The Death of Literature is a 1990 book by American literary critic and professor Alvin Kernan. In the book, Kernan considers the circumstances and causes of what be describes as the death of the "old literature" of romanticism and modernism. Among the causes he considers are recent theoretical approaches such as deconstruction, the politicization of criticism, and the rise of television culture. Reception Richard A. Lanham, reviewing The Death of Literature in College English, noted Kernan's "splenetic despair" and found Kernan's critique of digital technologies to be misguided. "Kernan is deaf and blind throughout to how powerfully the electronic word feeds back on Western literary history," Lanham wrote. "The movement from printed book to electronic screen is making us see, for a start, the distortions we practice on poems like the Iliad, or plays like Hamlet, by fixing them in print and in the print ethos." Lanham did, however, find strengths in Kernan's book: "Kernan also has many sensible things to say about the bureaucratization of learning, and especially of literary study. He sees clearly that literary study will undergo the same re-direction of energy and etiolation of purpose that all human activity undergoes when deeply bureaucratized. It will feel especially the embarrassing contrast between its permanently adversative stand toward constituted authority and its own increasingly bureaucratic personality and language." Laurence Lerner, writing in Comparative Literature, found Kernan's book to be of a piece with other books written by "the eminent scholar on retirement, who places a crown upon a lifetime's effort by publishing a book on the state of literary studies today, less carefully documented than the learned works which earned his reputation, and often polemical in intent, and which, with luck, may end up on the best-seller lists. Alvin Kernan's book fits this pattern, and whether or not it becomes a best-seller, it will take its place among the best informed and best written of such works." Peter Erickson, writing in Criticism delivered a harsh assessment of Kernan's book, finding it written at times in "catchy, superficial style of tabloid reportage." Erickson also found Kernan's view of the death of literature to be due to Kernan's neglect of minority literatures: "Contrary to Kernan's position, literature is very much alive. But its life has shifted in large measure to emergent minority literatures....Kernan can neglect major new literary developments only by seeing them as noncanonical, inferior, and incidental. This perception