University of Kwazulu-Natal

The Lost Art Of Reading Penguin Random House Canada

Bonisiwe Shabane
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the lost art of reading penguin random house canada

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Now, I recognize this as one of the fallacies of teaching literature in the classroom, the need to seek a reckoning with everything, to imagine a framework, a rubric, in which each little piece... Literature—at least the literature to which I respond—doesn't work that way; it is conscious, yes, but with room for serendipity, a delicate balance between craft and art. This is why it's often difficult for writers to talk about their process, because the connections, the flow of storytelling, remain mysterious even to them. "I have to say that, for me, it evolved spontaneously. I didn't have any plan," Philip Roth once said of a scene in his 2006 novel Everyman, and if such a revelation can be frustrating to those who want to see the trick, the... That kind of writing, though, is difficult to teach, leaving us with scansion, annotation, all that sound and fury, a buzz of explication that obscures the elusive heartbeat of a book.

For Noah, I should say, this was not the issue—not on those terms, anyway. He merely wanted to finish the assignment so he could move on to something he preferred. As he is the first to admit, he is not a reader, which is to say that, unlike me, he does not frame the world through books. He reads when it moves him, but this is hardly constant; like many of his friends, his inner life is entwined within the circuits of his laptop, its electronic speed and hum. He was unmoved by my argument that The Great Gatsby was a terrific book; yeah, yeah, yeah, his hooded eyes seemed to tell me, that's what you always say. He was unmoved by my vague noises about Fitzgerald and modernity, by the notion that among the peculiar tensions of reading the novel now, as opposed to when it first came out, is an...

He was unmoved by my observation that, whatever else it might be, The Great Gatsby had been, and remains, a piece of popular fiction, defining its era in a way a novel would be... This is the conundrum, the gorilla in the midst of any conversation about literature in contemporary culture, the question of dilution and refraction, of whether and how books matter, of the impact they can... We talk about the need to read, about reading at risk, about reluctant readers (mostly preadolescent and adolescent boys such as Noah), but we seem unwilling to confront the fallout of one simple observation:... For Kurt Vonnegut, the writer who made me want to be a writer, the culprit was television. "When I started out," he recalled in 1997, "it was possible to make a living as a freelance writer of fiction, and live out of your mailbox, because it was still the golden age... Then television, with no malice whatsoever—just a better buy for advertisers—knocked the magazines out of business." For new media reactionaries such as Lee Siegel and Andrew Keen, the problem is technology, the endless distractions...

What this argument overlooks, of course, is that literary culture as we know it was the product of a technological revolution, one that began with Johannes Gutenberg's invention of movable type. We take books and mass literacy for granted, but in reality, they are a recent iteration, going back not even a millennium. Less than four hundred years ago—barely a century and a half after Gutenberg—John Milton could still pride himself without exaggeration on having read every book then available, the entire history of written thought accessible... When I was in college, a friend and I worked on a short film, never finished, in which Milton somehow found himself brought forward in time to lower Manhattan's Strand bookstore, where the sheer... Milton (the real one, anyway) was part of a lineage, a conversation, in which books—indeed, print itself—made a difference in the world. The same might be said of Thomas Paine, who in January 1776 published Common Sense as an anonymous pamphlet and in so doing lighted the fuse of the American Revolution.

Colonial America was a hotbed of print insurrectionism, with an active pamphlet culture that I imagine as the blogosphere of its day. Here we have another refutation to the antitechnology reactionaries, since one reason for print's primacy was that it was on the technological cutting edge. Like the blogs they resemble, most pamphlets came and went, selling a few hundred copies, speaking to a self-selected audience. Common Sense, on the other hand, became a colonial bestseller, racking up sales of 150,000; it was also widely disseminated and read aloud, which exposed it to hundreds of thousands more. The work was so influential that Thomas Jefferson used it as a template when he sat down a few months later to write the Declaration of Independence, distilling many of Paine's ideas (the natural... Set your store to easily check hours, get directions, and see what’s in stock.

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Sign up for news about books, authors, and more from Penguin Random House Sign up for news about books, authors, and more from Penguin Random House Visit other sites in the Penguin Random House Network Shirts, totes, socks, and more for book lovers An online magazine for today’s home cook Your local store may have stock of this item.

Now, I Recognize This As One Of The Fallacies Of

Now, I recognize this as one of the fallacies of teaching literature in the classroom, the need to seek a reckoning with everything, to imagine a framework, a rubric, in which each little piece... Literature—at least the literature to which I respond—doesn't work that way; it is conscious, yes, but with room for serendipity, a delicate balance between craft and art. This is why it's often difficul...

For Noah, I Should Say, This Was Not The Issue—not

For Noah, I should say, this was not the issue—not on those terms, anyway. He merely wanted to finish the assignment so he could move on to something he preferred. As he is the first to admit, he is not a reader, which is to say that, unlike me, he does not frame the world through books. He reads when it moves him, but this is hardly constant; like many of his friends, his inner life is entwined w...

He Was Unmoved By My Observation That, Whatever Else It

He was unmoved by my observation that, whatever else it might be, The Great Gatsby had been, and remains, a piece of popular fiction, defining its era in a way a novel would be... This is the conundrum, the gorilla in the midst of any conversation about literature in contemporary culture, the question of dilution and refraction, of whether and how books matter, of the impact they can... We talk ab...

What This Argument Overlooks, Of Course, Is That Literary Culture

What this argument overlooks, of course, is that literary culture as we know it was the product of a technological revolution, one that began with Johannes Gutenberg's invention of movable type. We take books and mass literacy for granted, but in reality, they are a recent iteration, going back not even a millennium. Less than four hundred years ago—barely a century and a half after Gutenberg—John...