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Daily Tar Heel Write Up

Wed, 09/12/2007 - 18:06 — Daniel Anderson

Just a quick link to the piece about our first SOUL event of the year. Great to get some more publicity for the group.

Comments

Wed, 09/12/2007 - 22:26 — Sarah Bull

The good fight...

Note that even the DTH recognizes us as a group for "book junkies," not Internet/blog junkies. (Cough.)

More--as I thought about our little discussion this evening, it occurred to me why I don't need to worry and I became very peaceful and was able to completely release the horror I felt at the prospect of professionals rejecting our literary and academic foundations (from the texts up to the methods): there is a fundamental difference between texts and the online world. You can't -touch- the internet, it exists in computers. A book is an artifact. The literary tradition and the classic teaching system we exist in is foundational, the way history is foundational. It happened. Just because people no longer care about, say, the history of the United States, does -not- make that history any less relevant. Just because students no longer care about being able to scan a line of poetry or read a book cover to cover, does -not- make meter or literature any less important. Am I right?

Also: http://research.unc.edu/endeavors/spr97/dial.html

"Our great thoughts, our great affections, the Truths of our life, never leave us." - William Makepeace Thackeray

Wed, 09/12/2007 - 23:38 — Daniel Anderson

what are books

That's a nice piece about the way that the values of literature and teaching literature adhere even as English classes and theoretical appoaches shift. I actually agree with you about the relevance of the past--literature doesn't die just because other things come along. But I'm not convinced that we're thinking of it exactly the same way. There's an outfit called the institute for the future of the book that I interact with sometimes. One of the things they think about is whether it is possible to separate things like the book, from the ideas that they convey. If we think of the book as sheets of paper bound by leather, then it has some relevance, but also is more likely to become an artifact. If you think of the book as a vessel for ideas, then the relevance of that concept might be expanded as well. The leather and paper vessel works really well--portable, touchable, stable, filtered. But it might not be the only vessel.

The trick, I think, is recognizing the characteristics that matter about the idea of the book--a vessel for extended blocks of thought, often a singular perspective, often a carefully sequenced progression of ideas. If another form or vessel can carry those criteria forward, I'm OK with it. The book's demise has no doubt been exaggerated--it's form has been so well refined to do this work. Early books had no spacing between words, no page numbers, tables of contents, etc. All of these technologies were invented and refined to make the thing easier to deal with. I'm not 100% sure that some of the inventions didn't shape the thinking that goes into or comes out of books--did the demands of thought spur the inventions, or did the inventions alter the way we use and think through books--probably a bit of both. So ,books are still evolving. New vessels are being invented and they will shift and adapt over time as well, but behind these developments there does seem to be something foundational. So, if it's not too much to say so, in many ways, we're still on the same page.