How to Navigate in the Sea of Modern Literature?

The article is devoted to such significant issues as the status of a critic in the modern literary process and the influence of the publishing business on building writing hierarchies and reputations. The purpose of the article is to establish the current trends in the development of the literary process and to determine the purpose of literary criticism today. It is emphasized that endowing a literary work with a certain aesthetic value is being replaced today by promoting a book product through various marketing strategies aimed solely at making a profit. In this regard, the role of critics, who are now becoming serial reviewers, is to regularly perform the managerial function of an employee of a text promotion corporation. Today, the publishing business has a decisive influence on the literary process and focuses on the transformation of book production into the service sector, on the mass character of titles, not their circulation. As a result, the tradition of systematic communication between the author and the reader is being destroyed, the sacral status of the text is being profaned, and literature loses its natural hierarchy and becomes saturated with artificially created and monopolized literary reputations and brands. The article proves the need to preserve the active role of professional literary criticism as an activity in the formation of the spiritual paradigm of society, in identifying timeless value criteria for the selection of texts, which is now replaced by the compilation of “recommendation lists” and a simple exchange of impressions. It is concluded that under these conditions, the main task of criticism is the discovery of modern literature for the reader, the initiation of a dialogue that will allow to move from the consumption of a book product to understanding and generation of meanings of a work of art.

book business, book blogs, literary criticism, stratification of literary process, formation of reader's tastes and preferences