Last fall the NEA’s Reading at Risk report evidenced a decline in literary reading, particularly among young adults.  For some English professors, this was cause for celebration.

One would expect that professors of literature and writers of literature would be dismayed by the Reading at Risk report put out by the National Endowment for the Arts last summer.  The report showed that literary reading — defined as non-required reading of any novel, short story, play, or poetry in the previous 12 months – -has declined from 56.9 percent in 1982 to 46.7 percent in 2002.  The largest rate of decline, a full 17 points, was among young adults, 18 to 24.  

Journalists and commentators responded to the report with grave concern.  Newsweek was one of the many general interest publications that reported the study’s findings with alarm, wondering “not just if Americans will ever be on the same page, but if they’ll be on any page at all.”  The Christian Science Monitor warned of a “dumbing down of America,” while the New York Times spoke of “The Closing of the American Book.” Since the release of Reading at Risk in July of 2004, more than 500 stories and editorials have appeared.
 
Oddly, however, literature professors have had little public reaction.  That isn’t accidental.  Many of them regard literature as a dubious category and so its decline is not to be lamented.  For some, it harkens back to a canon with dead white male authors.  For others, literature resists the tide of postmodernism, which jumbles high literature and low entertainment with ironic glee.  For still others, it fails to acknowledge the digital revolution, which replaces traditional writing with hypertext, websurfing, Instant Messaging, and the like.  Whatever the reason, some literature professors — those charged with preserving and imparting the literary tradition — have turned to other subjects.  If Reading at Risk reports that literary experience is waning, their response is “Let it go.”

For those who live and work in the world where one is held to standards of a trade and is expected to produce a quality product, this doesn’t make sense.  But an alternate universe exists in the halls of most English departments, where ‘sense’ or logic is viewed as a vestige of an oppressive system of western civilization.  In this alternate universe, anything “western” (lower case deliberate) is suspect.  Anything “non-western” is to be admired, sentimentalized, or rationalized.

If you don’t believe me, walk down the hallways of English departments and note the posters.  You may notice one much like one I saw last fall at a Georgia university.  It displays a photograph of a beaded vest, the vest itself one of the required “texts” for a graduate seminar on Early Multicultural Native American Literature.  The purpose of the class is to “dismantle the problematic intellectual barrier between the ‘prehistoric’ and ‘historic’ periods.”  Students in this class, the professor tells them on his web page, will “actively participate in an academic revolution designed to tear down one of the last bastions of Eurocentrism” as they work to “open up vast new areas of ‘American literature’ that have yet to be fully explored.” 

According to the professor, American literature begins not with the writing in English by the first Puritan settlers, but with rock art of Barrier Canyon dating back to 6000-1000 BCE.  The required texts, accordingly, range from “rock art to spirituals.”  Recognizing that such “texts” do not lend themselves to scholarly papers, the professor promises that because the class “will be venturing where few Americanists dare to travel, the class will stress intellectual creativity.  Students will be actively encouraged to write using a cyclical rather than a linear sense of ‘history.’” To this end, students will be encouraged to use “creative writing and/or oral storytelling techniques in their literary analysis.”  He promises to do his best to arrange for a Cherokee storyteller to come to class.

This course is not an anomaly.  The turn toward non-literary “text” is now a working principle.  If you are enrolled in a survey class in American or world literature that uses the enormously popular Norton anthology you will see the inclusion of creation stories, rain dances, and scalp dances.  In the instruction manual, the editors acknowledge the idea that students may find scalp dances or rain dances a novel form of “literature,” and assure the teacher that in “the very Euro-American context of a modern college or high school classroom, [good strategies] will take shape if literary culture and history can be presented as something changeful, alive, and available to all who read patiently and in good faith.”

What students get in anthologies is the end result of academic conferences where professors take foolhardy leaps into new dreamed up topics for dissection with their own contrived theories.  One such conference that gained the notice of the popular press was Yale’s “Regarding Michael Jackson: Performing Racial, Gender, and Sexual Difference Center Stage” last September. Such presentations as “Regarding Michael Jackson, Queer Theory, and Racialization” and “Faux Pas de Deux: The Liminal Movement of Michael Jackson,” delivered at this conference, though, represent the change in tenor of academic studies — the turn away from the written and evidentiary to the visual and speculative.

There is perhaps no other department in which this shift has occurred more dramatically — or to what should be more consternation — than in English departments.

Discussions of neologilistic topics like “racialization” and “liminality” are common in English classrooms and conferences.  Universities write checks for faculty to present papers at conferences like the College English Association’s 2005 meeting on the theme of “Space(s).”  This motif — “Space(s)” — echoes the topic of borders (the open-ended “liminality” of the Michael Jackson conference that is applied across disciplines to “texts” and is thereby used as a convenient tool for advancement of political theories).  Calls for papers include those on the panel topics “Diseased spaces: the hospital, the asylum,” “Gendered spaces,” “Inner and outer spaces,” “Cyberspace: the Web, hypertext, the cyborg,” and “Virtual spaces: the video game, the Web, the web-page.”

These professor-hipsters and theorists have long been on a mission to eliminate books (those with cohesive ideas and plots).  A logical outcome of their promotion is the inclusion of video games into the new canon of “texts.”  

At the “Form, Culture, & Video Game Criticism” symposium sponsored by the English Department at Princeton University last year, papers included “But our princess is in another castle: towards a ‘close-playing’ of Super Mario Bros,” and “‘Can I please reload from last save game?’: Getting it wrong (and right) in a nascent discipline.”  Yes, video game commentary is now a “discipline.”  UCLA, too, sponsored a Digital Cultures Graduate Conference last spring, “Narr@tive: Digital Storytelling.”  

For graduate and undergraduate students who now enroll in classes on Oprah Winfrey or The Matrix, information about such conferences would not raise an eyebrow.  Many universities substitute films for all or some of the “texts” used in freshman composition classes, and instructors trained in feminist pedagogy tell students that the linear thinking required for reading literature is a tool of the patriarchy.  

For decades now, professors of English have been telling students that traditional literary standards have no validity, that indeed they are evidence of a political hegemony.  They have demanded their students “resist” and “confront” literary texts such as those by Shakespeare or Solzhenitsyn.  What they have put in place are their own media preferences.  It is no wonder that they are not concerned about the decline in literary reading.  Some, in fact, celebrate it.