Author Archives: ghw

page 123, 5th sentence

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Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and Its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England, by Margaret Spufford (ISBN 0416741509):

The case of William Johnson of Lincoln, who was born in Scotland where his father died insolvent and became a pedlar in England, is an instructive one. He carried a pack of linen as a pedlar and by 1718 was able to take up a small shop in Lincoln where he at first sold hardware, caps, handkerchiefs and other ready-made wear in linen. He became a wholesale linen draper and a freeman of the city and eventually left a fortune of between 8000 and 9000 [pounds]. William Johnson’s successful career from pedlar to freeman and shopkeeper suggests that the nineteenth-century Scottish model of a successful chapman’s career may well hold true for earlier periods.

[meme via Words’ End]

mortality of the humanities, ii

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Consider this post a sequel to my earlier one.

Observing that “Maryland has just become the first state in the nation to institute a statewide comics curriculum,” Erin O’Connor questions the wisdom of this move, arguing that we need to make

sure kids get the analytical and reasoning skills they need, and that they begin learning those skills at an appropriate age. There are things you learn to do mentally when you read a long novel alone in several sittings; or when you puzzle over a poem to grasp its metaphors, its meter, and the way the form and content necessitate one another. Those things are subtle, but they are very real. They are also highly transferable. I’m just not convinced that comic books are good material for teachers who want to ensure that their students acquire more than the most elementary reading skills.

One of her commenters says, “I don’t think presenting 10 year olds with comic books is a way to prepare them for the real world.”

Three initial thoughts spring to mind:

  1. Why do we continue to privilege the image over the word, as if the meaning of the former is always self-evident, requiring no critical thought whatsoever? Sitting for long periods of time with complex images might provide the exact same benefits that sitting with a novel does.
  2. I have to agree with Matt, who writes that “contemporary cognitive science needs to be part of any serious conversation about attention and imagination.” Novels do a better job than comic books do of lengthening attention spans and teaching kids critical thinking skills? It’s an interesting reseach question. Where’s the research? If it exists, let’s bring it into the conversation.
  3. Is the value of the study of literature in elementary school confined to how well it prepares ten year olds for “the real world”? As my colleague Bob Stewart said at the Kansas City “Reading at Risk” forum, sometimes the only thing a good book does is take you further inside yourself. Reading can be an activity that’s personally rewarding but that carries no social or civic benefit.

Bonus Link! F. Scott Fitzgerald and Charles Schulz duke it out.

again with the mla?

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Last year, I posted the titles of all the papers on British Literature that were presented at MLA 2003.
This year, I’m doing it again. Why? Because people in the press and in the blogosphere tend to pull out a few paper titles, argue that they’re silly or worthless, and then imply first that most of the papers at MLA are silly or worthless and second that contemporary scholarship in language and literature is.
It makes for amusing commentary.
But not only is such commentary intellectually shallow (mocking paper titles? please); it’s demonstrably wrong. As I wrote last year, the majority of papers presented at MLA are “the kind of interesting work one would expect scholars of language and literature to be doing.”

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