The Future of Reading

The Atlantic has a conversation with Harvard professor Marjorie Garber about her new book, The Use and Abuse of Literature.

From the piece...

I get the sense from your book that you do think literature can speak for itself to a certain degree, and that people can at some gut level recognize the value of literature. Where, then, do you think the challenges for literature lie?

One of the biggest problems facing literature today is things like the disappearance of the neighborhood book store—places where you can actually go and look at books and touch them and look through them and see what's next to them on the shelves. I love Amazon—I order books from Amazon—but I think there's something about the books and the bookstore as a cultural meeting-place that is enormously important.

I don't think the problems facing literature are within literature. I think that they tend to be circumstantial—the disappearance in some universities and colleges of a kind of introductory course to literary classics or to the epic or the poem or the novel that it was once assumed everyone took some version of. The minute you're exposed to things like that they begin to associate themselves with the other things that you might do for a living or for fun, whether it's economics or law. I have lots of students that come back to me later in life or send me notes and say "I am just now beginning to realize how important these literary texts are to me."

So I think it's a matter of exposure. I think it's a matter of accessibility. I think that literature does invite conversations but you have to meet it somewhere along the line.

So when people talk about the decline of literature, or moan that we're not going to appreciate Shakespeare in 50 years because people are reading trash instead, you feel that's incorrect. You say that if people are introduced to literature they'll value it?

I certainly believe that, but I also believe that all reading is reading, and if you read with literary intention, if you pay attention to the particulars of language, to imagery, to sound, to figures of speech, then whether you're reading the newspaper or a summer beach book or reading a chapter book to your children, there is something literary there. My book goes to some length to talk about how things become literary, become literature, that Shakespeare's plays themselves were thought of as the opposite of canonical or important or even as literature in their time. When Bodleian funded the Bodleian library at Oxford, he wouldn't allow stage plays to be there because they were riffraff, they were trash. Very often novels began as alternatives to serious reading (things like sermons or prayers and philosophical meditations) and these things have now made their way into the forefront of what we now call literature.