In her keynote lecture from the PEN Working Day at the 2011 PEN World Voices Festival, Toni Morrison discusses the loss of public life exacerbated by the degradation of private life, and literature’s role in the modern world:

As a simultaneous investigation of human character in time, in context, and in space, in metaphorical and expressive language, [literature] organizes the disorienting influences of excessive realities—heightened realities, virtual realities, mega–, hyper–, cyber–, contingent–, porous–, nostalgic–. It can also project an alleviated future.