Arts & Culture
Philip Roth
Once not so long ago, it was understood among those who thought about such things that writing was a dying art form, a relic from an era when things like time, opportunity, and audiences were available and things like authority, expertise, and artistry mattered. Scholars and critics and other old sticks in the mud mourned the death of the written (and read) word in American culture like other old sticks in the mud in other times mourned the death of gas-powered lamps or the art of conversation or the silent movie. Writers no less important than Philip Roth, who felt his influence waning along with everyone else who made a living behind a typewriter, once told David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker – another relic with waning influence – that the evidence “is everywhere that the literary era has come to an end.” And stodgy pundits and cultural critics like John Humphrys and John Sutherland attacked texting as “bleak, bald, sad shorthand which masks dyslexia, poor spelling and mental laziness” and texters as the linguistic heirs to Genghis Kahn. Even this author may have said a thing or two about the dangers of our “tweeting” culture – all 140 characters of it – in a moment of pre-middle-aged grumbling.
This was the sad reality of the situation. But as disheartening as circumstances were for these defenders of the word, at the very least they all knew that their point about the less-than-slow death of written language was indisputable, that they were unheeded prophets in a decadent age. And they found comfort in their sanctimony.
But then Clive Thompson – a writer himself – came along with a shocking bit of news: It turns out, according to a study by Andrea Lunsford, professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, that college students’ writing isn’t getting worse as a result of all that texting, tweeting, and Facebook-updating; it’s getting better. According to Thompson, “[f]or Lunsford, technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.”
Just look at all the writing these “young people” are doing, Lunsford argued: more than any generation before. “That’s because so much socializing takes place online,” Thompson wrote, “and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it.” Like the fella said, you add 140 to 140 to 140 to 140 and pretty soon it starts adding up to something.
Turns out these kids weren’t putting the written word to bed with all their grammatically indifferent updates about the emotional state of their goldfish or their preference for pizza over hot dogs as it relates to an upcoming lunch break; rather, they were rivaling the ancient Greeks with their mastery of the rhetorical art of kairos – “assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across” – and creating a new golden age of literacy in the process. Sure, it seemed to many that they were squeezing all the life-blood out of the language – leaving trifles like beauty, subtlety, ambiguity, and syntax dying on the floor in the name of quasi-confessional narcissism – but actually they were mastering a new kind of prose, one based on “haiku-like concision” that was designed with its audience (of one or millions) in mind. In interviews, this new generation of Bashos declared that the best prose was the prose that had the greatest effect on the world, whether that effect meant convincing a friend to see this movie rather than that or letting the world know that, indeed, you are bored at work and, yes, you are looking forward to the weekend, and, quite right, you plan on spending the weekend making tiramisu.
And with that all the grumbling stopped. Suddenly the Roths and the Remnicks and the Humphrys and the Sutherlands of the world were satisfied. They too picked up their iPhones and started grousing about the weather and Brad Pitt’s new hair-do to their friends all over the world. All of a sudden, they ceased to see the point in flaying themselves for months, even years, at a time, in some garret somewhere, trying to map some hidden corner of the human tragedy, when they could let the world know what they were feeling right then and there and still have time to make it home to watch the season finale of Mad Men. They came to the realization that we aren’t living in an artistic age but an age of access, where aesthetic notions like “good” and “bad” and “beautiful” and “meaningful” seem almost comically geriatric and the only thing that matters is availability. They realized, like the Catholics did thousands of years ago, that confession is good for the soul, and so they traded their lonely writer’s rooms for the warmth and comfort of the modern electronic confessional booth that is the Internet, and they were happier for it. And the written word lived to fight another day.
Comments
11 Comments
Roth is mainly known for an semi-autobiography about how much he used to masturbate. If there’s anybody who should be embracing quasi-confessional narcissism from the ivory tower, it might be him.
This is heartening and sadden at the same time. I read the papers of college students all the time, and I will attest the the writing awful. If it is better than it has been then I happy to have never known those dark ages before the likes of LOL and OMG.
Even Aristotle talked about the importance of relating to one’s audience as integral to effective speech. If texting, and tweeting, and blogging is teaching this to the youth of today’s world–is it really something to complain about?
Kelly, even Aristotle, when he was developing complex ideas and “relating” to his audience in writing, did so in clear, grammatically correct, and easily understandable prose. Or, to quote Aristotle, “let us know discuss sophistical refutations, i.e. what appear to be refutations but are fallacious instead.” Your fallacy posing as a refutation is the implication that relating to an audience is somehow more important than crafting a clear, grammatical, and stylish text. LOL.
If your going to invoke some past master as a means of buttressing the authority of your weak observation, why don’t you work a little harder to develop an argument that is worthy of buttressing. Or you could respect your audience a little more and drop the unnecessary classical references.
[...] Unfit Times article [...]
Theophrastus, if you’re going to refute someone’s argument, then be sure to check your facts. Just about everything we have from Aristotle is in the form of lecture notes, many of which may have been written by a student. These lecture notes are -not- grammatically correct, nor are they at all times clear. In fact, they are often contradictory, awkward, and repetitive. The only indication of Aristotle’s actual writing style that we have is the praise that he received from the writing of people from that time who commented upon it. If you’re going to use an example, try to make it one that you can actually back up.
As for the point, you’re forcing an implication into Kelly’s argument that is simply unclear. The “it” in her final sentence has no clear antecedent, which apparently gives you the right to toss out whatever straw man you’d like in order to rebut. This simply means that you’ve bitten your own critique of her argument. At best, you can say that her argument is unclear and expresses the importance of audience adaptation. Anything else is merely, as you “quoted” from Aristotle (and more accurately from a translation of lecture notes most likely written by Aristotle), “sophistical refutation.”
Twenty-three years ago, our history professor complained that too many students got “too, to and two” wrong; my generation was said to be “A Nation At Risk” by slots addict and professional moralizer William Bennett. In turn, we looked down the noses of those who came after us.
[...] Yamaneko: Twenty-three years ago, our history professor complained that too many students got “too,… [...]
I don’t make a habit of point out other commenters’ writing mistakes, but it’s deliciously ironic that Theophrastus’s comment contains two mispelt or misused works and one sentence ending with the wrong punctuation mark, beyond the content errors that C.B. points out. Reading the comment is annoying, but he or she gets the message across clearly enough despite the problems with orthography. I’d rather read that than read immaculate prose with nothing to say, but of course it’s better if one can do both.
Well, now I’m the pot to Theophrastus’s kettle, I suppose: “pointing.”
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