I’m assuming, and I think not incorrectly, that many of the folks currently reading my meanderings have read and either celebrated or despised (or some deeply ambivalent mixture of the two) Sven Birkerts’ The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age.  For those who haven’t, a quick (and thoroughly unfair) summary:  Books are really, really good for the soul, especially the kinds of books we think of as serious modernist literature, and the world has pretty much gone to hell in a handbasket since the advent of the technologies that are distracting us from engagement with such bound, printed, individualist texts.  To quote:

I do not anticipate a future utterly without books, or bereft of all discourse about ideas, or entirely given over to utilitarian pursuits.  No, what I fear is a continued withering-away of influence, a diminution of the literary which brings about a flattened new world in which only a small coterie traffics in the matters that used to be deemed culturally central. (194)

The most telling section of The Gutenberg Elegies has long been, for me, the coda, entitled “The Faustian Pact,” in which Birkerts claims to have met the devil, and its name is Wired magazine.  In the pages of this publication, an unabashed promoter of the ostensible digital revolution, Birkerts finds evidence of “the argument between technology and soul” (211), an argument that can only be resolved in either capitulation (and damnation) or fervent retreat from the contemporary.

With this background, you’ll understand then why I find Birkerts’ most recent editorial in the new online manifestation of Agni so riotously funny: 

How do I now justify using and promoting a technology which, just a few years ago, I deplored? Do I no longer deplore it? What can I offer to explain myself? I would say—short answer—that the digital age has arrived and that, at least in immediate retrospect, it has the feel of inevitability about it. Who knew? Well, clearly some people did. They read the signs, trusted that it was our collective will to move forward into connectedness and the radically changed private and public space that connectedness makes inevitable. I’ll admit it took me a while to accept this—not the fact of the technology, but the zeal of people everywhere to embrace it. But I have made my correction; I have accepted that there is now a new way of things.

Is it an admission of error, or merely a capitulation?  Is it a move into a truly new medium, or instead a kind of retrenchment of “literary value” in digital form?  Is it any coincidence that Birkerts himself refers to this move as a form of “apostasy”? We can all now welcome, it seems, Mr. Birkerts into the new orthodoxy—but it will be interesting to watch in what this new orthodoxy, for him, consists.

Bill directs our attention to a pretty hefty MeFi discussion of A. S. Byatt’s rather persnickety thoughts about the popularity of the Harry Potter series among adult readers.  Byatt seems, in some utterly inexplicable fashion, to blame “cultural studies” for Potter-mania, suggesting that the “leveling effect” of cultural studies is a result of such scholars being “as interested in hype and popularity as they are in literary merit, which they don’t really believe exists.”

There’s a lot to argue with there—does the study of the popular automatically suggest a failure in merit?  Does an interest in media culture of necessity imply an uncritical celebration thereof?  And what on earth does cultural studies have to do with the average Harry Potter-reading adult?—and the good folks at MetaFilter do lots of that arguing.  And then some.

What can I bring to the table?  First, I have to admit that I have not yet read volume 5, though I did advance-purchase it, and did have a minor conniption fit when I realized that, since I can only receive mail in the office (living in an address-less faculty residence on campus), and since the office is closed on Saturdays, and since we had in fact just moved out of our office and into temporary quarters so hidden from the FedEx guy as to be deemed undeliverable, my delivery would be delayed by Three Whole Days.  After some anxious phone calls and some running around on the part of our summer student worker, I got my Harry 5.0, and happily placed it on my desk, where it remains, waiting patiently for me to finish the other reading I’m doing before plunging in.

In short:  have it; dying to read it; have not yet done so.

I am, however, a student of hype, as Byatt would no doubt consider me, and find myself just as suspicious of those Keepers of the Culture who take such apparent joy in pooh-poohing the popular as I am of obviously market-driven cultural phenomena.  Which is why I was overjoyed to find Charles Taylor’s article, “A. S. Byatt and the Goblet of Bile.” Taylor has the insight to point out that “nothing deserves our respect (or scorn) simply because it’s popular, no matter how popular,” and to suggest that “the literary novelists who get themselves worked up over popular fiction never stop to consider what it is that readers are responding to except, like Byatt, to put it down to the stupidity of the masses.”

These points bear much in common with the argument of my first manuscript, which I recently laid out in part in George’s comments:

The title, at least at the moment, is “The Anxiety of Obsolescence:  The American Novel in the Age of Television,” and the central argument focuses on the apparent conviction embedded in the postmodern novel that it is a form under siege, obsolesced by more flashy contemporary media forms.

But what I’m interested in in that manuscript is not whether the anxiety is warranted—whether the novel is in fact becoming obsolete as a cultural form—but rather what discursive purposes the manifestation of such anxiety serves.  One such purpose is of course the novel’s own continuation; as John Barth suggests in “The Literature of Exhaustion,” one way to deal with such anxiety might be to write a novel about it.  But another such purpose is the intentional self-marginalization of both novel and novelist, such that, as an “alternative” culture, the product and the cultural producer can both benefit from the cachet of edginess—and, not incidentally, appropriate the mantle of marginalization from racial or ethnic or gendered or sexual “minorities.” There’s thus equal parts, in my argument, of nervousness and pleasure in this particular form of anxiety.

Byatt’s somewhat hysterical denunciation of the pleasures of the popular (and, even more importantly, the critical consideration of the popular) suggests that such anxiety might be operative not simply across media boundaries but even within the print form.  The “serious” novelist feels obliged to create distance between her own work and that of her more plebeian but also more successful competitors (what Hawthorne famously referred to as “that damn’d mob of scribbling women”), hinting that her more difficult texts are happiest in their position on the margins of our culture because the mainstream reader is ill-equipped to understand them.

Such bald elitism is pretty difficult to take; hence the uproar on MeFi, Salon, and elsewhere.  But, as Taylor reminds us, there is consolation to be found in the durability of the popular:  Leslie Fiedler, in an interview he gave a few weeks before his death early this year, told of a meeting with a group of “postmoderns” in which he horrified his audience by proclaiming, “Look, let’s be frank with each other: When all of us are forgotten, people will still be remembering Stephen King.”

Sorry for the no-update today, folks (as well as for the unavailability of comments earlier in the day); my hosting provider migrated the site to an upgraded server late last night, and we encountered some minor but pesky database problems as a result.  All seems to be in order now, though I actually need to spend some time doing that reading I’m struggling with.  I’ll be back tomorrow with new Thoughts.

This recent post by vika has made me uncomfortably conscious of the slowness with which the pile of books I’d planned on reading this summer is diminishing—or, more accurately, the alarming speed with which it’s growing, as the research reading list is getting added to much more rapidly than the actual reading is getting done.  To a certain extent, I think, this is to be expected, accounted for under the old “the more I learn, the more I understand how little I know” adage; as one source always leads to many others, research begets research in exponential fashion.  Moreover, research always seems to expand to fill the time-vessel in which it’s contained.

But there are other factors in my growing pile of to-be-read material that I find less-than-happy, not least of which is the snail’s pace at which I’m turning the pages lately.  The positive explanation for this is that I read more carefully than I used to, and take copious notes, which is a time-consuming process.  On my less optimistic days, though, I wind up blaming what seems to me my painfully short attention span:  I sit down to read whatever I happen to be working through, get a couple of pages in, and feel the uncontrollable desire to check my e-mail, or my net stats, or these here blog comments.  I lack focus, brain divided among too many pieces of reading and writing to keep any in full view for very long.

Is this a symptom of the age, or is this what my eighth-grade English teacher used to refer to as “a personal problem” (as in, “I couldn’t finish my homework, Mrs. Collins, because I had to study for my math test.” “Sounds like a personal problem to me”)?  For better or for worse, we all multi-task, and often not all that efficiently—but is my distraction just a part of life in the networked world, or does it reveal a lack of discipline (and one I’d be well advised to keep to myself, at that)?

Rather than taxing my heat-cramped brain by attempting to come up with a clever ‘why I’m not posting today’ post, here’s instead a smattering of July 4th postings from blogs around the way:

Bill sends wishes around the globe and urges an expat pal to blow something up (in a wholesome way, of course).

Meg gives us a few suggestions about how we might celebrate domestically, and notes why.

George reminds us that the nation is largely an imagined community.

And Fool’s Paradise sends a message to the rest of the world.  [Warning:  this link will likely only work today.]

On opening night.  And paid full price, at that.

Legally Blonde 2, that is.

A good friend of mine and I have for the last several summers made a point of seeing as many bad summer movies as possible, and particularly those that have some girl-appeal (witness the trip to see Josie and the Pussycats two years ago.  I seem to have blocked last summer’s fare out of my memory).  Her daughters, 8 and 13, are at the heart, I think, of Legally Blonde 2‘s target demographic, if I can judge by the general composition of last evening’s audience.

And I can’t help but wonder, after having seen the movie, where the girl-empowering notions they’re coming away with originate.  The L.A. Times review refers to Elle (the Reese Witherspoon character, for those of you who haven’t partaken of the Blonde franchise) as an “alpha girl,” though an unlikely one, suggesting that her effectiveness as a character lies both in her personal power and in her nonthreateningness.  And indeed, repeatedly throughout the movie we see Elle charm her way into being taken seriously by a slew of Beltway politicos, including the hardened, embittered Congresswoman from Texas and the “conservative NRA spokeman from Alabama” (who is referred to as such no fewer than three times in the movie).

So, message number one:  smart is good, but sweet and cute is necessary.

Elle encounters a bunch of opposition in the course of her quest—which quest involves the ever-so-1990 issue of the animal-testing of cosmetics—and in particular from a series of powerful women, including her boss, her co-workers, and the above-mentioned Congresswoman from Texas, who is finally won over only through the uncovering of their sorority-sisterhood, and who then performs the most thorough about-face ever seen in U.S. politics.  Elle does get support in this quest as well, but that support comes from a few limited places:

1.  Men.

2.  Sorority sisters.

3.  Dingbats.

4.  The style-challenged.

And the message here?  Powerful, attractive women cannot be trusted—unless they have also drunk from the sacred cup of sisterhood?

Okay, I’m willing to countenance the argument—which someone ought to bring up about now—that it’s a summer movie, for crying out loud, and a sequel at that.  It’s not to be taken so seriously as all this.  It’s darned entertaining at moments—in fact, the Times is not far wrong when it claims that the movie’s “wonderfully wacky absence of logic” is one of its charms.  But I couldn’t help but look around that theater-ful of 8-to-13 year-olds and wonder what of all this might wind up internalized after all.

One of the reasons I’m so concerned about the relationship between this site and my current scholarly work (or lack thereof) is that my new project (or, as I’m beginning to think about it, my Imaginary New Project [INP]) focuses on the relationship between computer technologies and literary production.  There’s been a tremendous amount of work done in this field from the computers-and-composition or computer-mediated-communication angle (see, only most obviously among possible links, Kairos, a journal of rhetoric, technology, and pedagogy), and with the publication of Katherine Hayles’s Writing Machines, there’s beginning to be interest in such connections in more mainstream lit-crit circles.

What I’m interested in, however, is less what that relationship between writer and computer (or, for that matter, reader and computer) actually is than what we imagine it to be.  How we envision, culturally speaking, the future of literature in the era of the Internet.  In that fashion, the project is exploring (will explore) the mythologies, in the Roland Barthes sense, of the computer age.

There’s a connection to this here blog, though, that I haven’t quite unearthed*:  the network—or so runs one of the most common commonplaces—makes possible new “spaces” for writing, new modes of publishing, new kinds of conversation.  I certainly don’t dispute that (except for the usage of “space” to describe the virtual, which is an issue I’ll take up at another time).  What I’m curious about is the relationship between those kinds of writing made possible in such spaces and the things we currently think of as “literary.” Is literature possible in the blogosphere?  Does it currently exist?  How will we know it when we see it?

I’m in the bibliography-building phases of this project, you see, so any suggestions (including disagreements, arguments, contradictions) would be much appreciated.

*I’d apologize for the mixed metaphor, except that it seems more apt to suggest that I meant that connection to be a rhizome anyway.

There’s a fascinating conversation going on in two different posts on Invisible Adjunct (post 1 | post 2) about the celebrification of academia, and the potential costs of such a star system.  IA herself (now that’s an interesting bit of gendering; why do I automatically assume that IA is female?  Did I read something on the site that suggested such a pronoun use, or is there something gendered in the hierarchy of academia itself?) has put forward the theory that there’s a distinct connection between the rise of this star system and the parallel “adjunctification” of the academy, and that all of this is connected to the widespread devaluing of teaching at the university level, as well as the fall in the public sense of the value of a liberal arts education.

I want to second this notion, and I know that a number of my grad-school colleagues would do so as well.  We were enrolled during a period when our Private University in the Public Service went on a major buying spree, snapping up superstars right and left.  With a few notable exceptions, those stars did not teach—or rather, while they did preside over classes, on both the graduate and the undergraduate levels, it was clear that their raison d’être at the university was not fundamentally about the students.  They led their classes, but had slews of teaching assistants who handled all that messy grading.  They spoke occasionally with graduate students, but only those who had already demonstrated their own star potential.  They certainly did not Advise.  Thus, the burden of real instruction, and particularly undergraduate instruction, and especially the extra unremunerated labor that such instruction brings, increasingly fell upon junior faculty, adjuncts, and graduate teaching assistants.

I find myself in an odd position with regard to this conversation, which I suppose is why I’m posting my thoughts here rather than in Invisible Adjunct’s comments.  On the one hand, I’m without question one of the blessed:  in a stroke that I can attribute to nothing but stupid luck, I got the job of my dreams right as I was finishing my dissertation, and have been here since.  I can sympathize with those whom this system genuinely degrades into a second-class citizenry, but I can never empathize, as I just haven’t been there.  On the other hand, I’m employed by a Small Liberal Arts College that is very keenly focused on undergraduate instruction and hands-on (and labor-intensive) interaction with students.  We are also very conscious of the decreasing esteem in which such an education is held in the culture at large and very concerned to minimize our reliance upon adjunct labor.  (This last should not necessarily be taken as a token of our virtue; an over-reliance on adjuncts can hurt one’s rankings among the other SLACs, a fact never too distant from our thoughts.) Working at a place like this, I have a measure of protection from the colder economic realities experienced at many larger universities, but a deeper investment in and commitment to teaching itself—a commitment that vastly diminishes the likelihood, because of the stresses on my time as well as the assumptions made by many in Research I schools about the lack of scholarly “seriousness” among faculty so committed, of my ever graduating into the realm of the academic elite.  (Witness my manuscript-shopping travails in the previous post.  How much easier is it to get your manuscript read when your letterhead says “Research I” than when it says “SLAC”?)

Which is not to say that I’d ever want to be such a Star.  I’m committed to the choices I’ve made, I love this place, I adore my students, and I thank my lucky stars every day to have landed here.  But it’s hard not to feel oneself a bit preterite-ized when the Elect are given so many demonstrable signs of their Value.