Fire

I decided to reread Farenheit 451. Reread is, I suppose, a misnomer, since I read this book so long ago that I remembered very little of the actual plot. As I was driving home today, I considered how I liked the book.

I decided that I didn't like it, that it was not really all that great, and I started to feel sorry for those poor, poor kids that had to read this thing (I purchased it in the Summer Reading section at Borders). Why, I wondered, would anyone consider this book art?

After about 30 seconds of that assessment, I remembered the lesson I tried to teach my students this past spring about difficulty. I questioned my initial impression and thought about what I saw as the book's weaknesses--its brevity and strident speechiness (because we can all now create newer/better/truthier words, can't we?).

The brevity was good, since it kept the speechiness at least short in duration. And the speechiness worked in the context of people desperate to break out or hold in by controlling words. But the ending, wholly unsatisfying. The protagonist, so flat. The other characters, such props and cardboard cutouts. The terrible moments not nearly as awful as that bleak setting, particularly at the end.

And then I thought about the style. I found myself most annoyed by passages where Bradbury eschews actual sentence structure and goes for a choppier delivery. Like this one:

One drop of rain. Clarisse. Another drop. Mildred. A third. The uncle. A fourth. The fire tonight. One, Clarisse. Two, Mildred. Three, uncle. Four, fire. One, Mildred, two, Clarisse. One, two, three, four, five, Clarisse, Mildred, uncle, fire, sleeping tablets, men disposable tissue, coattails, blow, wad, flush, Clarisse, Mildred, uncle, fire, tablets, tissues, blow, wad, flush. One, two, three, one, two, three! Rain. The storm. The uncle laughing. Thunder falling downstairs. The whole world pouring down. The fire gushing up in a volcano. All rushing on down around in a spouting roar and rivering stream toward morning. (18)

It occurred to me in the car that I needed to read those passages aloud, something I'm not inclined to do when I read before bed (which is when I read "fun" stuff). So I read it aloud. Perhaps, I thought, the whole book should be read aloud. For a book about book burning, this one takes the view that the books worth remembering will be memorized, that people are walking books, that in the absence of being able to read, being able to listen will do just nicely.

Dystopian fiction is not my favorite thing these days, I suppose. And I'm just not a big fan of Bradbury's writing style; I think that's the reason why I was annoyed by the book. But the scenario? Well, let's just say that I'm thinking a bit differently about my books, my two television sets, my headphones and my Zen, my Bluetooth, and my front door. I need to make it less a wall and more a way.

Getting Priorities Straight

Inside Higher Ed reports that there's a disconnect between high school and college instructors with regard to their definitions of "college readiness." Of particular interest to me is the following bit of information:

In English, the survey suggests, high school instructors’ focus on the development of students’ ideas overlooks basic grammatical and syntactic skills — possibly leading to an increased need for remedial teaching at the college level. Reading had the least misalignment between secondary and first-year college instructors, but the survey suggests that the reading skills acquired at previous levels are not built upon in high school.

As usual, reading and writing are coupled together as English tasks--which they are and should be--but the information about reading reinforces what I've seen over and over. We don't pay any attention to reading as an ongoing developmental skill. Once you can pass a comprehension test, pick out important information (efferent reading), you're considered ready for the reading world. The fact that reading is the place where we all have the same expectations indicates there's a long way to go to change our understanding of the trajectory of reading development.

Validation?

In a fit of pique during this utterly unproductive Spring Break (in which I've stared endlessly at charts trying to make sense of them) I replied to a post on the WPA listserv. The conversation had turned, as it periodically does, to the matter of the rhet/comp--literature divide. When "writing" became the sub for "rhet/comp" but "literature" remained, I brought out my little soapbox.

Long term viability for English studies will come not when we jettison the literature enterprise, but when we recognize the multiplicity of activities that come under the banner of English studies. For the purposes of the above conversation, that means ending the verb--noun battle (writing vs. literature) and using the verb--verb connection--writing and reading.

Rhet/comp classes are to Literature classes what writing classes are to reading ones. Two peas in a snuggly language pod.

And the validation? Well, that came when folks started talking about the reading/writing connection in response to my post. Felt pretty good indeed.

Maybe there's a place for my dissertation after all.