Die Novel, Die: The impossible intersection between digital culture and reading a novel

Facilitate learning rather than educate. Interactive and dynamic rather than force fed. Doer and transmitter rather than receiver. I understand and believe in most of the new reevaluation of teaching and pedagogy that has occurred in the past twenty years. Students need to be actively learning rather than passively taught, and darn near every educational study has proven this relatively new ideology. However, in the world of English, there’s a problem.

Students still need to spend time, of their own accord, reading.

This problem isn’t something that’s relatively new, and I think we all have to recognize that now. As anecdotal evidence, I like to point to Frank McCourt’s memoir Teacher Man which chronicles McCourt’s time as a high school English teacher in the public schools of New York City. McCourt’s account of unmotivated students took place over thirty years ago, and in the memoir he reports widely on the lack of reading. Fast forward a few decades and the National Endowment for the Arts reported in 2007 that on average Americans between the ages of 15 to 24 spend two hours of their leisure time watching tv, and only seven minutes of that time reading. Seven. If Neil Postman’s futuristic prognostication regarding the detrimental effects of increased technological distractions isn’t vindicated by this little nugget then I don’t know what can.

Students need to be a central part of the learning process. I buy into that wholeheartedly. But how does an English class proceed to the facilitation of learning when the majority of the class hasn’t read?

Only in the last few years have I started to really understand the relationship between English as a subject that’s part of a school system (and the focus regarding a school “system” is to stress that systems are designed around ideologies) and English as a representation of the literary arts. Literature is art. This is really the crux of the issue that English teachers face in the classroom. As an art, English teachers not only facilitate interpreting that art, but also facilitate how to appreciate it, and how to apply it. The crux of the matter then revolves around the issue of technological distractions and experiencing literary art.

Music is easy, and arguably, visual arts even easier. Although one could spend a whole lifetime studying and appreciating these art forms (as many people do), to experience the totality of these genres of art can often be done in twenty minutes. Understand that I’m talking about the experience of the art, mind you, not the thinking about and interpretation of the art. A pop song is often experienced in under four minutes; many classical pieces can be experienced in under twenty. A novel, however, can take many hours to experience. How, in this way, is the novel to survive a cultural push to crowd out, condense, and clip knowledge into digestible and scan-able scraps?

Simply put? It can’t. The cultural forces that are going to cause the downfall of the novel may have unintended consequences. I’m willing to bet there’s going to be a renaissance in the interest of poetry due to these same forces. Epic, no, but short-verse freeform and the lyric? Absolutely. Shakespeare understood the requirement of readership when it came to the life of a work. In sonnet 18, the speaker depicts his lover’s immortalization in the poem itself:

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,  Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st, / Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,  When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st;  /  So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

What Shakespeare is assuming as he penned these lines, however, is that someone will always be reading it. The poem gives the lover immortal life as long as it’s always read. Will that happen any longer if our culture only values and courts the information that’s easily accessed or instantly searched? Is the lover of the poem still given life if that famous couplet is the only part of the sonnet ever pulled out and read from the Internet’s constantly indexing search engines?

My fear is essentially this. Perennially I tell my students not to read a novel, but to experience it. Experience it as art and allow the novel to work into the inner most recesses of your brain, or, better yet, let it chip away or tug at the core of your emotions where a light of recognition and understanding connects your mind with a thought of one of your own personal experiences. My fear, then, is saying these things to a class of students who have become information spectators rather than artist actors. My fear is standing in front of the classroom and eventually realizing that my generation’s experience with a novel may be the last to experience it as such. But more importantly, my fear isn’t that the students who aren’t reading novels don’t read them because they choose the easy way out by instantly going to Spark Notes or to Google, but rather that they can’t experience it the way that I do because culture has hardwired them to see that experience as superfluous, old-fashioned, and irrelevant.

Once culture has succeeded in that, the novel will be truly dead.

Unglamorous Glorifying of Big Data

The recent article in Popular Science magazine by Juan Enriquez titled “The Glory of Big Data” boasts a tagline that should scream at us to wake up instead of making us drool over the possibilities of data crunching that the article highlights. The tagline reads, “Suddenly, we can know the world completely. Next, we reprogram it.” It’s become very apparent to me that we’re losing perspective on the difference between knowledge and experience.


I attended a conference at Rutgers University in June of 2010 where a speaker on the use of technology in the classroom told us that the future student will have more knowledge at their fingertips due to technology than the specialized knowledge in which a professor will have personally acquired. At first blush this seems absolutely incredible and progressive. The skills the student then needs is not retaining information but learning how to access it.

So where’s the problem? This seems like a giant leap forward in the ever quickening race to acquire information. That’s a good thing right?

What we’re failing to separate is the distinction between what we gain in the human condition through experience and what’s classifiable as attainable knowledge. To make an analogy, I can tell someone that heroin use is harmful to one’s body and that it can damage one’s relationships, like any other substance abuse, because of the intensity of addiction. I know that; that’s knowledge. However, I’m lucky enough to have never experienced it, either first or second hand. Someone who has experienced the awful issues revolving around heroin abuse will access that pool of wisdom they’ve accumulated about its devastating impact. This is a resource that I can’t replicate or duplicate, not with Google or any other powerful information search engine.

Moreover, the human condition is defined as the sum total possibilities of human experience. Notice it doesn’t concern itself with knowledge, because knowledge is not as useful to us without the accompanying experience to turn that knowledge into wisdom. It’s our experiences that define us, not necessarily just what we know.

As a case in point, the perennial stumbling block of all English teachers is Spark Notes or a plethora of the other sites that summarize and analyze literature. This, in and of itself, is harmless, and not the issue. The issue is how this knowledge is used to supplant the experience of reading the art, for art it is. This is the equivalent of someone telling you that Raphael’s “The School of Athens” is a painting that depicts some of the greatest philosophical minds of antiquity, including Aristotle, Plato, and, interestingly and anachronistically, even Raphael himself. Ok, so now I know who’s in the painting. I’ve gained some knowledge. However, in the summer of 2008 I had the pleasure of seeing this famous painting in person at the Vatican Museum. It’s an incredible experience to behold this colossal work. In the few moments I had with the painting I experienced a kinship of understanding with the artist; a connection with Raphael. Although the Vatican commissioned the work, Raphael had the freedom to depict these philosophers as he wished, and one can experience the reverence and awe that Raphael imbibes in the painting by being present with it. It was in the moment of experiencing the art that I began to fully understand how important these Greek philosophers were to our modern world. These thinkers set the stage for others to build upon their thoughts. I didn’t read this sensation; I didn’t have it described to me; it wasn’t analyzed by some third party. I experienced it.

The experience of art is different in a museum than on a computer screen—anyone who has ever visited a museum or has been in an art studio can tell you this. Spark Notes and its ilk mar the ability for a student to experience the art—to allow the student to formulate their own constructions of meaning and experience around the act of experience itself. The Spark Notes method of disseminating knowledge from the art is not referential nor does it allow for the indelible personal connection. Take a look at some of the incredible things that genetic engineers are now close to accomplishing—like bringing back the wooly mammoth—which could potentially go horribly and irreversibly wrong. Tell someone that science is potentially the greatest force the human species has ever wielded, and they’ll know it. Talk to a scientist that has ever read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or watched Jurassic Park and they’ll have the wisdom of it.

Determining what humans stand to lose if knowledge supersedes experience is a difficult conclusion to pin down. However, the loss of experience must impact the depth of the human condition. Take away experiences and one makes human existence meaningless. In a sense, pure knowledge is embodied by the Internet itself. It’s important to remember that the Internet—data-- is not who we are. However, if education and our daily lives are now defined by how we access our information and not what types of experiences we have, we should expect a great shift in what it means to be human. The degree of that shift, and in what direction, bodes ill.