Next spring, for the first time in forty years, I will not be teaching Introduction to Literature. The reason is neither budget cuts nor the sinking lifeboat of the humanities. In fact, I asked not to be assigned this class even though at my community college level, Introduction to Literature is a “plum” course. Or it was, because now the Internet has made the teaching of literature a sad and disheartening mess.
Search engines and electronic information storage have made us all empty and stupid. Memory is externalized and disembodied in the cloud; imagining is externalized in film, TV, and Google images. As a result, many students find reading uncomfortable because they have been fed images all their lives and can no longer “make pictures” in their heads. Diverted by entertainment, gaming, and social media, students no longer develop the religious, historical, or cultural knowledge essential for literary study. The “laterally associative” nature of electronic linking replaces the “vertically cumulative” richness and linearity of print. When that happens, everything that depends on the linear disappears: grammar, logic, history, narrative, and morality. Nor do students develop the necessary vocabulary from using email, Twitter, blog posts, and comment threads. These losses make literary comprehension and appreciation, much less literary interpretation, impossible. Mark Edmundson relates a story “about a Columbia University instructor who issued a two-part question at the end of his literature course. Part one: What book in the course did you most dislike? Part two: What flaws of intellect or character does that dislike point up in you?” The format and content of the Internet creates an environment seemingly designed to cause students to fail as readers, to dislike books and, consequently, to suffer from books’ demands.
First there was Google: faster, cleaner, and more copious than its predecessors and competitors. Then came Web 2.0 with Wikipedia and YouTube; each one was a body blow to the teacher of literature who now lies senseless on the academic canvass. Jane Smiley talks about how a novelist takes you along word by word, but in the electronic world, faster is better; students are impatient at any delay, even pacing. One consequence of our accelerated nervous systems is that we have all become skimmers, getting the gist, jumping to the end while glazing over sentences longer than nine words.
Happily for the numbed and impatient student, Google makes actually reading literature unnecessary. Instead of plodding through Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” and its “thee and thou” nineteenth century diction, students can just Google it (approximately 524,000 occurrences) and find summaries, notes, essays, quotes, analyses, interpretations, pictures, even lesson plans. The Wikipedia entry also gives students a plot summary and character analysis along with predigested comments students can offer as their own. Students who are “visual learners” can go to YouTube and find a video version of the story to watch instead of read. A popular “Young Goodman Brown” film is a high school parody mash-up of Hawthorne and Star Wars with Luke Skywalker in the role of Goodman Brown, complete with light-saber.
Lately, I also find that my lit teacher mojo has stopped working. Once I could sex up an intro class by darkening the room and running the music video of INXS’s “Devil Inside,” a modern visualizing of what is perennial about “Young Goodman Brown.” No more. Now students are already permanent residents of “cyberia,” and “oh wow” has become “ho hum.”
Worse, the Internet has turned out to be especially adept at the replication, multiplication, and distribution of error. Once, I downloaded and Xeroxed Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” (a story clearly informed by “Young Goodman Brown”). To my dismay, I discovered that the Internet is not sanguine about dialect. O’Connor’s unforgettable character The Misfit complains that “Jesus thown everything off balance.” But the Internet version had decided that what O’Connor had meant to say was “Jesus shown everything off balance,” a wrenching distortion and a corruption that would have infuriated the meticulous O’Connor. When I say that the Internet multiplies and distributes this kind of error, consider this data point: Google gives me approximately 74,000 occurrences of Shakespeare’s immortal “we are such stuff as dreams are made of . . . .” Of course, that’s 74,000 errors since Prospero actually says “we are such stuff as dreams are made on . . . .”
Nor do my most inventive essay assignments work anymore. Another of Hawthorne’s short stories is “Wakefield” (1835), the enigmatic account of a man who “under pretence of going a journey, took lodgings in the next street to his own house, and there, unheard of by his wife or friends, and without the shadow of a reason for such self-banishment, dwelt upwards of twenty years.” In 1984, Donald Hall published his poem “Mr. Wakefield on Interstate 90” in The New Republic. I used to give my students the poem after they had read short stories by Hawthorne (not “Wakefield”), Conrad, Melville, Hemingway, O’Connor, Barth, and Borges. Then I sent them to the library to burrow into books, combing stories for the source of Hall’s allusion. Then they would write a paper on the relationship between the poem and story.
Google, obviously, wrecked that assignment and spoiled the fun of the literary Easter egg hunt.
When Hall collected his poem in The Happy Man, he changed the title to “Mr. Wakeville on Interstate 90,” clouding the previous allusion. That let me surprise students with the new version and another paper having them analyze the effects of that change and his other revisions. But now any student who has done the first part of the assignment has already discovered the YouTube video of Hall reading “Mr. Wakeville” at the University of Virginia in 2007 and here at Monterey Peninsula College in 2009. Goodbye stimulating surprise.
To show the importance of a story’s end, I used to have students read a story from which I had amputated the final paragraph. After discussion, I could reveal my duplicity, hand out the real ending, and continue discussing. This was a theatrical, shocking, enlivening teaching strategy; now, searching for a clue to the story, students have already found the text online and know that the handout is incomplete.
Another assignment was to view Robert Enrico’s Academy Award film “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (1963), then read Ambrose Bierce’s short story of the same name (1890) and write a comparison and contrast. Telling Bierce’s story with words differs radically from telling it with images, editing, lighting, acting, etc. Unfortunately, now almost 20,000 such Bierce-Enrico comparisons pop up on Google, from essaydepot.com to SparkNotes, ripe for the picking. And just last week a good student turned in a paper based on his viewing of an appalling, redubbed version of Enrico’s masterpiece on YouTube. The film’s entire soundtrack is now only Jethro Tull’s interminable “Thick as a Brick.” No birdsong and rushing water, no ticking watch, no “Livin’ Man,” just a major head fake for students who don’t know the difference.
In the end, I believe the situation I have described (massive availability of predigested opinion, the rule of images and rewired neural processing, text degradation from replicated error, and hermeneutic contamination, primarily from grade school parody) has something in common with Pandora’s Box, Humpty Dumpty, and the genie out of the bottle; it cannot be undone. Some critics will surely dismiss my conclusions as reactionary and blame either my lack of creativity or my lack of Internet savvy. They will be wrong on both counts. Pre-YouTube, I was using music videos to teach literature thirty years ago. The new medium is simply not an effective vehicle for the old medium. Thus, the situation is not limited to the teaching of literature but has implications for the creation of literature as well. Birkerts probably says it best in Reading Life (2007), “What finally is at issue is nothing less than the status, the perceived value, of imagination itself.”
Travis
| November 12, 2012 - 2:04 AM
There certain is some considerable degree of validity to the criticisms, or complaints, described here. However, I think that the choice of canon, and the approach employed in Intro-level Literature courses could probably shoulder some of the blame as well.
Instead of assigning the “great classics” of English and American literature, perhaps we should reassess which works are included in that category, and perhaps we should reassess as well the idea that students need to read precisely these specific books in order to be “edified.” The type of analysis, i.e. the approaches, emphasized in these courses can also be problematic.
I am currently TAing a course on History through Literature, in which we are assigning some classics (e.g. the Pillow Book), but also some contemporary popular literature (e.g. Haruki Murakami). We do not ask students to read with an analytical eye, the kind of reading that makes what should be a “curl up with a good book” enjoyable, relaxing activity into a complex, difficult, cold & calculating analytical one. Instead, we ask students to enjoy the narrative, and to focus on what this book tells us about the historical/cultural context within which the story is set. This helps them imagine certain aspects of Japanese society in certain periods - what it looked like, what it felt like, how society functioned at that time - helping them do precisely the kind of imagining that you claim they are unable to do, and precisely the kind of imagining that is pushed to the side when students are asked to “analyze” books for literary techniques, character motivations, etc.
I think that this Internet influence presents a crisis not just for Literature, but for many, if not all, the Humanities. But, rather than resist, or give up, we have the choice to adapt. Perhaps this crisis is a good wake-up call to help us rethink the assumptions we have been operating on for far too long. Why are the books we consider canon, canon? Why do we assign this book and not that book? Why do we value this interpretive approach and not that one?
I have also TAed for Art History classes, and have found that students can be extremely interested and engaged when you simply approach the subject in a particular way - e.g. the “popular culture” nature of certain types of art, comparing it to anime & manga - instead of another way, e.g. the technical details of composition or brushstroke style. Just because something has been the standard way to teach for ages, or the standard content of that teaching, doesn’t mean it’s objectively the way it always should be.
Travis
| November 12, 2012 - 2:07 AM
Skip the Hawthorne, Hemingway, Conrad, Melville, and other unnecessarily difficult and/or sleep-inducing readings, and assign something else. How about Gibson, Gaiman, and Murakami for a start? Those are excellent writers - real quality literature, not pop pulp fiction - and they might serve students better in providing them with cultural capital for everyday life, not to mention opening their minds to different, interesting, creative ways of conceiving of the world - inspiring imagination.
Joshua Converse
| November 26, 2012 - 1:49 PM
Travis: I took this very class and I can assure you there’s nothing rote, standard or snore-inducing about the teacher, the lecture material or the texts involved. If a student can’t find Hemingway, Conrad, Melville, Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and other NECESSARILY challenging authors worthy and interesting it is not the fault of those authors or their texts or the teachers who assign them. It’s not a matter of pulling a simple switcharoo and coming up with “fresher” authors, (as if there were such a thing)- people are showing up in classes more and more with a deeply impoverished inner world and severe incapacity to deeply consider, to say nothing of sorely lacking technical skills. The thing is Literature classes should be challenging. Education doesn’t always need to entertain, however the internet has 1) formed a back door for lazy students to get over 2) actually rewired the way people receive and understand information. These are not simply challenges to the student reader; they are dangers to the medium of typography and therefore to the practice of deep reading.
Elliott Grotham Rotweil
| January 24, 2013 - 11:32 PM
As a GenXer, the internet became widely disseminated when I was in my late teens. By then, I’d already become an avid reader of physical books so the internet was not a major influence on my childhood development. As a child, if I was curious about a topic, I’d have to go to the library and actively turn the pages of several books to find the information I was looking for. In the course of such “searching” I’d inevitably read more about the subject that I originally thought I needed to know. After all, if we do not read extensively and carefully, how will we ever develop the deep knowledge to even know what questions to ask? Now that so many books are available online, I am grateful to the Internet for providing so much easily accessible reading, however, I often wonder how this new generation of children whose momentary curiosities are immediately gratified with a “ready-made” answer will ever develop curious and inquiring minds. They think they know everything already because google has made them feel superficially all powerful and knowing. No question lingers long enough around in their minds to really make them ask more questions and develop deep, critical thought. Based on what google ranking a particular article or post has, young people begin to spout out the same answer to the same question because they are simply reciting what is most frequently clicked by others on the Internet. This leads them to think in a hive-mind state and of course, the purpose of teaching the Humanities and Liberal Arts is to prevent Hive Mind from destroying the blossoming of each individual’s spirit and intellect. Thank you for caring enough about this topic to whole-heartedly write such a poignant essay. I also thank the above commentors for adding on important additional insight to this post.
Steve H
| February 22, 2013 - 12:06 PM
You have to lecture them firmly about the importance of these works, and give them assignments that force them to do their own thinking instead of just downloading a paper. “Everyone gets the joke except you” can be a powerful motivating force. You ‘let them in on it’ and they suddenly find everyone DOES know about this. Teach them Camus and explain existentialism, and watch them realize their favorite band is existentialist, or that they are immersed in the stuff like a frog in formalin and have been all their lives, and now they have words to explain and resist it. Repeat this over and over with Prufrock and Kubla Khan and To His Coy Mistress and they realize that you are opening doors they didn’t know were closed to them. These things are the crown jewels of our language and culture, and they have a right to know them. Don’t allow someone with Greek letters all over his shirt to read the Iliad without realizing the oaths of brotherhood sworn by those determined men camping by their ships have inspired the ‘fraternity’ that means so much to him.
Maybe the teaching of literature is dying, as you say. But RAGE against the dying of the light!
David Grant
| March 07, 2013 - 2:41 AM
In a sense it’s hard not to get a chuckle out of your complaints. Sometimes you have to see the humor in situations regardless of how frustrating they are. Google ruining your assignments? You could make the argument that we are all raising tech savvy kids, techaholics? http://www.techaholic.ca/ for example. Education is changing. Yes the internet and Google and all those devices are confusing many of us. By the sounds of it you’re not overly “old school” regarding technology/internet, but perhaps your expectations of students isn’t staying current. Does the internet make people lazy? For sure it does. It’s still evolving and we’re not going to know for a few years what it’s doing to our youth.
sohbet
| May 11, 2013 - 6:02 PM
ents that force them to do their own thinking instead of just downloading a paper. “Everyone gets the joke except you” can be a powerful motivating force. You ‘let them in on it’ and they suddenly find everyone DOES know about this. Teach them Camus and explain existentialism, and watch them realize their favorite band is existentialist, or that they are immersed in the stuff like a frog in formalin and have been all their lives, and now they have words to explain and resist it. Rep