Special Convention Issue: Performance || Response

Midwest Modern Language Association

ResponseAuthor(s): Thomas ChaseSource: The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 38, No. 1, SpecialConvention Issue: Performance (Spring, 2005), pp. 107-110Published by: Midwest Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30039303 .

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Response Thomas Chase

I'm happy to be here today, and honored to be the sole non-American member of the panel. Though I teach mostly Canadian students in a Canadian university, I can't claim to have experienced any feelings of smug superiority as I read through Reading at Risk. We are certainly not free of the problems it outlines. In the limited time we have this morning, let me focus on two demographic phenomena that, from my vantage point as a northern neighbor, I found especially striking.

First, ethnicity. Canada remains ethnically more homogeneous than the United States. While immigration is gradually altering this fact, especially in major urban centers like Toronto, Montreal, Calgary, and Vancouver, Canada does not have substantial minority populations spread out across entire regions, as the United States does. The finding that "the lowest literary reading rate is among male Hispanic Americans (18 percent), followed by male African Americans (30 percent), and female Hispanic Americans (34 percent)" thus outlines a disparity, or rather a bundle of disparities, with no direct parallel in my own country (11). Some subgroups of the Canadian population doubtless have similar rates, but none of these sub-

groups is proportionately as large as their American counterparts. To say the least, the implications of this disparity are potentially trou-

bling. If we accept the premise (and I want to return to this a little later) that "reading of literary work in particular . . . is essential to a sound and healthy understanding of, and participation in, a democratic society" (1), knowing that fewer than one in five Hispanic American males participate in this activity should lead us to ask serious questions about cultural fis- sures, disengagement from the public sphere, and indeed a self-imposed disenfranchisement. Has a substantial component of the American population in effect removed itself from public discourse? Why? And what does this isolation mean for sociopolitical processes, especially in the

sprawling urban communities of the American South and West?

Still more fascinating, however, is the gender differential. Over the last

generation, college teachers of modern languages and literature will have noticed a slow but steady drain of males from their classrooms. Where the young men have gone is subject to a variety of explanations, some more convincing than others. But it is clear that they are not studying English, or indeed the humanities and many of the social sciences, in

anything like the numbers they once did. At my university, for example, barely one-quarter of those graduating in the past ten years with MAs in

Thomas Chase 107



English literature are male. The National Opinion Research Center reports that, in 2002, American women earned more doctorates than American men in the humanities and the social sciences ("Characteristics of Recipients"). For some disciplines, the gulf yawns even wider: female psychology majors at my university currently outnumber their male counterparts by a ratio of four to one. This striking shift within large sec- tors of the academy mirrors two wider phenomena. Mark Bauerlein has already emphasized one of them, the accelerated decline in literary reading rates among adults aged 18-24. The other we might describe as the accelerated feminization of reading.

In the West, it has long been a cultural clich6 (at least outside France and parts of Eastern Europe) that "real" men don't read literary fiction or poetry. Pop culture's masculine role models in the last half-century have shifted somewhat, but they remain contemptuous of, if not overtly hostile to, such frivolous activity. Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry Callahan, for example, was an icon of American frontier masculinity transposed to the threatening urban landscape of the 1970s. He traces his roots to pre- urban predecessors such as those embodied in various roles played by John Wayne. More intelligent, sophisticated, and calculating than his antecedents, Callahan-a powerful role model for a past generation of young American males-nonetheless was no more likely to have time for pursuits like literary reading than did those dusty, avuncular marshals of the frontier. And recent mass-culture male (anti-)icons, whether Vin Diesel, Larry David, or indeed Homer Simpson, suggest that such reading remains as foreign as ever to the American Durchschnittsmensch. It is something that women do.

This disengagement is potentially as troubling as the ethnic one I've already touched upon, if not more so. If our culture insists on parsing the consumption of literature as a feminine activity (or more accurately an effeminate activity), and if caricatures of gender roles continue to domi- nate mass media, we are in for an interesting time educationally and socially.

I'm not convinced, moreover, that we academicians are entirely blame- less. Most professors of English continue to read literature.1 What we're not reading, if sales figures provide any indication, is what we as scholars are saying between hard covers about literature. We have set up a strange- ly contradictory system that demands we publish our thoughts about the literature we teach, and allows us to ignore our colleagues when they fol- low suit. Six years ago, Cary Nelson pointed out that the situation was dire:

Literary criticism, once a boom industry, has disappeared from many [publishers'] lists. Those publishers who still maintain large offerings in the area typically have something else going for them. Oxford and Cam-

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bridge, for example, can still sell 900-1,000 copies of a hardbound vol- ume of literary interpretation, but that's because of the lingering effects of ideology and colonialism. That is, they sell the same 300 library copies in the United States that Indiana University Press does, but they also sell to all the far-flung fading outposts of empire.2 (230)

Nelson's wry humor regarding reflexive colonialism in our lit-crit pur- chasing habits-the cynic might see here a sneaking admiration for an

Oxbridge accent that has been transmuted into book sales-deflects atten- tion from a stark fact. Once library sales are factored out, only a small

minority of us are buying copies of the books upon which maintenance of our professional competence would seem to depend. There are many possible explanations: the cost of academic books and a consequent nationwide rush to the libraries; the rise in numbers of part-timers lack-

ing disposable income; the increased fragmentation of the profession and its intellectual landscape; indeed, the impoverished opacity of much con-

temporary criticism. Whatever the reason, however, this particular kind of reading seems to be in decline among those whose reading should be more intensive-and extensive-than that of nearly any other group.

The vicissitudes of literary criticism are, I think, related to the larger issue of literary reading. I can't say whether we academics are part of the

problem (in other words, a cause, and in this case a central cause) or just part of the pattern (one of a series of consequences). But if the statistics in Reading at Risk are accurate, something is happening, and it is happening inside the academy as well as outside. It's not enough to argue that

technologies such as the Web and electronic gaming have led to a rise in "visual literacies" among the young, or-good postmodernists all-to say that the essence of the contemporary condition is fragmentation and col-

lage, and that a drop in literary reading is an inevitable product of this cultural entropy. Though few would argue that in and of itself the act of

reading Ulysses produces more engaged citizens, most of us would say that literary reading of the kind that we do is valuable.

Now, to demonstrate this value in a tangible or objective way is a diffi- cult thing. I therefore cannot agree with Reading at Risk's assertion that

literary reading is "essential to a sound and healthy understanding of, and

participation in, a democratic society" (1). None who have had the experience of immersion in a sustained and complex work of literature would

wish, however, to have missed it. The sustained reading of literature

deepens us. It broadens us. It opens us, simply by taking us out of our- selves in a way that no other art can do. Such an experience benefits not

only us, but the society of which we are a part.

University of Regina, Canada

Thomas Chase 109



Notes

1. Or we claim to do so. The soured literature professor, a bitter man (and he's almost always male) who long ago ceased to read anything he doesn't absolutely have to read, is a staple of academic comedies in the last half-century. 2. To put Nelson's figures into perspective, remember that the Modern Language Association has more than 30,000 members, most of whom occupy, or soon hope to occupy, college teaching posts. There are, moreover, many tens of thousands of people teaching humanities in North American institutions of higher learning. A lot of them aren't buying many books.

Works Cited

"Characteristics of Recipients of Earned Doctorates, 2002." Almanac. The Chroni- cle of Higher Education. 2004. 22 Feb. 2005 < http://chronicle.com/prm/weekly/almanac/2004/nation/0102001.htm >.

Nelson, Cary. "Scholarly Books." Academic Keywords: A Devil's Dictionary for High- er Education. Ed. Cary Nelson and Stephen Watt. New York: Routledge, 1999. 230.

United States. National Endowment for the Arts. Reading At Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America. Washington: GPO, 2004. 1 Nov. 2004 < http://www.nea.gov/pub/ReadingAtRisk.pdf >.

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