Coming Clean

It’s ethical, in most fields, to reveal conflicts of interest.  So I should reveal my investment in reading since you are all writing about reading in this unit.  As wacky as it might seem (and it continues to seem wacky to me), my scholarly work is in the history of reading and literary history.  Like most academics, I know WAY too much about one little thing.  The thing I know too much about is, admittedly, not that little since it is the longest novel written in English (Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, 1748-9); but really only a few hundred people in the world care deeply about this novel.

My work, while quite specific in some ways, speaks to larger issues as well.  Many of these larger issues are those we are exploring in this unit:  How has reading been important in the past?  Is reading an important part of developing free or democratic societies? Can we continue to be individuals, with strong individual thoughts, if we consume vast amounts of streaming, electronic media?

One part of me (this is the disclosure of the horse I have in this race) wants to argue that, indeed, free societies will collapse if more and more people stop reading. We’ll generally know less; we’ll become less critical and rational; we’ll be unable to engage in careful, complex, deep thought and simplistic, polarized positions will dominate. More sadly, many cultural forms (the novel? plays? poetry?) will disappear, reducing and bleaching out our experience of our own humanity. We might stop caring about each other as much.

But this is where things get complicated: Some of my research suggests that many of the readers of the past were perfectly happy to just read and, didn’t want to, say, overturn gender inequalities or execute kings. Increasing literacy rates and enlarged habits of reading--in spite of exceptions--suggest progress toward more modern, free societies. But clearly reading is not the only factor in all historical situations. All of these contradictions only emphasize the complexity of historical change when it come to media ecology--a complexity we should probably take into consideration when we contemplate the future.  Or, as McLuhan suggests “those who panic now about the threat of the newer media” should remember to “dissociate[e] . . . action from feeling and emotion.”  We should not simply react to loss (is he talking to me?), but think clearly about how to act and move forward.

So. I want to look back, but I know that it is necessary to look forward.  What do I want you to take from this? I hope that you take a sense that arguments look forward will be as carefully considered as those that look backward.