Summary Of Once Upon A Time, Literature? Now What?

Improved Essays
Salter Analysis
In James Salter’s essay, “Once upon a time, Literature. Now what?”, he explains how language and literature are essential components to society. He continues to highlight the importance of literature by stating how much knowledge can be shared through reading. In addition to this, Salter begins to highlight how changes in modern culture have negatively impacted literature. Similarly, he goes on to state that literature is becoming less and less popular especially to the masses. In Salter’s opinion this phenomenon is a disaster that should be addressed in order to preserve the timelessness of written works. Salter’s argument is ineffective due to his elitist tone, lack of credible examples, and numerous fallacies.
At the beginning
…show more content…
He calls this phenomenon the “disaster” that is frequenting our society. As a result, he tries to persuade the reader into valuing literature as highly as he does. An example of this, can be seen when he states that he can not die without certain books or having published things he’s written. This takes away from his credibility as he is not objectively providing evidence for his claim. Likewise, he first introduces this “disaster” through quoting a fellow author, Virginia Woolf. However, he does not give any background on this author. This detracts from his credibility as he could be citing a random person or a person who is not necessarily a good source. In addition to this, Salter goes on to use a false analogy. He compares the “disaster” to Kazantzakis observation that the Apollonian crust had been broken and the Dionysian had poured forth. This is clearly a false analogy because a loss of appreciation in literature is not equivalent to the rational crust of the modern world has broken and chaos has poured …show more content…
He begins to lead us into this direction by defining culture as well as popular culture. As a result, he uses a false analogy to try and persuade the reader. This can clearly be seen when Salter compares Star Wars to the Trojan War in terms of their significance to future generations. This analogy fails to recognize that Star Wars and the Trojan War are completely unrelated as one is a fictional movie and the other is an actual historical occurrence. This causes the reader to feel that movies are more important compared to literature than they might actually be. In addition to this, Salter goes on to use a slippery slope to back his claim that the crowds or culture have the power to decide what is important. This is seen when Salter states that the future belongs to crowds, and this will cause extremes of poverty and wealth, isolation from the natural world as well as a new population that will live in hives of concrete and on a diet of film, television and the Internet. This is a slippery slope because the crowds may not cause these things to transpire. This further discredits Salter as his evidence is not strong which weakens his claim that popular culture is the the reason behind the loss of appreciation for

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    Literature has not lost its place in our society, but it has had to adapt to our developing societies. Literature has existed in different times and eras, such as the times of Shakespeare, Poe, Hemingway, or Fitzgerald. Their literature can allow today’s readers to be transported to a different time, place and culture which held specific values. Society continues to admire today’s literary works by authors like, Bukowski, Rowling, etc. The value of literature has changed based on the differences of opinions due to the different generations, but literature is still very much…

    • 988 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    From the very beginning of Francine Prose’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Can’t Read”, the topic of her argument appears to be one concerned with the failing education system, contributed, in part, by the failure of teachers to effectively teach literature, focusing on the moral values that can be taken from a particular work rather than focusing on the actual literary content, and the lack of literary works that encourage a love of literature and are complex in nature. However, Prose’s arranging of her argument allowed for an ill-conceived notion of what she was really trying to get at. Prose makes an universal assumption that the lack of complexity in assigned literary works is what makes for the decreased enthusiasm for reading and students…

    • 1298 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    Briefly introduced, Sven Birkerts was a former lecturer at several colleges in MA and currently a great critic with the Gutenberg of Elegies as his best-known criticism on how reading was drowned in the electronic age. In his essay, The Owl has Flown, Sven Birkets mentions how crucial reading and thinking to one’s life that it would give an impact towards the moral progress. Current education structure is one of the causes that initiate the changes of today’s people reading behaviour, but technology is the most primary. Birkerts makes a clear contrast between people in the earlier day and now, where long ago, books are scarce, all hand-written, and the reader would go over and over again of the same book until he got to comprehend the book…

    • 410 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 tend to embody the ideas of their age and time. One being of a young Hester Prynne and her punishment that haunts her, but eventually becomes what characterizes her. With her daughter by her side, she is able to endure her punishment. The other being of one named Montag becoming a martyr for the survival and continued use of books.…

    • 751 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Empirical analysis of literature can be a strange denomination of fun while reading. Viewing literature for its structure and organization is the essence of what makes being a bookworm so powerful and worth the effort. The ability to surgically splice and dice novels into their core elements and placing them in an organized fashion so that they can be later compared and contrast to other similar list in an effort to claim the positive or negative notoriety of a piece of literature is hardly a ticket to the amusement park. However, despite the initial lack of positives when analyzing literature in such a way, the end result can be a satisfying nature of finding out a portion of a puzzle. This data can be collected under many titles: literary devices, media, diction, language, basically anything in the actual text is up for grabs.…

    • 1275 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Corruption of Power in Macbeth Books and the art of writing has been a very big part of our society for centuries. Great writers have bloomed and disappeared in the past, the most significant one with the greatest impact in our society is William Shakespeare because he is the master of writing literature that goes into deep psychological thoughts and emotions of a character. Readers are very intrigued by his books because it amazing to see how even though his work is old; it is not obsolete because his work is universal and timeless due to its topics. In Shakespeare’s famous plays he writes down unique soliloquies for the characters to express their feelings and emotions through by breaking the “fourth wall” of literature; the “fourth wall”…

    • 1007 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Reading literature invokes the most intellectual recesses of the human mind. At face value, a story is a thread of plot points or events or happenings; anyone with the simple abilities of reading and remembering can follow a story from its first page to its last, but this mere action, to follow a story, draws no merit, for the true labour in reading literature lies in understanding the meaning beneath each word. One skeptical advocate may suppose that there exists no ulterior meaning to the events that unfold in a body of literature; Thomas C. Foster in his book, How to Read Literature like a Professor, argues on the contrary. Writers of literature carefully and intelligently compose their work with the sole purpose to weave layers upon layers…

    • 985 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’, Nicholas Carr displays his views on how technological advances have brought great advancements and success to the world, however, he also argues how such advancements have become detrimental to the mindset of mankind. The fact that it has such long explanation probably helped validate his point to many readers, including me. While reading the article, I paused after every two pages or so of text to take a break, which mirrors Carr’s own experiences of reading long texts and “dragging my wayward brain back to the text” (Carr). While Carr attempts- through ethos, pathos and logos- to convince readers the validity of his argument that due to Google and the rise of digital texts people are no longer able to…

    • 1409 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    For more than a thousand years, writing has been used to communicate ideas and inspire people to think differently. In their respective novels, Brave New World and Kindred, Aldous Huxley and Octavia Butler both argue that reading and writing can cause rebellion from a dissatisfied group through the spread of ideas and information. The authors do this by creating leaders that deprive a group of people of reading and writing in order to maintain control over them, having the protagonists use their literacy to challenge their societies, and making the protagonists fail at changing their societies. Brave New World’s Mustapha Mond, one of ten World Controllers, and Kindred’s Tom Weylin, a slave owner, restrict literacy, so they can keep their inferiors…

    • 1014 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In the passage, Dana Gioia tries to persuade her audience to believe that the decline of reading in America will have a negative effect on society. She thoroughly explains that reading and studying literature is a principal practice that all people should embrace, as it develops essential skills needed in the common workplace. She achieves this task through using evidence to support her claims, reasoning to develop ideas and connect to claims and evidence, and stylistic syntax and diction to add power to the ideas expressed. Gioia sites various examples and evidence to support her claims and findings.…

    • 581 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In this essay I will be explaining how Dana Gioia builds an argument to persuade his audience that the decline of reading in America will have a negative effect on society. In my essay, I will analyze how Gioia uses one or more of the following features to strengthen the logic and persuasiveness of his argument. While reading the article, ‘‘ Why Literature Matters” by the author Dana Gioia, Dana makes a good statement that, argument claiming the levels of interest from young Americans have shown in art in recent years. But they have declined and that this trend is a hug problem to society and it also may come with some really bad consequences. The strategies Dana tries to apply to support his argument is by including citations of completing polls, reports that were made by these big organizations that have issued the evidence and quotations of the studies that were a problem from another author.…

    • 707 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    There is a common ideology, that literature reflects social realities. A multitude of authors and poets are able to use…

    • 2018 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    As a beginning reader young adult books captivated me with what, at the time, were intriguing and comprehensible plot lines. Thus began my love affair with books. Eventually, those plot lines became my adversary, when their simplicity triggered a soporific rendition of the book. It persisted until the gifts of classical literature unwrapped as I learned to penetrate, explore, and discover meanings in, for example, Dickens’ lengthy description of a clock tower did I truly find my beloved. Although young adult books had their place in my life by inspiring a love for reading, classical literature has opened up a whole new perspective, teaching me to seek out knowledge while still yielding enjoyment as I consume each book.…

    • 648 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    These developments subsequently led to the formation of theories such as ‘The death of the Author’. Arguably, Elliot also had an influence on Important figures in Literary criticism such as Leavis and Bloom. There are present mutual notions of perceiving tradition as continuously remade and rethought.…

    • 792 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Great Essays

    Social Media Vocabulary

    • 1619 Words
    • 6 Pages

    The mass appeal of the popular culture today which finds manifestation in lowbrow mass media forms, which are forms of reality television, pop music, escapist fiction, kitsch, slapstick, jingoism and pornography etcetera. With the help of mass media, almost the entire world is made to pass through the sieve of this low brow industry which precludes any space for sustained thought or imagination. As a result, the classical highbrow English Language that once offered the world a rich legacy of artistic literary genres, has been severely and badly affected (Khan…

    • 1619 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Great Essays