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Introduction: Death of a Reading Culture?
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10217 |
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MODERN THOUGHT
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8 / 1993 |
491 Words |
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Reading presupposes writing. Or does it? When we read we somehow elicit the meaning of words and what they signify; this is done according to rules that can be quite consciously formulated, even if for most people and for much of the time they reside only in habits.
Can the same be said of what is read? While writing is also carried out by formal rules, either explicitly or implicitly in habits, we read many things that were not intentionally set down for scrutiny. The Pawnee scout, the Baker Street detective, the particle physicist, and the geneticist, all read what they choose to take as signs, but none of them claim that what they read is writing, that what they read is a text deliberately and intentionally left for them. And yet Galileo said that the book of Nature is written in the language of mathematics. Is this to be taken literally or metaphorically?
The arts or skills of writing and reading, the arts of literacy, convey to their possessors the power to give and take meaning. But these powers, when elaborated, are not confined to the relation between text and writer, or text and author. It also extends to the relation between writer and reader, and beyond them to a whole pattern of social organization that literacy requires and also makes possible.
If the social organization changes, then so will the means and mode of communication; if literacy--the recently dominant mode of communication--changes, then so will the social organization that is both its result and support, as Alvin Kernan dramatically points out in the first of our essays. We are going through a transition from a literary culture to a culture based upon visual and oral modes. This must, of necessity, bring with it social disturbances as new technology creates sources of new power and redistribution of old power. The literary culture is by no means dead, but we do not yet understand the full scope of the changes to come nor our own proper response to them.
Martin Mueller, in our second essay, brings together the ethical and the intellectual in his fiction of the person-text and putting the self second. And he discusses how the absence of the person of the author is the source of both textual strength and weakness.
The final essay is a most interesting case study of how reading was used and understood in Renaissance and Elizabethan times. Anthony Grafton displays both the ways in which reading has been understood and practiced and the growth of a new academic
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