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Critics are panicking over the demise of the book. But, in the midst of the digital revolution, Holy Cross continues to cultivate lifelong readers.
By James Dempsey
There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry—
—Emily Dickinson
My working and charitable assumption is that half the class has read half the work. I even semi-seriously thought it might make sense to teach a course in the fall called “The First Half of Long Novels,” followed by the spring course "The Second Half of Long Novels.”
—From “Huckleberry Who?” in The Chronicle of Higher Education, by Professor Lennard J. Davis, the University of Illinois at Chicago
At more or less regular intervals since the early 1960s, when Newton Minow recoiled in horror at the “vast wasteland” of television culture that he saw metastasizing across American life, reading in general and the book in particular have been proclaimed dead. In recent years, with reading being further crowded out of our lives by the Internet, the dark jeremiads on the demise of reading continue.
The titles of the books and articles on the subject tell most of the story: “The Death of Reading: Will a Nation that Stops Reading Eventually Stop Thinking?” by Mitchell Stephens; The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, by Sven Birkerts; “The Closing of the American Book,” by Andrew Solomon; “Cultural atrophy: the decline of reading,” by Amy Cookson.
The august National Endowment for the Arts joined in the chorus in 2004 with Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America, which reported less reading taking place across the board, with the steepest fall, a whopping 28 percent, in the youngest age groups. Newspapers—themselves suffering from declining circulation—are reducing or cutting pages devoted to book reviews.
Nor is the phenomenon viewed as merely esthetically damaging. Author Andrew Solomon sees the death of reading as a national health crisis. “That the rates of depression should be going up as the rates of reading are going down is no happenstance,” he writes. “Meanwhile, there is some persuasive evidence that escalating levels of Alzheimer's disease reflect a lack of active engagement of adult minds. While the disease appears to be determined in large part by heredity and environmental stimulants, it seems that those who continue learning may be less likely to develop Alzheimer’s.”
Of course, there are two sides to every issue. What is rebuffed by one thinker is embraced just as passionately by another. There are those who see in the world of hypertext, for instance, a new paradigm for literature, a breaking beyond linearity and horizontalism. Others think this technology a mere gimmick, something only a little more intellectually robust than the choose-your-own-ending tales that were popular with younger readers some years ago. And one has to wonder, if readers can choose their own endings, what happens to Aristotelian unity?
For many, the migration of the word from printed page to the ethereal confines of hyperspace threatens to do away with that absurdly archaic artifact of ink, glue and dead trees we call the book. As for the newspaper, which poet and English professor Christopher Jane Corkery remembers being referred to as “the poor man’s university,” one can almost guarantee its shape-shift from the rustling, inky broadsheets and tabloids of today to a crisp and unwrinkling presentation on the Almighty Web—where it will be animated, busy, in glorious color, and, naturally, “interactive” (one of the Internet’s most impertinent claims; true reading is always interactive.)
“I really don't know whether we'll be printing the Times in five years,” Arthur Sulzberger, owner, chairman and publisher of The New York Times was reported as saying, “and you know what? I don’t care either.”
Before we all start sharpening our knives for the autopsy of the book and begin penning eulogies for the act of reading, however, let us pause to talk with some of those for whom reading is central to their lives—those whose business, in one way or another, involves the writing and reading of words.
The Joy of Reading, continued>>>
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17 Suggestions - Faculty, students and administrators offer their recommendations for a summer of reading
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