What kind of political or ethical force, if any, can literature still exert in contemporary culture?
Ours is an age that has moved far away from readers’ solitary contemplation of well-written texts. Instead, today’s so-called ‘attention economy’ privileges content over argument, immediacy over craft, and shouty but fleeting messages over sustained thought.
Hari Kunzru’s novel Red Pill is set in a writer’s retreat in Germany. There, a neurophilosopher named Edgar berates a literary critic, the novel’s unnamed British-Indian narrator, as follows:
“Even if one accepts the continued cultural importance of poetry, as opposed to some mass medium, say television or social media, even radio, any of which would surely be more powerful and effective — if only in terms of reach, numbers participating — even then one has to ask about the mechanism by which poetry would do anything as powerful as, how did you put it, ‘reformatting contemporary selfhood’?”
As obnoxious as Edgar is, he has a point about literat
What kind of political or ethical force, if any, can literature still exert in contemporary culture?
Ours is an age that has moved far away from readers’ solitary contemplation of well-written texts. Instead, today’s so-called ‘attention economy’ privileges content over argument, immediacy over craft, and shouty but fleeting messages over sustained thought.
Hari Kunzru’s novel Red Pill is set in a writer’s retreat in Germany. There, a neurophilosopher named Edgar berates a literary critic, the novel’s unnamed British-Indian narrator, as follows:
“Even if one accepts the continued cultural importance of poetry, as opposed to some mass medium, say television or social media, even radio, any of which would surely be more powerful and effective — if only in terms of reach, numbers participating — even then one has to ask about the mechanism by which poetry would do anything as powerful as, how did you put it, ‘reformatting contemporary selfhood’?”
As obnoxious as Edgar is, he has a point about literature’s limited reach and impact. The attack leaves our mentally fragile protagonist floundering, unable to defend the lyric poems he wants to research. Later, this narrator will meet one such “mass medium” content producer. Gary Bridgeman, known as Anton, is a slick, alt‑right provocateur, using his wildly popular TV show Blue Lives to normalise nihilistic violence.
As Kunzru shows, we are entering a new era, one in which right-wing memes and agitprop have infiltrated the mainstream. Society is fracturing into increasingly polarised camps. Protected from the quagmire, an unaccountable elite made up of men like Anton pulls the strings.
This calls into question whether literature can (or ever could) carve out a space for radically empathetic imaginings. The question is especially pressing in a world governed by spectacle, algorithm and instant gratification.
Back in 1967, Roland Barthes pronounced the “death of the author.” In his titular essay, the French theorist argued that writers are no longer originators of meaning but “scriptors.” Authors are merely the arrangers of a vast, intertextual web of cultural quotations. A writer cannot truly express inner emotions. Even the self is shaped by inherited language: a “ready-formed dictionary” of signs. In Barthes’ view, poems and novels are not people speaking to people, but texts speaking to and through other texts. Meaning emerges not from authorial intention but from the meeting of writing and reading. This renders literature a site of endless deferral rather than self-expression.
Richard Howard praises Roland Barthes’ challenge to the threadbare readable text in favour of what Barthes called the scriptible or “writerly” text. Howard notes that the French theorist challenged “what it is, in the very nature of reading, which fences us in, which closes us off.”
Nearly six decades later, we are well and truly fenced in and closed off from each other. Perhaps that is because we are reading X, Reddit, and Substack instead of long-form writing by Kunzru and his peers. All of these digital platforms can produce gems, but more often than not they are full of addictive rubbish. No wonder that “brain rot” was the Oxford Word of the Year for 2024.
One of Kunzru’s peers, the Indian-Danish novelist Tabish Khair, has been talking for decades about ‘The Death of the Reader.’ In the light of the emergence of generative AI, his idea warrants fresh ventilation.
Almost 40 years after Barthes, in ‘The Death of the Reader’ (2006), Khair argued that when the French philosopher proclaimed the death of the author, he foreclosed the birth of the reader. The reader’s own demise was inadvertently heralded in Barthes’ impoverished imagining of the reader as a passive receiver of authorial intent.
What is needed for a resurrection is, Khair suggests, an engaged, interpretive reader — one who digs, questions, and slows down. Khair laments a literary culture that flatters with surface brilliance yet discourages real attention. Unlike television’s fixed pace and dominant visuals, reading allows the reader to control narrative time and meaning. But if readers no longer do the work of reading, literature risks becoming just another consumable.
Chinese-American novelist Ling Ma’s Severance shows books as commodities. As I showed in a previous essay for Dawn, these objects are manufactured by global south labourers for Western publishers such as Spectra, which prizes glossy appearance over thought. Reading becomes symbolic and performative. Shakespeare sits unopened on suburban shelves. A fevered child clutches Madeleine L’Engle’s young adult sci-fi novel A Wrinkle in Time upside-down, failing to understand a word. A publishing colleague of protagonist Candace notes that, among mainstream book retailers like Barnes & Noble, “all these journals, board games, craft kits” make her question “if anyone reads anymore.”
Because of this lack of demand for books, aspiring novelists, like Candace’s impoverished boyfriend Jonathan, find it virtually impossible to make ends meet from their writing alone. In Severance, literature no longer resists; it decorates. Books sit unread, used to signal taste or preserve routine. Reading becomes hollow, emptied of meaning. Ma offers little hope that literature can counter capitalism’s erasures — only a haunting sense of what has been lost.
Yet even in an age of algorithmic spectacle and fractured attention, literature can retain a faint but vital pulse. From postcolonial margins, writers spin counter‑stories that unsettle dominant historiographies and voice experiences struggling to be heard. I find hope in the Indian Subcontinent, where the reading of sha’iri, attendance at mushairas, and attention to particular shers are acts of defiance against commodified distraction.
Fiction and poetry can still forge empathetic bonds across difference, illuminating the human costs of capital and empire. They remind us that language is never neutral but a site of struggle and strength. Pretty much every generation has thought they were witnessing the death of the author and the reader. BookTok suggests a hunger for them to rise again.
If readers learn again to linger, to question, to excavate meaning rather than consume it, literature may yet reclaim a political edge. The book or poem is an antidote to mass‑media culture war clickbait or virtue signalling. Far superior to AI, it is a truly generative space for imagining decolonial futures and ethical solidarity beyond the scroll.
The columnist is a Professor of Global Literature at the University of York and author of five books. Bluesky: @clarachambara
Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, July 20th, 2025
