A defense of literature and literary study in a time of globalization and the new tele-technologies

Present-day globalization means many different kinds of change. It is, moreover, happening at different rates in different places around the world. All globalization’s forms, however, depend on new tele-technologies like email and the Internet. Among cultural features being transformed is literature. This is so both because literature has a more and more subordinate role, around the world, in relation to film, television, computer games, cellphone messages, blogs, and videos, and also because the rapidity of literature’s translation and diffusion has brought into existence Goethe’s and Marx/Engels’ dream of a “world literature.” New technologies have also transformed the conditions of literary study by making so much literature and so many aids to literary study available online. Nevertheless, as a close look at Wallace Stevens’s “The River of River in Connecticut” shows, literature, in the sense of printed novels, poems, and plays, still remains one of the premier ways to create “virtual realities.” Literature also uses language in subtle and complex ways that are difficult, if not impossible, to match in other media.