Thursday, March 12, 2015

The death of writing – if James Joyce were alive today he’d be working for Google

There’s hardly an instant of our lives that isn’t electronically documented. These days, it is software that maps our new experiences, our values and beliefs. How should a writer respond? Tom McCarthy on fiction in the age of data saturation

Information overload?
Information overload? Illustration: Ikon Images/Alamy
If, five years ago, you’d asked me to name the most important French mid-20th century writer, I’d have mentally dipped a hand into a hat in which names of contenders such as Camus, Genet, Duras and Robbe-Grillet had been tossed, and pulled one out at random. Not any more. Right now I’d answer without hesitation: Claude Lévi-Strauss. An odd choice, perhaps: an ethnographer by calling, Lévi-Strauss wrote neither plays nor novels. Yet, for my money, his work displays a richer, deeper literary sensibility than that of his “proper” literary contemporaries.
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