On Campus, Vampires Are Besting the Beats

The beginning of the article talks about a student in 1969 and how everyone she knew was (at the time) reading "Soul on Ice," written by Eldridge Cleaver, her new collection of essays. Back then for this student( Alice Echols), that psychedelic time was filled with " The Autobiography of Malcolm X." "The Golden Notebook," the poetry of Sylvia Plath and the erotic diaries of Anais Nin. then it states how four years later you more likely to " hear a werewolf howl than Allen Ginsberg, and Nin's transgressive sexuality was replaced by the fervent chastity of Bella Swan, the teenage heroine of Stephenie Meyer's modern Gothic "Twilight" series."

It also tells how much the author of Twilight sold last year(2008), she soled ---22 million-- and the copies weren't all bought by middle-schoolers. that according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the best- selling title on college campuses are mostly about hunky vampires or Barack Obama. The article also described " Here we have a generation of young adults away from home for the first time, free to enjoy the most experimental period of their lives, yet they're choosing books like 13-year-old-girls---or their parents. " in a small paragraph the article stated that a question that has been asked for a while now, " What happened to the students who would buy challenging books instead of these students who take an easy-read book?" this question was also recognized by a professor named Eric Williamson, quote,"seen the students snicker when I said that Melville died poor because he couldn't sell books. Then why are we reading him if he wasn't popular?' "Today's graduate students were born when Roland Reagan was elected, their literary values, he claims, reflect our market economy." To me , this statement, its syntax was a more of an insult to the youths literacy.

The article also mentioned what Roger Kimball, a editor and publisher of the New Criterion, said about how market and economy affect the minds of the youths. He said that there were no problems in the economy but yes, the truth is that economical conflicts affect the minds of youths. The many concerns for the way youths are reading and writing some say: quoted by David Farber," that the way Americans think about the age of maturity has shifted considerably."There's much more an emphasis now on kids thinking of themselves as kids, even into their early to mid-20s." This quote does prove that perhaps because the youths would soon no longer be children and be adults perhaps writers have noticed this too. This could be one of the reasons why now the books read by youths are mostly fictional.

Towards the end of the article Mike Connery who writes about progressive youth politics for the Web site Future Majority, he is concerned on how young ones nowadays get to know their politics. He said that they get it off other sites such as Youtube or blogs.how their still looking for their Kerouac. At the end of the article it states how the Internet is a like a way to get information, as easy as looking at someone. They are concerned(literature lovers) of what will become of literature when the youths and the new generations to come have a new and easier way to read/write.

The audience for this article could be anyone/everyone who is concerned about how people, more on the new generations, will learn their literature. They now have access to any kind of literature through the Internet. The articles purpose could be to get you to think about how important it is to consider literature and how the new ways of finding/ learning/ etc.. affect those who refer to do the old fashion way.