thing nobody wrote or read any of that in the 60s. Ahem.
(via Ed Webb's class)
Interesting blog and post, but it’s missing an important part of the equation: Generation Jones, born 1954-1965, between the Boomers and Generation X. Google Generation Jones, and you’ll see it’s gotten a ton of media attention, and many top commentators from many top publications and networks (Washington Post, Time magazine, NBC, Newsweek, ABC, etc.) now specifically use this term.
It is important to distinguish between the post-WWII demographic boom in births vs. the cultural generations born during that era. Generations are a function of the common formative experiences of its members, not the fertility rates of its parents. Many experts now believe it breaks down this way:
DEMOGRAPHIC boom in babies: 1946-1964
Baby Boom GENERATION: 1942-1953
Generation Jones: 1954-1965
Here is a recent op-ed about GenJones as the new generation of leadership in USA TODAY:
http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20090127/column27_st.art.htm
Posted by: this view from there | March 17, 2009 at 11:42