The Changing Face of Reading
Tonight, when you curl up with your bedtime story of choice, will the glow
of a Kindle illuminate your sleepy face? In the morning, when you rise to
apprise yourself of the world’s happenings, will you do so via an iPad, laptop,
or smartphone? Will your day be punctuated by emailed communiqués from
friends, family, and colleagues? One thing is certain: Reading isn’t what it used
to be. Over the last thousand years, the texts themselves, and the ways in which
we read them, have undergone a succession of thrilling transformations.
Of course, long before books, there were stories that spilled not from pens
but from human throats. The first form of “reading” was a synthesis of listening
and talking, an oral tradition perfected by indigenous cultures around the world,
and still practiced by people everywhere.
Even with the advent of alphabets and the practice of writing, an emphasis
on the human voice remained; this concern with the sound of words was a
notable characteristic of some medieval literature. “During the Middle Ages
in England,” explains Professor Kathy Lavezzo, “a lot of vernacular literature
was written in alliterative form and therefore intended to be read aloud before
an audience. In some of this literature, such as the
Alliterative Morte Arthure (c.
1400), the author seems so excited about alliteration that at times he/she makes
up words for the sake of consonance and at the expense of coherence. In this
case, reading is about the sheer enjoyment of alliteration.”
In the early modern period, readers were less likely to recite, and more
likely to write; the act of reading was inextricably tied to that of putting
words on a page. “In the Renaissance,” says Professor Adam Hooks, “readers
were trained to encounter a text with a pen in hand, in order to mark
up—and hence actively engage with—the text. Simple reading alone was not
sufficient; the proper scholarly reader needed to actively use the text, taking
the time to fully comprehend its meanings and
implications. Reading was also aimed at some
practical or intellectual goal: a used text was
inevitably incorporated into one’s own writing.”
Consequently, a blank—or “commonplace”—book,
Hooks explains, “was an indispensable tool for the
Renaissance reader: here quotations from various
sources could be collected, so that they could be
retrieved and used at some later point.”
This brings to mind the comparatively simple
act of “bookmarking” a webpage. Today, texts
are portable, downloadable, listenable, copy- and
paste-able, and can be discarded and replaced with
the quickness of a mouse click. We see them on
displays as wee as two square inches and as wide as seventy feet—the width of
a movie theater screen, which, today’s English majors know, can be “read” as
readily as a book.
The act of reading no longer requires the presence of words—be they spoken
or printed—at all. Photography, film, television, the Internet, and an assortment
of gadgets ensure that we are swimming in images, all of which serve as fodder
for a thoroughly modern kind of reading. Today’s most avid readers and critical
thinkers realize that every picture really does tell a story. “The ability to ‘read’
an image,” says Professor Miriam Thaggert, “as well as a literary text, shapes the
face of reading now—to analyze the composition of a photograph with as much
attention as we examine the structure of a narrative. Reading now recognizes the
visually-inflected world we live in and studies how image and text work together
to shape our world.” Students in English courses such as
Popular Culture and
Everyday Life in the U.S.
, Topics in Film and Literature, and New Media Poetics learn
this. Meanwhile, the rest of us can learn by watching them.
“We learn a great deal about the future of reading by observing young
people—what and how they read, with which technologies, and as part of what
media cultures,” notes Professor Stephen Voyce. “We are told that manic
tweeting, text walking, and the chronic facebook updater fill the world with
ephemeral, disposable language. Yet, one finds a handy riposte to this version of
things in their dedication to Harry Potter novels and video games whose quests
take months to complete. So it would seem the so-called Millennials love extremes,
reveling in a seven-part epic whose vast symbolic arena echoes Homer’s imaginative
universe, whilst taking joy in Twitter’s cheeky 140-character restriction.”
Today’s young readers both keep pace with and perpetuate reading’s
ongoing evolution. “The young have no problems moving between radically
different media and border-blurring genres,” says Voyce. “I see in my students a
generation swinging wildly from that jungle gym of language we used to call the
avant-garde.”
If yesterday’s avant-garde is today’s conventional reality, tomorrow’s reading
practices will only further stretch our collective imagination, as well as our
capacity for invention. What will abide, however, in spite of reading’s perpetually
changing face, is the love of words and the stories they shape—the very human
craving for both true and invented tales that will last as long as we do.
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