Today's critique will take the shape of a symposium, which is a fancy Latin word that for when a group of scholars or authorities get together to argue and debate a singular topic. I will serve as the symposium's moderator, but other classmates are welcome to ask questions and voice concerns.
I'd like each student to chime in vocally on the central question: What is the future of literature? Why does it or does not matter? I want each student to choose one passage in their paper that they feel best articulates their thoughts and feelings on the subject. I'll enable screen-sharing for everyone. I think it will be fun. I hope there is some thoughtful disagreement.
Here's a draft of my casual essay on the subject:
My thoughts on the subject of the future of literature are constantly evolving. I used to be adamant about the superiority of print-based reading and writing. The image at the top of this blog post sums up this position graphically. I love books as objects and I love them as tools. Most of my books I have never read start to finish. Novels are the only exception.
I've begun to think recently that books are perhaps like the horse and carriage. Before trains, cars, and airplanes, nothing could beat the good old-fashioned horse and carriage. If I were to travel on backroads from Wilmington to downtown Philadelphia in a horse and carriage, it would be a vastly different experience than driving a car on I-95. Reading a book is slow, watching a film version is relatively fast.
Today, more people use public libraries to access the internet than they do to read and borrow printed material. Speed is important. I remember a student I taught at the Corcoran that made fun of me for reading an actual newspaper. He said, "Did you know that you are literally reading yesterday's news?" Thanks for letting me know, smarty-pants.
This essay has been written in choppy and brief sentences. It is meant to be read online (by my students, on an online blog). The paragraphs are likewise extra-short. This is a reality of online reading. Our attention spans have been murdered. Consider the frenetic video work of Ryan Trecartin. There are two edits almost every second, everything is a blur, there is no restraint. You can't really find the plot, the settings and characters shift and morph. It's massively confusing if you're trying to make sense out of it in the conventional way. Maybe it's a flawed strategy to even try to make sense of it. Let it wash over you, let it seep in. Is this what "new media" is doing? Social media, reality tv, podcasts. Am I the only human left who doesn't have a podcast? If true, why doesn't this bother me?
After 32 years of teaching college English, mostly at art colleges, this has been my first semester of going 100% paper-free. No trees were harmed in the teaching of this class. I grumbled at first, but I adapted. In each of my 64 prior semesters of teaching (not including about 12 summer semesters), the printer would jam or it would be out of toner. Some technological glitch would prevent students from turning in their papers. Even though I despise the euphemism of the term "Learning Management System," they do have real and clear advantages. Uploading essays can still be a headache, and you need an internet connection, but it does seem to be a better way to collect student work. The old way entailed carrying around print-outs in a folder, marking them with a pen in my messy handwriting, then physically returning them to students. The new system is an improvement.
But I'm getting away from the main point of this essay: The Future of Literature. I do think it is connected to the changes in teaching and learning that digital technology has brought with it. The theatrical play in Elizabethan England was a dominant form of literature for that period. In the nineteenth century, people wrote and read long novels. In the 20th-century people began privileging the image: photography, film, advertising. The 21st century has been even more disruptive to traditional ink on paper books.
However, much like vinyl records, books and independent bookstores are making a comeback. They will never regain the market dominance that they once enjoyed, but they will continue to be powerful tools and objects that help to define our culture.
By accepting the inevitability of new media, I do not want to leave the old-fashioned modes of reading and writing (books and print in general) in the dustheap of history. I do think they retain unique values, but the world (especially the Capitalist world) moves on. Resistance is futile.
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