Tuesday, April 23, 2002

Reading and Revelation " . . . the journey begins to matter more than the arrival . . . there are always additional choices to be made, if one's life is to remain interesting." "The idea that a simple rereading could also be a new reading struck me with the force of a revelation. . . . It offered an escape route, however temporary, from . . . the speeded- up, mechanized, money-obsessed existence that had somehow become our collective daily life." " . . . I had purposely constructed for myself a life that was marginal to and therefore shielded from the clamoring demands of the marketplace. Well, 'purposely' may not be the right word . . . " "Rereading is certainly both, as I was to discover. You cannot reread a book from your youth without perceiving it as, among other things, a mirror. Wherever you look in that novel or poem or essay, you will find a little reflected face peering out at you -- the face of your own youthful self, the original reader, the person you were when you first read the book. So the material that wells up out of this rereading feels very private, very specific to you. But as you engage in this rereading, you can sense that there are at least two readers, the older one and the younger one. You know there are two of you because you can feel them responding differently to the book. Differently, but not entirely differently: There is a core of experience shared by your two selves (perhaps there are even more than two, if you include all the people you were in the years between the two readings). And this awareness of the separate readers within you makes you appreciate the essential constancy of the literary work, even in the face of your own alterations over time, so that you begin to realize how all the different readings by different people might nonetheless have a great deal in common." 3:30:17 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Debate? Dissent? Discussion? Oh, Don't Go There! "That familiar interjection 'whatever' says a lot about the state of mind of college students today. So do the catch phrases 'no problem,' 'not even' and 'don't go there.'" "Indeed, the reluctance of today's students to engage in impassioned debate can be seen as a byproduct of a philosophical relativism, fostered by theories that gained ascendance in academia in the last two decades and that have seeped into the broader culture. While deconstruction promoted the indeterminacy of texts, the broader principle of subjectivity has been embraced by everyone from biographers (like Edmund Morris, whose biography of President Ronald Reagan mixed fact and fiction) to scholars (who have inserted personal testimony in their work to underscore their own biases). Because subjectivity enshrines ideas that are partial and fragmentary by definition, it tends to preclude searches for larger, overarching truths, thereby undermining a strong culture of contestation." "At the same time, multiculturalism and identity politics were questioning the very existence of objective truths and a single historical reality. As the historians Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob observed in their book, 'Telling the Truth About History,' radical multiculturalists celebrated 'the virtues of fragmentation,' arguing that 'since all history has a political — often a propaganda — function, it is time for each group to rewrite history from its own perspective and thereby reaffirm its own past.'" " . . . the legacy of multiculturalism and identity politics remains potent on college campuses. On one hand, it has made students more accepting of individuals different from themselves, more tolerant of other races, religions and sexual orientations. But this tolerance of other people also seems to have resulted in a reluctance to engage in the sort of impassioned argumentation that many baby boomers remember from their college days. 'It's as though there's no distinction between the person and the argument, as though to criticize an argument would be injurious to the person'" "Outside the classroom, it's a mindset ratified by the PLUR ('Peace, Love, Unity and Respect') T-shirts worn by ravers (whose drug of choice is Ecstasy, which induces warm, fuzzy feelings of communion)." "At the same time, the diminished debate syndrome mirrors the irony-suffused sensibility of many millennial-era students. Irony, after all, represents a form of detachment; like the knee-jerk acceptance of the positions of others, it's a defensive mode that enables one to avoid commitment and stand above the fray." "What are the consequences of students' growing reluctance to debate? Though it represents a welcome departure from the polarized mudslinging of the 90's culture wars, it also represents a failure to fully engage with the world, a failure to test one's convictions against the logic and passions of others. It suggests a closing off of the possibilities of growth and transformation and a repudiation of the process of consensus building. 'It doesn't bode well for democratic practice in this country . . . To keep democracy vital, it's important that students learn to integrate debate into their lives and see it modeled for them, in a productive way, when they're in school.'" 3:04:03 PM  Google It!  comment  []