Justin wrote: I was thinking less of nostalgia than television. My bet is that people read more. Moreover, we do have real evidence that popular attentiuon to complicated argument was greater once. Think of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Tens of thousand of Illilois backwoodsman flocked from the middle of nowhere to godforsken little towns to stand for hours listening to two men in suits, one tall, one short, debate national policy and cosntitutional law in unforgively high terms, and stood out in the weather for hours, without the benefit of amplification, to participate in these discussions. jks
I'm advancing the tentative hypothesis that the seemingly greater "literacy" Justin and others refer to was _not_ literacy in the strict sense (letters on paper) but collective understanding mostly through _oral_ communication.
They _listened_: they did not _read_ those speeches. And I have a very vague memory of accounts of people (actually, men) gathering together in the 1780s to have Federalist papers READ ALOUD to them.
I've been working away at this and some related posts off and on for several months, & I'm not going to be able to develop them in a coherent fashion right away. So I'm just going to noodle away on them. They might be called Variations on Mao and Gramsci.
1) Is Mao's proposition, "Trust the People" relevant, _in some form_ to the U.S. left.
2) Gramsci argues that while a general staff can always raise an army, an army can't raise a general staff. I think that is wrong, but does point in the right direction.
The rest of this post deals with literacy.
The following argument reflects my personal experience as I find it confirmed in Patricia A. Dunn, _Learning Re-Abled: The Learning Disability Controversy and Composition Studies_ (Portsmouth, NH, 1995), a work which summarizes a good deal of research and which gives bite to my personal experience.
[The next 3 paragraphs are copied slightly edited from a post I wrote on the ISU English Dept. list back in February 1998. I quote more from that whole thread further on in this post.]
The personal experience began with an odd student I had back in the early '60s for three courses, two of composition and the third an intro to lit. He was a delight to have in the classroom, willing to speak, and always speaking intelligently. In the comp courses I gave him a C for this reason and out of general charity, but in those two courses I don't believe he ever submitted a paper with a single complete sentence.
Then in the lit class, one day he was in my office discussing the novel we were reading, _Rabbit Run_. At that time I possessed a fairly sharp ability to memorize an oral statement of several sentences and project it on a screen in my mind, and I did so with what he said to me at one point.
What I saw on that screen was as well "written" a passage as any I ever received from an ISU student. The syntax was complex, flexible, and correct; the observation on Updike's novel intelligent and striking. Examining his papers from that perspective, it was quite clear that all those sentence fragments were just that, broken pieces of sentences that in themselves were quite unexceptionable. He had no trouble with grammar, with sentence rhythms, with the articulation of his ideas. There was simply some horrid glitch between brain and fingers, but not between brain and vocal cords.
Here was this illiterate who (1) had read a reasonably complex novel with no difficulty and (2) had intelligent things to say about it in complex and well structured language, but he COULD NOT WRITE. I doubt that he could _ever_ have learned to write by any means of instruction now available. But what his illiteracy tells us is that our defintion of literacy is terribly screwed up. (Since he could read quite well, he doesn't fit the more well-known pattern of dyslexia, inability to read.) I would tentatively suggest that _writing_ ability (as opposed to ability to speak and listen) is rather like perfect pitch or the ability to wiggle one's ears, sort of freakish.
"Writing Ability": I'm not referring just to syntax or even style. I include all the "higher" forms of thought: organization, coherence, relevance, overall decorum, ability to recognize a paragraph, substance even. My student who could speak so well about _Rabbit_ could not have written anything intelligent about it. Many people, I suspect a rather large majority of the human species, simply cannot think on paper. BUT THAT DOES NOT MEAN THAT THEY CANNOT THINK, OR CANNOT THINK ABOUT COMPLEX SUBJECTS. Moreover, just because most Americans are not, at present, applying that capacity to the topics _we_ think they should does not mean that they are not, even now, exercising that capacity on other subjects.
And incidentally -- it is as difficult for someone who can write to write badly as it is for a bad writer to write well. In other words, it is seriously in error to account for "bad grammar" etc. in terms of laziness. I've known only one person in my life who could, in speech or writing, shift back and forth between "literate" and "illiterate" speech easily. [Good writers can produce really bad prose, of course, when they strain to he humorous under the widespread impression that without something called a "sense of humor" one is not fully human.]
My post on this "illiterate student" generated a lengthy thread. I had not met (or heard of) Patricia Dunn, a newer member of the department, but she responded with the following post:
Date: Thu, 12 Feb 1998 16:27:34 -0600 To: engdep-l at acadcomp.cmp.ilstu.edu From: "Patrica A. Dunn" Subject: Re: pedagogically speaking
Carrol, I wish more teachers/professors recognized the phenomenon you described below.
For too long, good WRITING, interpreted narrowly, has been correlated with intelligence. What's worse, people with the kind of glitch you described--they can speak in syntactically complex sentences but can't get them on a page or screen--have been told, explicitly or implicitly, that they are NOT intelligent.
Those of us who are good "writers" (and I would venture to guess most of us on this listserv are decent writers or we wouldn't be doing what we're doing) can only imagine what society's assumed and often false association between writing and intelligence does to people with the kind of horrid glitch you describe.
Susan Vogel and others have done research that confirms what you say about some students having highly complex and sophisticated sentence patterns that for some reason they can't get down in writing. At the risk of sounding like a show-off, I must here put in a plug for my book (LEARNING REABLED: THE LEARNING DISABILITY CONTROVERSY AND COMPOSITION STUDIES - Boynton/Cook Heinemann), in which I summarize and analyze this and other related research.
Also, now that voice activated computer systems are getting much more sophisticated,(i.e. Dragon Naturally Speaking), perhaps the academic playing field, with its over-emphasis on the written word, will begin to become more equitable for people who must deal with this frustrating glitch. -Patty Dunn
[This may be too optimistic in regard to voice activated composition; I don't know - cbc]
- - - - - (In a future post I'll quote much more of this ISU English Department thread.)
There has been a good deal of negative commentary by lbo posters on american culture (i.e., the culture of the bulk of the population) -- sometimes by the same posters who in a different context -- discussion of foreign affairs -- are apt strongly to condemn "anti-americanism." It seems to me that anti-americanism (defined as a condemnation _in principle_ of the u.s. state) has to be half the foundation of any significant left movement in the u.s. It _also_ seems to me that the other half of of that foundation must be a resolute condemnation of the kind of anti-americanism which dominates lbo: i.e., the endless criticism of the populace. (Wojtek and Carl Remick are perhaps the most extreme instances of this, but the habit is widespread. It is behind Zizek's silliness, for example, re willed ignorance.) Such silliness has more in common with whining about the weather than with any thing that can be called social analysis from a left perspective.
To Be Continued
Carrol