According to Peter Stothard, the chair of this year's Man Booker Prize judging panel, book bloggers are harming literature. His idea is that if the mass of uninformed opinion gradually outweighs that of the "literary critics...then literature will be the lesser for it". He does go on to say that some bloggers are okay, but the sub-text is that the bulk of them aren't.
This is very much the "us" and "them" argument which I thought went out the door after the Second World War. Maybe we should hand out certificates to those who can talk about literature "properly" and disallow anyone else from talking about it. Yeah, that'd work.
This is very much the "us" and "them" argument which I thought went out the door after the Second World War. Maybe we should hand out certificates to those who can talk about literature "properly" and disallow anyone else from talking about it. Yeah, that'd work.
Perry, John Self has answered him convincingly in the Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2012/sep/26/book-bloggers-literary-criticism-stothard
And would you look at that, it has 56 comments...I may take in a few before I hit the sack, I think.
oh HEH, one of them says, I guess Stothard thinks bloggers are plebs. (Wicked internet laugh mwahahahah).