In his dialog with Phaedrus, Socrates reminds us of a story told from ancient Egypt:
Everything was good and grand in the world of the gods and the world of man. Men did what they did. Gods did what they did. And that was that. One day, Theuth (the god who invented numbers, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, dice and letters) approached Ammon (another god) after a particularly productive reflection with a concern of his. Ammon, he said, you know those humans sure look happy but let me tell you I got something for them that would make their lives much easier. You see, in all my wisdom of quantification I invented this little thing called letters. Of all the things I have invented, I think letters will help humans remember more, it'll let them write the day of the week, write down how much grain they have, etc.
Ammon took the letters from Theuth and looked at them a little bit and handed them back to Theuth with something short of amazement. You see, Ammon looked like he didn't give two shits about what Theuth was showing him. Well, this made Theuth pretty upset so Ammon proceeded to explain "Now you got it all backwards here Theuth. These letters are great and all but they won't help human memory, in fact they'll practically destroy it! Once these humans start trusting these letters to remember for them, their own natural memories and abilities will fall to pieces. This memory will make those that learn it more forgetful, the only thing you've done is invented something that will forever remind humans of how stupid they actually are. Instead of taking the time to learn and remember their experiences all they need to do is write them down and reread them without actually knowing them!*
Now why in the world would I start something off with that? Precisely because Socrates brings up a good point, mainly: What in the world is writing good for? As an English major I've been trained to spout a barrage of responses, ranging from the rhetorical to the ridiculous. Writing can help us capture a past that is slowly receding. Writing can be used in creative ways that are unique to itself, things that speech will never accomplish. And on and on. However, we still need to ask: in the end of the day, what is reading/writing? I think Socrates gives us a great answer: it is a technology for forgetting.
One important thing to remember is that in Socrates days the world was much smaller, and what constituted knowledge was often written down in a few books (even if a hundred is a few). Still, from his point of view, we could actually know all the knowledge that was out there (or at least his sheltered Greek oriented understanding of knowledge). And how, might we ask, does one go about knowing? For Socrates, unlike all of us studying English, learning means nothing short of memorizing and speaking.
So what does this have to do with English majors? Well one thing, we know where we stand. In a modern age we cannot store all of the information out there in our minds. Instead, we create books to remember for us, we create neural pathways outside of ourselves in the form of books. Those of us, like historians and literature scholars, then take it upon ourselves to become the collective memory makers of our modern culture. During any day to day experience, one could ask: What would my grand-father think of rocket ships? Well, we could get a pretty good idea of what he
could think by going back and visiting what people wrote about rocket ships in the 1900's.
This is good and all, but we are not just in a modern age. Academics the world over are constantly talking about post-modern literature, post-modern politics, post-modern everything! And, I believe, we have to deal with the idea of post-modern reading. Mainly, in this digital age, we have to ask ourselves: as literary critics is our way of life worth living? Or, where do literary scholars, and their dependence on the book, fit into the post-modernizing world?
From the Kindle to Twitter, Digital poetics to spoken word, the new world of creative expression seems to be leaving us book loving persons stuck in history's closet. Our first instinct is to shout: "What are you talking about! The book isn't dead, you just aren't enlightened enough to realize how important it is!" The sad thing is whether we are right or not, a world is slowly developing ignoring our constant battle cry for the good old days of textual analysis under a lamp, underlining page after page of our favorite Faulkner novel.
So what, as understanding literary critics should we do? Should we burn down our nearest google database and hunt down all the staff at Amazon for their blasphemy to the every great novel? Or should we look at how our own sense of what knowledge is (i.e. textual knowledge) should be questioned (or at least pondered.)
I would say that this whole question of "is literary studies (in the traditional sense) dead?" is nothing more than a misunderstanding of how knowledge works. As Nicholas Carr makes clear in his brilliant article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" we aren't loosing our ability to read books, we are simply shifting the way we "read." Reading isn't analogous to reading a novel, reading includes all sorts of symbolic analysis, whether that deals with images, sounds, video or texts. All of these symbolic systems (such as images and sound) add up to our total comprehensive literacy or the way we are able to discern patterns among certain systems. If we embrace this idea of a literacy that includes multiple systems than we can come to an understanding and acceptance of the changing literary climate.
Just like Socrates lamented the rise of the literary culture, we are often quick to lament the fall of our beloved book based academia. However, we shouldn't be so quick to ask what we have to lose, but also the many things we have to gain in this current change from books to website and beyond.
Notes:
*An actual transcript of the dialog between Socrates and Phaedrus can be found in the dialogue entitled Phaedrus. A link is provided although I don't know how accurate it is: http://www.freeranger.com/chris/MM7.htm)
Nicholas Carr's article "Is Google Making Us Stupid" can be found by visiting The Atlantics website here: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google
