Tag Archives: cultural literacy

Lolita’s Bedroom—Or why marketing directors should read more novels.

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What young family wouldn’t hold out the image of a sexually precocious 12-year-old as the image they hope their young daughters will have dancing in their heads as those innocent heads hit the pillow at night. The London Times reports that Woolworths has had to pull a certain ill-named piece of bedroom furniture from the market after a widespread internet protest by offended mothers.Woolworth’s Lolita bed

“The Lolita Midsleeper Combi, a whitewashed wooden bed with pull-out desk and cupboard intended for girls aged about 6, was on sale on the Woolworths website for £395.”
……

“Whereas many mothers were familiar with Vladimir Nabokov and his famous novel, it seems that the Woolworths staff were not. At first they were baffled by the fuss. A spokesman for the company told The Times: “What seems to have happened is the staff who run the website had never heard of Lolita, and to be honest no one else here had either. We had to look it up on Wikipedia. But we certainly know who she is now.””

Lolita book cover full sizeAs my colleague, Matt Roth, suggests it’s hard to know which is worse, that they made the bed in the first place, or that they didn’t know about one of the iconic literary figures of the past half-century.

However, given the international state of our reading crisis, perhaps its worth asking how so many mothers even knew who Lolita was. I wonder if they read the book or saw the movie.

In any case, cultural illiteracy will get you nowhere.

Still, I’m just a tad bit suspicious about Woolworth’s protestations
According to the same Times article, the Brits business community has a penchant for salacious pitches to the preadolescent crowd:

“In 2006 Tesco was removed its pole-dancing kit from the toys and games section of its website after it was accused of destroying children’s innocence.”

A pole-dancing kit. What every nine-year old girl wants for Christmas.

Similarly the BBC reports the following:

“In 2005, WH Smiths came under fire for selling youngsters stationery bearing the Playboy bunny – a symbol of the pornography empire.

“Prior to that Bhs decided to withdraw its Little Miss Naughty range of padded bras and knickers for pre-teen girls after attracting criticism.

I’m not sure what’s naughty about knickers. I thought it was just a weird British word for underwear. And according to the grammar they were padded anyway. Sounds uncomfortable to me. Still, I draw the line at padded bras for pre-teens.

For the record, I did a Google search on women named Lolita. Turns out there are thousands of them. And not just Lolita Davidovitch. And most of them aren’t even on sex sites. I’m sure that the Woolworth’s bedrooms set was probably named after the owner’s great aunt Lolita in Birmingham. And after all, it’s not pole-dancing. Come on people, lighten up!

Anyway, though I’m appalled at the marketing division’s literary illiteracy, isn’t it a great thing to see literature making a difference in the world.

More solid evidence that the NEA is correct in saying readers are more likely to be social activists. 😉

Critical Thinking and Cultural Literacy: Or, Is Unmasking Shakespeare Productive Cultural Work?

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Ok, a slightly lame way of doing the blog entry today, but I spent a lot of time commenting on Mark Bauerlein’s blog at the Chronicle today, so I thought I’d just copy some of that and expand just a bit on what I had to say there.

In sum, Bauerlein makes the argument that the arguments in favor of critical thinking as a raison d’etre for literary study are really only half the story for professors in the humanities, and perhaps especially in English. The other half is that we need to pass on an appreciation of a cultural tradition.

As a department chair, I’m used to giving the usual run-down on critical thinking in making arguments for English studies. They generally sell well with provosts and deans because they both seem to comport with traditional practices of the humanities while at the same time being a marketable skill to discuss with skeptical external constituencies. On the other hand, I’m not completely convinced that the humanities are the only place to get critical thinking skills. What, they aren’t doing critical thinking in the hard and social sciences? I think we sometimes assume that because different fields investigate different data sets, they are therefore not developing critical thinking. What is an economist doing but attempting to think critically about received wisdom as applied to sets of data in the economy?

Thus, I fully appreciate, while not going all the way with, Bauerlein’s argument that the humanities have to be about familiarizing students with a substantive subject matter and understanding its active or potential value in the world and for themselves. In my own terms, I think that English studies, especially, has to be more than a critical project; it has to be a constructive project as well.

My comments on Bauerlein’s blog were as follows:

I think the comments above that suggest an exclusive identification of literary or humanistic studies with critique has become strangely vacuous are right on the mark. And, in reality, it’s not clear that critique per se has changed very much over the course of the last two or three decades. This is because critique must always have an object of its attention and is therefore always dependent on some kind of received culture.

In an older form of literary study, criticism meant not simple-minded passing on, nor simple-minded tearing apart, but critical evaluation. That is, what is worth passing on, what is worth reading, and for what reasons? The literary academy and the humanities more broadly have almost entirely defaulted on this particular task because to make an affirmative act of construction is to lay oneself open to the, I guess, humiliating preference for deconstruction or other forms of political critique.

In our curriculum I teach both the courses on literary theory and a course on book reviewing, and in both attempt to get students to think in concrete and critical ways about what’s worth reading and why. I have to say that students find the classes incredibly important to them. Far from feeling like the web—with its massive democratization of product and opinion—has done away with the need for discussion of value, they really find it an important question. Why should I spend my time with this book rather than that book? With Mark Bauerlein’s blog instead of Moby Dick? These are theoretical questions, critical questions, and questions that involve themselves in the construction of traditions and cultures rather than simply critiquing them.

In my own view, I think the current explosion of textual matter on the web—whether blogs, or online fictions, or newspapers, or e-books—has created a critical situation very similar to that which existed after the invention of the printing press. In a certain sense, the invention of the press changes the function of criticism. Prior to widely accessible print and the expansion of both reading audience and authorship beyond the narrow confines of the clerisy and aristocracy, criticism more or less existed to catalogue and discuss the characteristics of good writing. This was not, properly speaking, an evaluative project. Things that were published and preserved were, by and large, already considered good. “Criticism,” such as it was, was more a taxonomic affair, describing the goodness that was already known to exist.

After Gutenberg, criticism became the task of defining what, out of the immense amount of material on hand that could be read, really should be read. What was worth preserving? What things being produced by the new class of writer/readers deserved a status similar to that of the ancients as worthy of being preserved? To some degree, we are still at the dawning moment of that part of the internet revolution. What is really worth reading? Even, what is really worth writing? Is a blog worth doing? Is it real writing or is it conversation. Is real thinking going on, or is it ephemeral. To some degree popularity sites like Technorati or Digg that try to apply the democratic impulses of the web to blogs and the like are trying to serve an evaluative function. The wisdom of crowds applied to the function of criticism. Will this work for the long term? I have my doubts. There’s always been a tendency to try to insist that “best-sellers” are those things that are really valuable, but their value hasn’t been sustainable for more than a generation or two. I suspect that we are still working out the function of criticism at the present time. What shape will criticism take? How will we decide what is worth reading and writing. How will we decide what being written—or perhaps we should now simply say, “being produced—on the web are the kinds of things that should be passed down to our children as we attempt the inevitable human activity of forging a common culture.

After a variety of comments for Bauerlein with varying levels of vitriol in play, I followed up on a comment that made the argument that we need to be teaching things that students are comfortable with, but also things that sting them with their unfamiliarity.

My response:

Tim, I wonder in this day and age whether reading almost anything longer than a blog will be, for many students, a de-familiarizing and unsettling experience. That is, one doesn’t have to buy in to all the hype about a reading crisis to recognize that the nature of reading is changing, and the ability to read extended and complex texts has been eroding among college graduates.

Because we are so habituated by our own reading practices and training, we often make deeply flawed assumptions about what students will find de-familiarizing. And, to be honest, we often default to simple-minded notions of unfamiliar cultural content. “De-familiarization” first developed among formalists as a conception of how literary language served to shock readers from their comfortable linguistic frames of reference. On that score, I think we often find that contemporary students find reading much of anything “literary” at all to be unfamiliar, defamiliarizing, and unsettling. Especially so in poetry, but in a different register in long novels and plays they no longer even bother to try and read. Rather than experiencing the sting of defamiliarization in Shakespeare’s Tempest, students are quite as likely to go get the Sparknotes so they can pass the test and even write their essays.

In this kind of reading context, it seems to me that discussions of how to upset the cultural applecart on the basis of whether folks read Shakespeare or not are increasingly arcane and disconnected from cultural realities in which long form reading is taking place. While I agree that the task can’t be a simple passing on of received tradition, I think the cultural situation does call for engaging students with the question of why certain forms of reading may be valuable, and thinking through what texts might be worth the time required for reading them. In other words, the philosophical conception of “The Good” surely can’t be “Whatever has always been.” But it also surely can’t be, “Whatever I decide might make my students talk in class,” or “Whatever an individual wants it to be.” To go this route is, I think, to give up on the question of “The Good” entirely, something I think most students are still unwilling to do.

This is something I find repeatedly in play among literary intellectuals. It’s almost as if we are so hermetically sealed within the discourses and practices of our discipline that we can’t conceive of a world where the fact of reading a book might be uncomfortable or unfamiliar for students. When I raise this problem at conferences, I repeatedly have professors reply by saying “Everyone I know reads.” I want to say “Duh. You work in an English department.”

This fact, I think, calls in to question some of the basic premises of the canon wars that preoccupied folks at Duke while I was there as a grad student in the late eighties and early nineties. In the world that we are entering and are now in, people who read literature as an important part of their cultural lives are a distinct minority group that all have more in common with one another regardless of ethnicity, sexual identity, religion or gender, than they do with other members of their various identity groups—at least insofar as reading is concerned. That is, reading books, and reading literature especially, marks them out as different, as Other from the culture they inhabit–whether we are thinking of an ethnic, a national, a religious or a sexual culture. We need to recognize that we are quickly entering a world, and are already in it, wherein the simple fact of reading Moby Dick or Shakespeare will be a stinging act of defamiliarization that unsettles the cultural life of students.

This doesn’t mean that Bauerlein is right that we need to be passing on a received tradition—though I think students value that more than we sometimes realize. But it certainly does mean that we have to be involved in a constructive project and not simply a critical project.

Reading as Mapping: Or, Who are the Well-Read? And Does Anyone Really Care?

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My son is a seventh grader who plays up a grade on an eighth grade basketball team. They make the Bad News Bears look talented. I was talking with a friend whose daughter plays on a high school team that’s also been struggling, and I asked him if it was as bad as our eighth graders. “Worse,” he said, “because at least there’s hope.”

How true. With absolutely low expectations and little hope of victory, we can be thrilled when the eighth grade boys manage to keep the game within 30 points. By contrast, our boys’ high school basketball team has lost a dozen games by less than five points, and the girls’ team has played well below expectations, their dismal records depressing by virtue of what might have been.

I feel a little bit the same way about Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.Despite my disparagement of Bayard in yesterday’s post, it’s fair to say that Bayard has 15 pages of very provocative insights. But his tendency to extend them to absurd extremes, to make mind-bending leaps of illogic without sufficient evidence, and his willingness to bury those insights beneath pages of mind-numbingly dull and uninventive reading—to say nothing of his generally flippant tone—leads me to dislike the book all the more despite the important things it might have to say. What might have been, I want to say. What might have been.

For me, Bayard raises the question of what we must mean when we imagine being well read—a class of persons that seems increasingly rarified and relatively unimportant, but which bears a residual level of cultural respect, if not capital, in any case. In America, the Well-Read are something like the British Royal family: ceremonial but without any real power.

Bayard points out that given the tens, the hundreds, of thousands of books that we could possibly imagine being worth reading, there is some literal sense in which all of us will have always read almost nothing at all. He tells the story from Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities wherein the hero walks through a library of 3 and a half million books and realized that, were he to read a book a day, he would have to live ten thousand years to read them all. I am reminded of my favorite professor in college, Joe McClatchey, whom we saw walking across campus one day, a troubled look on his face. Asked what was wrong, he said with some intense sadness that he had just realized how many great books there were that he would never have the chance to read.

I am reminded of Thomas Merton’s dictum for Christians that in comparison to the love and wisdom of God, Christians must begin each day realizing they are starting over as infants. None of us is ever really well-read in this quantitative sense, and so being well-read means something other than or different than “reading everything” or even “reading a lot.” It has nothing, in fact, to do with an amount of reading whatsoever.

The traditional canonical arguments would suggest that it means reading “the best” that has been thought and written, while canonical revisionists would, of course, seek to change or alter what is contained on this list of “bests,” or else challenge and change what is meant by “best.” I am unimpressed by this quest for the right list of “bests”; even were we to agree on what the category entails, it seems to me there are too many very good books out there to read, even in the relatively narrow field defined problematically as “literature”–leave alone philosophy, history, theology, social theory, and etcetera–for us to ever imagine something like a comprehensive literacy.

Bayard takes things in an intriguingly different direction. Being well read is not a matter of what you read at all. Being well read is not a matter of assimilating a particular number of titles. Indeed, for Bayard, being well read has nothing to do with reading particular books at all. Instead, being well read is a function of understanding the relationships between books, an understanding that, once mastered, allows someone to place books with only the most cursory understanding of their contents.

To some degree with is a literacy of location—thus the title of this blog, reading as mapping. To read a single book is a little like examining the details of a single city block. I could read a hundred different titles on a great books list, but if I am only wrapped up in the reading of individual texts, what I will come away with is an intimate knowledge of 100 different city blocks.

For Bayard, by contrast, being well-read is not achieved through the intimate, rigorous, and close reading of discrete texts, but through understanding the map of texts, the way texts and their properties fit together, cohere, differ, contrast. As Bayard puts it:

“As cultivated people know (and, to their misfortune, uncultivated people do not), culture is above all a matter of orientation. Being cultivated is a matter not of having read any book in particular, but of being able to find your bearings within books as a system, which requires you to know that they form a system and to be able to locate each element in relation to the others. The interior of the book is less important than its exterior, or, if you prefer, the interior of the book is its exterior, since what counts in a book is the books alongside it.

“It is, then, hardly important if a cultivated person hasn’t read a given book, for though he has no exact knowledge of its content, he may still know its location, or in other words how it is situated in relation to other books. This distinction between the content of a book and its location is fundamental, for it is this that allows those unintimidated by culture to speak without trouble on any subject” (10-11)

Before questioning this, I want to affirm how very true it really is, and how important it might be for thinking through what we might mean by cultural literacy. I am often poignantly struck by students who come to me for a list of books they ought to read. I always tell them, read authors they like, and then read what those writers liked, and then read writers who liked those writers. I’m not quite saying the same thing as Bayard, but I am trying to suggest to students that reading a particular list of books is not going to be that helpful.

I think Bayard pushes me a little further here in making me see that I’m also trying to get students in to some kind of system of relationship between texts. Who influences whom, and why does it matter. This is one way of mapping—probably not a very good one. What professors know that students do not are not just individual texts. What professors know is how to read the maps of texts that students don’t even really comprehend exist. The championing of “native knowledges” and reading preferences of students as is common in some pedagogies is of limited use if we don’t see that we are leaving students impotent in understanding how maps of reading work in culture. How can they map their own preferences on to the map of literature—or, how can they challenge whatever maps currently exist.

In a particular sense it seems to me that what Bayard is doing is applying the insights of structural linguistics to the world of books. Imagine each book as a word. Understanding the word by itself is not important, and indeed, if a person only knew one word we justifiably and correctly call such a person an idiot (clinical definition, a person who can do only one thing or speak to only himself—kind of like writing this blog).

However, the structural linguists rightly point out that the meaning of any word is only functional within the entire system of words, and that it is important to understand the shape of that system, that discourse, in some ways more important to understand that than to understand discrete words themselves—a logical impossibility in the thinking of structural linguists since there is no word “in itself”. To apply a Wittgensteinian take on this rather than a structural linguistic take, we rightly note that the meaning of a word is in its use. We can often determine or broadly guess the meaning of a particular word we have never heard before by hearing the word in use, in a particular context. And in any case we come to understand a word not by getting definitions but by learning how the word is put in to use in the systems of language.

Bayard is saying something very similar about what it means to be culturally literate. Cultural literacy is not the grasping of lists of facts or texts—as E.D. Hirsch or Allan Bloom would have had it back in the 80s. Literacy is understanding how the system of books work so that, even when we have not read a particular book, we can determine without too much trouble its general place in the system of books as a whole.

On the whole, I think Bayard underplays the significance of reading particular texts, and the particular kind of sophistication that come through these local knowledges. Bayard’s assertions that it is more important to know the map than to have visited the locations on the map, bears a certain truth. But it’s not clear that a person who reads a map, but who has never seen a mountain or who has never walked through a city block, or who has never viewed the sea, can properly be said to understand a map at all.

Imagine a person who grows up in a closed room and is taught only to read maps, and he becomes thoroughly familiar with maps and the relationships between them. It’s not clear, however, that such a person can really read a map if, when taken out of his room, he cannot recognize a city street. Instead the person is merely reading hieroglyphics without any sense of the relationship of those hieroglyphics to the cultural life in which they are embedded. In other words, a certain level of extended close reading is necessary for the reading of book maps to make any sense at all. Reading of individual books is necessary to the possibility of reading maps in a way we simply take for granted. On the other hand, this having been said, it’s not clear we can really understand our own geography in the fullest ways possible, without understanding the ways that geography is related to other geographies.

In other words, we need to both read the maps and walk the streets. The relationship between the two elements is far more dynamic and interactive than Bayard seems to allow. The knowledge of individual books is only coherent by understanding how to map the book to a particular bookish geography. However, maps only make sense to us at all if we have some knowledge and understanding about at least some, and preferably many, individual books. We can only understand relationship through understanding things being related. Relationship itself, as Kierkegaard well understood, is the most abstract and insubstantial—yet unavoidable and necessary—of philosophical concepts. To get at the ways in which books relate, we have to grasp at least some things of book themselves.

Many more things to say here, but I think I’m going to stop for the night. Two main things on my mind. One, I think the multi-ethnic canon wars have often been fought over lists, and have thus been only marginally effective in challenging the most important thing: the way books are mapped. While we read a few new books, we mostly haven’t changed our understanding of how books relate to each other. We haven’t changed the map; we’ve just added heretofore-unacknowledged trees and rocky outcroppings, while leaving the basic contours of the geographic spaces of literature untouched. Second, and it might be related, but I’m not sure. I think we still do a better job of communicating to undergraduates the importance of the close reading of discrete texts than we do the importance of relationship between texts. Students come away with a strong sense of reading, but not a strong sense of how to map books in their experience.