Whither Books and Reading (redux)

Robert McCrum, a book reviewer for The Observer in England, retired recently after ten years on the job. In this valedictory, he talks about trends over the past decade.

William Paulson’s Literary Culture in a World Transformed, which I mentioned in an earlier post, is an extraordinarily stimulating book, descriptive in its first two-thirds and prescriptive in its final third. Its first part relies to a great extent on French theory, which is understandable since Paulson is a Professor of French and the French are formidable describers of the structure of open systems. The prescriptive part is more tenuous and limited to higher education. When read in conjunction with James Paul Gee’s What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Education and Literacy, one can see that the length and breadth of literary reading must begin at an early age, as reading specialists have always told us and which I infer from Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid. If, as Wolf suggests, early interaction with literary texts changes the brain’s physicality, does that neural condition create a desire to read, the way changed brain chemistry can create drug addiction? Or as I get from Gee, do video games create an interaction with semiotic systems that make it easy or even pleasurable to read certain types of literature to which we don’t expose young people in institutional settings? In other words, is literary reading addictive? Would a thirteen-year-old video game aficionado, because of the structure of his or her daily activity, respond better to a novel by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. or Thomas Pynchon (leaving difficulties of language aside for the moment) than to John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, which an eighth grader is so often required to read? I understand the many pressures on teachers to assign books that will allow them to explain how novels are structured, but to deny that the pervasiveness of technology has changed the way young people read and learn is to play the ostrich. To insist that they follow the curriculum in place for at least four decades is to convince young readers to despise printed books.

If literary reading is on the decline, one way to stem that decline is to create a holistic approach along a spectrum of age-appropriate activities and to allow flexibility, which the balkanized literary culture will most likely not be able to do because of varied cultural, political, and social ideologies that have very little to do with inculcating a love of reading. If we leave the creation of readers to ideologues—and I use that word in its broadest sense—as we have done for decades, we will end up as a nation of non-readers. And I am not only talking about the easy-to-predict failure of Reading First and No Child Left Behind, but the results of the actions of boards of education, curriculum developers, parents, and even book salespeople.

Columbia Journalism Review Article

Click here to read Ezra Klein's jaunty take on the present and future of printed and electronic books in the Columbia Journalism Review (it's called "The Future of Reading", but that's a much more complicated topic than he tackles here). Nothing new (must we hear one more time about marginalia? Do we really need someone to tell us that one of the advantages of the electronic book is that it can be updated by subscription?), but in one short article he pulls together a lot of the discussion of content delivery systems--mainly the Amazon Kindle but a bit on e-books in general--and their possible impact.

While you're on-line, take a look at Sven Birkerts' article on literary blogging and reviewing from July, 2007: thoughtful, experienced, self-interested but fair.

The Literary Scientific Method, Part One

Jonathan Gottschall’s article in the Boston Globe today suggests that literary studies become more like the sciences, which, he implies, “would set things right” with literary scholarship since it’s so beaten-down. The interesting aspect of his article is that he calls his proposal a “clear solution to the problem.” Professor Gottschall implies (or is this my inference?) that, there is one solution to the problem of literary studies in the United States, and it resides in forcing professional reading to prove its conclusions. I don’t doubt that this is one avenue for literary criticism to take, but it is only one.

There are, however, other thoughtful scholars who have written on the topic of the future of “literary culture,” a more useful term for literary studies since it encompasses the world and the manner in which books are read closely, by professionals and amateurs. William Paulson’s Literary Culture in a World Transformed, a follow-up to his intriguing The Noise of Culture: Literary Texts in a World of Information, is well worth reading on the subject. Paulson is a Professor of French at the University of Michigan, and his basic idea is that literary scholars need to be trained in the broader culture, rather than limit themselves to the narrow study of literature. When read in conjunction with some of the essays in Morris Dickstein’s A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World (he is Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center) and other books that argue in favor of recognizing textual links to a broader culture, one may conclude that the way back to scholarly relevance in literature is to re-embed literature into the various disciplines, let’s say, to abolish literary studies as a separate course of action and encompass them in the study of the world, and as part of the world.

This would not entail returning humanistic study to the idea of a medieval trivium, but would employ the breadth of centuries of scholarship of science, social change, and twenty-first century technology to create intellectual links between the humanities and sciences, as Paulson (and Ong and Kernan and others) have shown us already exist in fact, if not in the mind of most of today’s scholars.

What I'm Reading

A quick post since I've been spending more time reading than writing. The controversy over "the new literacy" (traditional versus digital) has been enjoined. Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future decries the direction education is taking and backs it up with convincing statistics. Mark used to direct research at the National Endowment for the Arts but his main reputation was made as a professor of English and he is now at Emory University in Atlanta. His book approaches the question from a traditionalist perspective and anxiety about the future. His extrapolations may be valid and his predictions may come true--or not--but his warnings should be taken into account since the transition away from printed matter, fixed texts, and individual voices to e-literature, interactive creativity, and multiple authorship of mutable work is upon us.

On the other side is First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, which sees games as manifestations of literary composition beyond the narrow definition of their story. Between the two books lies the question of how knowledge affects the art of the literary. James Paul Gee's What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy is more accessible to the traditional reader (like me) and is especially good on the connections video game players make with language and the idea of language.

And if you get the chance, check out Jane McGonigal's web site Avant Game (www.avantgame.com) with interesting articles about game theory, recommended by former Hyperion editor-in-chief Will Schwalbe.

Gadgets

For almost four decades, the Palo Alto Research Center (parc) has brought the latest in technology to the world. On its website it claims to have invented laser printing, distributed computing and Ethernet, the graphical user interface (GUI, which led to windows-based computing), object-oriented programming, and ubiquitous computing. Lately, it has turned its attention to the concept of reading, with some fun results that may form the basis for new ideas of active, dynamic, and interactive relationships with literary texts. Take a look here.

The Literary Mix-Tape

The prose fiction we appreciate today from the late 16th century through the early 18th century in Spain, France and England was for the most part episodic, linked episodes in picaresque or epistolary form, such as Gargantua and Pantagruel, Lazarillo de Tormes, Don Quixote, The Princess of Cleves, the letters of Madame de Sévigné, Moll Flanders and Tom Jones. Robinson Crusoe is an exception (and please forgive my forgoing full titles: this is a blog, after all). So our notion of what makes the proper structure for quality prose fiction has changed over these centuries. The dominance of the psychological or social novel refined in the 19th century is recent and a result of the assimilation of the printing press and the rise of the middle class. Novels in the 16th and 17th centuries had perhaps not yet taken advantage of the continuity offered by the printing press and instead relied on the audience's ability to assimilate "linked anecdotes." It took a couple of hundred years for the novel to cohere as we know it today. Let’s use television as an example. Among the most popular shows for its first thirty years were the variety shows that took their lead from vaudeville. Where are they now?

My second point today is what the history of reading tells us about the future of reading (see Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading for a good overview). If so much of “reading” was oral/aural until a couple of hundred years after Gutenberg, which gave it a somewhat social element, and the immersive reading of the past few hundred years is only a stage in reading itself, we are most likely entering an era that will take something from both. For example, immersive reading followed by social assimilation of what is read. Despite the insistence of many, immersive reading never “shut out” the outside world completely. It simply pushed the surrounding environment aside or behind for brief periods of time (see Proust’s On Reading, the reprints of his introductions to John Ruskin, who himself believed that deep and/or systematic observation is type of reading).

So if the technology of participation is changing the way we subscribe to the literary arts, perhaps it will take time to secure its hold, despite the speed at which things move today. Perhaps participatory literature fulfills the promise of the idea that everyone reads a different book, perhaps in the future everyone will re-write a different book they are reading, i.e., the text itself will change, the promise of hypertext fulfilled. Reading will become a social act, and transparently mutable. Literacy and “literariness” as we know them today will have no meaning. The concept of literacy itself will not rely on the accumulated knowledge of fixed texts. Instead it will base itself on individual mutation and personal creativity, as it has always tacitly done. Forget print-on-demand, embrace creativity-in-demand. The next generation will develop the literary mix-tape, an anthology of personally selected short stories to be given to friends as Christmas gifts, complete with music mix to back it up.