Handelingenkamer Tweede Kamer Der Staten-Generaal Den Haag, the Hague, Netherlands

Six weeks ago Washington Post critic Ron Charles caused a stir with an article titled “On Campus, Vampires Are Beating the Beats.” Looking back to the days when college students read Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul On Ice or Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book, Charles laments that today, “the best-selling titles on college campuses are mostly about hunky vampires or Barack Obama.” He continues:

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. The only specter haunting the groves of American academe seems to be suburban contentment.

Where are the Germaine Greers, the Jerry Rubins, the Hunter Thompsons, the Richard Brautigans — those challenging, annoying, offensive, sometimes silly, always polemic authors whom young people used to adore to their parents’ dismay? [...] Could any author of fiction that has not inspired a set of Happy Meal toys elicit such collegiate mourning today? Could a radical book that speaks to young people ever rise up again if — to rip-off LSD aficionado Timothy Leary — they’ve turned on the computer, tuned in the iPod and dropped out of serious literature?

Charles cites a recent survey that suggests two-thirds of American college students identify themselves as “middle-of-the-road” or “conservative.” Among the responses to Charles’s cry of anguish are online posts by Jenna Krajeski, at the New Yorker, and Scott McLemee, at Inside Higher Ed, who interviewed Charles about his essay:

“I was surprised and disappointed,” he told me, “by the number of respondents who felt I wanted college students to start reading the works of Abbie Hoffman and other ’60s and ’70s writers. Or that I was complaining that they weren’t reading more Serious Literature. That wasn’t really my point: I was actually disappointed that they weren’t reading more age-appropriate material: not stuff for middle schoolers and not stuff for adults, but all the kinds of crazy, wild, naïve, in-your-face, big-think literature that young people should be reading during that magical moment between high school and the first soul-crushing job.”

In preparing the Live Archive on the museum’s fifth floor, participating artists in “Younger Than Jesus” answered a survey question about books that had influenced them. Among the authors listed in their responses were Thomas Pynchon, J.G. Ballard, Naomi Klein, W.G. Sebald, Adrienne Rich, Toni Morrison, Sello K. Duiker, Victor Pelevin,  Audre Lorde, Roland Barthes, Parastou Forouhar, and Hamid Mossadegh. Now we’re curious about our audience: What “in-your-face, big-think literature” has shaped you?