Literary types these days seem to feel cornered and outnumbered by “them,” people who simultaneously champion greater use of technology in learning and encourage the decreased study of literary fiction and poetry. One example of this assault on reading is the current movement of public schools toward a Common Core Standards curriculum. Lee Siegel’s recent essay (found on The New Yorker’s blog), “Should Literature Be Useful?”, notes that the Common Core promotes “non-fiction, even stressing the reading of train and bus schedules over imaginative literature.” This feels like a slap in the face to English majors everywhere. Similarly, when book-lovers hear of a movement away from physical books—for instance, the new, all-digital library in San Antonio, Texas—they are often equally shocked and feel personally affronted. I only know this because I am one of those angry, bookish folks, and I surround myself with similar people.
Increasingly, we fear that “they” are waging a war against literature, and that “they” want to replace it with learning in other, more “useful” fields. But who is “they”? Furthermore, who belongs to “us”? Maybe these distinctions are not so black and white. While many of us are up in arms about technological and political threats to literacy and literature, we can’t claim to be true Neo-Luddites. Most of us do not go into people’s homes and chop up and set fire to their computers, using their Kindles for kindling. Nor would many of us argue that the sciences are less worthy of study than are English or History.
In fact, I am currently delivering my thoughts to you via the technology of the Internet. Shenandoah is now entirely online, but this fact does not make its content any less valuable as literature. The convenience of being able to look up stories and poems on the website without having to pay for a subscription or search the library for past issues is actually a huge advantage. With novels and collections of poetry, however, I always prefer to have the actual book. It can be tedious and maddening to have to read a long text or a text that requires annotation online.
So, where the digitization of books is concerned, perhaps there is not so much to fear after all, as long as physical libraries remain in existence and do not all convert to the virtual model. But what about the discouraging state of literary study in public schools under the Common Core Standards? What about those tired arguments that the humanities are useless or irrelevant? Do you, too, fear the coming dystopia in which students are taught to read train and bus schedules at the expense of studying works of literature? Or do you think such happenings provoke more concern than they should?