Ray Bradbury Explains Why Literature is the Safety Valve of Civilization (in Which Case We Need More Literature!)

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Ray Bradbury Explains Why Literature is the Safety Valve of Civilization (in Which Case We Need More Literature!)

in Literature | August 14th, 2024 4 Comments

Ray Brad­bury had it all thought out. Behind his cap­ti­vat­ing works of sci­ence fic­tion, there were sub­tle the­o­ries about what lit­er­a­ture was meant to do. The retro clip above takes you back to the 1970s and it shows Brad­bury giv­ing a rather intrigu­ing take on the role of lit­er­a­ture and art. For the author of Fahren­heit 451 and The Mar­t­ian Chron­i­cles, lit­er­a­ture has more than an aes­thet­ic pur­pose. It has an impor­tant sociological/psychoanalytic role to play. Sto­ries are a safe­ty valve. They keep soci­ety col­lec­tive­ly, and us indi­vid­u­al­ly, from com­ing apart at the seams. Which is to say–if you’ve been fol­low­ing the news lately–we need a hel­lu­va lot more lit­er­a­ture these days. And a few new Ray Brad­burys.

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Relat­ed Con­tent

A New Edi­tion of Ray Bradbury’s Fahren­heit 451 That’s Only Read­able When You Apply Heat to Its Pages: Pre-Order It Today

Ray Brad­bury Reveals the True Mean­ing of Fahren­heit 451: It’s Not About Cen­sor­ship, But Peo­ple "Being Turned Into Morons by TV"

Ray Brad­bury Wrote the First Draft of Fahren­heit 451 on Coin-Oper­at­ed Type­writ­ers, for a Total of $9.80


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Comments (4)
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  • Pam says:

    That was a lot of writ­ing to bury the point and not expand on it. What a waste of time.

  • JOSEPH DUVERNAY says:

    Per­haps Pam! And per­haps, you speak of what I do not know. But, being inter­est­ed in the why and how of his efforts in Dame lit­er­a­ture, I very much appre­ci­ate, being some in sync with, Mr. Brad­bury’s illu­ci­da­tions on proc­cess.

  • C.E. Richard says:

    A lot of read­ing, Pam??? The arti­cle was a sin­gle para­graph! And the point of that para­graph was sim­ply to point the read­er to the embed­ded video clip and give it con­text. This post from Open Cul­ture did not "bury the point" or fail to "expand on it." Rather, "the point" was to get us to watch the lit­tle archival video and let Ray Brad­bury explain what it all means– in his own words!

    Maybe I have mis­un­der­stood what your post intends to say, in which case I apol­o­gize in advance. Or maybe Ray Brad­bury was prophet­ic: TV (and, today, tik-tok!) has indeed made such morons of us all that "read­ers" now think that a sin­gle para­graph con­sti­tutes "a lot of writ­ing"!

    (See above, "Ray Brad­bury Reveals the True Mean­ing of Fahren­heit 451: It’s Not About Cen­sor­ship, But Peo­ple "Being Turned Into Morons by TV"’)

  • Steven says:

    Yeah, well, as soon as he died they tore down his house. How sad!

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