01.12.09
welcome to this course
This course, Books & Culture, is being offered during January 2009 at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota. January term is an interim where students and professors are encouraged to learn experientially by taking a single intensive, usually interdisciplinary course that may fall outside the boundaries of the usual curriculum.
In this course, we will examine our own reading experiences, think about the social dimensions of books and reading, including issues of class and gender, learn about the business of books, and consider the past and the future of the book. Syllabus information can be found in the “pages” section on the right hand side of this blog.
As usual, I am making this an open course, hosted on a free WordPress platform. Please feel free to make use of material found here.
01.11.09
finding the right book
One of the great determinants of whether people will become avid readers or not is whether they find the right books – the ones that speak to them and make them want to read more. One of your jobs in this class will be finding your “right books,” three books that you will enjoy reading this month. Getting suggestions from friends and family is one route. Here are some tools that might also help you choose books.
- Fiction Finder (on campus only) – this database groups books by similarity. Choose it from the right-hand side options of Books in Print.
- Gnooks - try either Gnod’s suggestions or the literature map to find writers whose work is like other writers
- LibraryThing – a site where over half a million people have cataloged their books – 32 million of them. You can search by “tags” – user-generated subject terms – to find books you might be interested in.
- Lit Lists – links to “best of” lists of all kinds.
- Novelist (on campus or use your barcode and last name to access) – includes recommended reading and author read-alikes.
- OCLC Fiction Finder – an experimental catalog of fiction that you can search or browse by topic.
- Whichbook – put in your preferences on sliding scales, get lists of books to match.
- Writers Read – a blog where writers recommend books they’re reading.
So once you have ideas of what books you might want to read, how can you get your hands on them?
First, check our catalog, MnPALS and the St. Peter Public Library. (You can get a card there if you take in your ID and something with your name and Gustavus address on it, such as a bill.)
If the books you want to read aren’t owned by a local library, look them up in WorldCat and request them through Interlibrary Loan. To do this, click on the yellow “find it” button and then choose “Interlibrary Loan.” Use the barcode from your ID card and your last name to log in, then scroll down and check off the copyright statement and click “go.” You’ll get an e-mail when the book arrives. Problems? Ask for help at the library’s reference desk.
Another option is to browse the library’s shelves. In addition to the browsing collection (a small selection of popular books), here is some good browsing territory for contemporary British and US fiction (mixed with criticism):
- PR 6060 – 6100
- PS 3560 – 3600
01.10.09
the psychology of reading for pleasure
Victor Nell studied the trance-like state achieved when “lost in a book” – most commonly experienced when reading fiction or narrative non-fiction (that is, non-fiction that is told like a story); this is why in the 19th century, reading novels was likened to having a drug habit. It worried people that it was so absorbing.
According to a neurological study that Nell performed, processing demands are higher with books than other media (movies, television) but that also means that when you are absorbed in a book, you are more likely to block out distractions. While readers describe being absorbed in a book as “effortless,” their brains are actually intensely active. As one critic said, this is not an escape from thinking, it’s an escape into thinking – intensely, and without distraction.
Richard Gerrig conducted many studies on reading, trying to gain an understanding of the psychology involved. One study that I found particularly intriguing had to do with the extent to which people fold what they read in fiction into their knowledge base, even when they know it’s “all made up.” The less they know about the topic, the more likely they will believe in facts encountered in fiction. Cognitively, we don’t shelve fiction and non-fiction separately.
Another issue about the factuality of fiction is that readers who encounter something they know is inaccurate in a narrative will slow their reading and that slowing might interrupt the sense of being absorbed in the story – it breaks through the illusion of being in the narrative.
Other research suggests that reading helps in the formation of identity. Reading can help people find characters who are like them and affirm that they are not alone, not freaks. They can also help them define what kind of person they want to be.
In Keith Oatley’s New Scientist article that we read for today (28 June 2008, pages 42-43), he reports that he and some colleagues found that fiction acts a simulation of life situations and that, by engaging in reading fiction, people gain a stronger capacity for empathy as measured on standard psychological tests.
Studies of avid readers have found that books have an emotional affirmation. They make people feel better about themselves, provide confirmation that other people have gone through the same things, they help people think through problems in their own lives and help clarify their feelings. They broaden horizons and give them a window into other lives and other societies and help them both engage with the world beyond their personal circumstances and escape from pressures in their daily lives.
In the Spufford reading for today, the author tells us that his sister’s serious illness was a prompt for his reading. Here’s another description of a reader who found escape and enlightenment simultaneously in reading. This is from Greg Bottoms book Angelhead, a rather disturbing memoir of his brother’s schizophrenia:
At some point-I can’t pinpoint exactly when-I realized that books made sense of the worst things, even if they seemed stunted and dark, offering nothing but a crippled epiphany. These were the ones I gravitated toward then: Poe, Dostoevsky–The Tell-Tale Heart’ and ‘White Nights’ are, to me, schizophrenic classics–and the American pulp novelists of mid-century. I began reading all the time, endlessly, book after book, always looking to find the grand tragedy rendered with meaning-the more transgressive, the more violent, the better because by the middle of the book I wanted to see how this mess would be fixed, how a life, even a sad, broken, imaginary life, could be saved. I started to believe-and I still believe-that I could somehow save myself with a story, and even though I couldn’t save anyone else, I could try to understand them, attempt to grant them at least that, and perhaps it is in this, this attempt to understand, that a person is truly saved . . . I am not exaggerating when I say books saved my life; or put another way, books saved my mind and helped me to understand my life” (104-6).
01.09.09
books and gender
Do boys read differently than girls? David Brooks thinks so.
We do know from research that boys typically have lower reading scores than girls in standardized reading tests – and this is true in the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia. sometimes people assume that boys don’t like to read because it’s considered “girlish” or not very masculine and many of the usual role models for reading (teachers and librarians) work in primarily in female-dominated professions. Another study challenged that assumption. After interviewing 49 boys in depth, the researchers concluded the real problem was that it was too “schoolish” – it didn’t connect to their lives outside school, and that the kind of reading done in school didn’t match the kind of reading boys enjoyed in their own time. They also found that boys do a lot of reading that doesn’t “count” as reading – reading game manuals or websites or magazines or comics rather than novels or serious non-fiction. Now there’s an effort afoot to identify books boys will enjoy – or even to write books for boys who are reluctant readers, trying to make it easier, so more satisfying.
Although it is not true that men don’t read, it does appear to the be the case that in general men tend to divide their reading evenly between fiction and non-fiction, whereas about 70% of women’s reading is fiction. According to a large-scale study in Canada, men were less social in their reading habits. They chose books based on reviews or on their own judgment rather than on the recommendations of friends; they were less likely than women to discuss the books they read. Women are more likely to turn to friends for recommendations, and the majority of participants in book clubs are women.
In the early 1980s, Janice Radway studied women who read romance novels as an ethnographic project – looking at the totality of their experience through careful documented observation. Most feminist critics felt women who read romances were learning to believe in patriarchal patterns of relationships – to find their greatest happiness in being subservient to men and to see marriage as a woman’s highest calling. These theories were based on the content of the books, not on actual reading experiences. In a sense, these critics assumed that fans of romances were reading the same book they read, that the book itself contained all of its meaning.
Radway used a different approach to books – reader response theory, which argues that meaning comes from an interaction between the text and the reader, and that readers bring their own meaning with them. This meaning is also informed by interpretive communities – whether those are students in a classroom studying Jane Austen or people who are reading the latest Oprah’s book club choice. The community will develop certain reading practices that are considered the norm. So to find out what romances mean, she interviewed many women who she describes as “compulsive” readers of the genre. They saw it as a way of carving out some time for themselves – a kind of “declaration of independence.” These were largely women who spent their lives caring for others (husbands and children) and enjoyed a fantasy in which a man who was both masculine and tender cared for the heroine – a reversal from daily life, since they were more typically caregivers in their lives. In some ways these books become a critique of patriarchal society because they portray a patriarchal society that is so much better than the real thing.
More recently Radway wrote about girls reading and challenged the notion that women’s self-image is determined by media messages. She argued that when girls read, they often choose books that give them a taste of independence (The Boxcar Children, who lived alone, without adults, or Nancy Drew who was able to solve crimes without much help from her nearly invisible father). She argued that we make ourselves, in part, through collage, by finding things (in books and elsewhere) that we identify with or aspire to. She points to zines as an example of how girls (riot grrrls in particular) literally made collages out of things they found interesting or revealing – and suggests that this kind of self-fashioning should be encouraged in schools rather than dismissing popular culture as a corrupting influence.
01.07.09
different kinds of books
There’s a certain kind of book we tend to picture when we hear the word “book” – a block of text, printed on pages, divided into chapters, bound and wrapped in a cover. But there are many different kinds of books, many of which have been massively popular yet dismissed as lesser forms of expression.
In the Renaissance, pamphlets – many of them focused on lurid crimes – were immensely popular. This is a picture from “A true discourse. Declaring the damnable life and death of one Stubbe Peeter, a most wicked sorcerer who in the likenes of a woolfe, committed many murders, continuing this diuelish practise 25. yeeres, killing and deuouring men, woomen, and children. Who for the same fact was taken and executed the 31. of October last past in the towne of Bedbur neer the cittie of Collin in Germany.” (1590) The image is almost like a comic strip, depicting a crime followed by several salacious punishments. You can find this pamphlet in Early English Books Online.
Though not in book form, William Hogarth told moral stories in the form of prints, many of them issued in series.
In the 19th century, cheap and colorful adventure stories were immensely popular with boys. These “penny dreadfuls” and “dime novels” were sometimes thought to encourage vice, leading G. K. Chesterton to write “A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls.”
One of the strangest examples of the degree to which ordinary life is undervalued is the example of popular literature, the vast mass of which we contentedly describe as vulgar. The boy’s novelette may be ignorant in a literary sense, which is only like saying that a modern novel is ignorant in the chemical sense, or the economic sense, or the astronomical sense; but it is not vulgar intrinsically–it is the actual centre of a million flaming imaginations. . . . These common and current publications have nothing essentially evil about them. They express the sanguine and heroic truisms on which civilization is built.
Later, crime and horror comic books stirred a similar concern, leading to Congressional hearings on the supposed link between reading violent comic books and juvenile crime. To fend off hostile legislation, the comic book industry adopted a code to limit sex, violence, and deviance in comics. (The word “zombie,” for example, was banned from comics.)
Pulp fiction was another form of inexpensive entertainment. The stories frequently dealt with crime and sexuality and the cover art almost always involved women in tight and/or scanty clothing. The work of many pulp writers is considered important literature today; interestingly, important literature was sometimes published as pulp.
Some current forms of alternative book publishing today include graphic novels, zines, manga, fotonovelas, and hypertext fiction. Though there is enormous variation within these categories, each of these formats has its own aesthetic and traditions, and each invites a different kind of reading – one that is both verbal and visual.
This image is from Art Spiegelman’s Maus, an award-winning graphic novel.
This moody picture is from the opening of a famous manga, Akira.
Finally, books can be turned into new kinds of books. Altered books are an art form that offers some interesting approaches to rethinking the book itself.
01.06.09
books in history
Alberto Manguel has a chronology in some editions of his book, A History of Reading. These are some of the highlights – with a few recent updates.
- c. 1010 – the world’s first novel is written by Lady Murasaki – the Tale of Genji
- 1455 – Gutenberg invents the printing press (though the Chinese were there first with moveable type); for the first time identical versions of a text can be made multiple times.
- 1536 – Tyndale translates the bible into English and, for this heresy, is strangled, then his body is burned at the stake.
- 1559 – the Vatican publishes its first list of forbidden books. The final printing of the list was made in 1966, when the practice was discontinued.
- 1740 – South Carolina passes a law against teaching slaves to read; other southern states follow suit. Slave narratives – memoirs written by slaves about their experiences – become a potent force in the abolitionist movement.
- 1933 – in Germany Nazis hold book burnings; in the same year, the first mass market paperbacks are published, making mainstream books more affordable.
- 1971- Project Gutenberg begins putting public domain books online in downloadable files. The first of these are hand-typed as text files by volunteers. The project continues, now using scanning technology.
- 1995 – Amazon begins selling books online
- 2003 – Amazon launches its “search inside” feature, searching the contents of hundreds of thousands of books.
- 2004 – Google launches Google Book Search. When publishers fail to flock to their project, Google begins to scan the contents of major research libraries. Publishers sue.
- 2007 – Amazon launches the kindle to much ballyhoo.
- 2008 – Stanza for iPhone released and nearly half a million iPhone users download it.
- 2008 – Google settles with publishers and sets the groundwork for becoming the world’s largest vendor of online book content.
01.05.09
Libraries, Culture, and Democracy
Until fairly recently, libraries were only for the wealthy. The movement to found public libraries only started in the 19th century. In England, the Public Library Act of 1850 was passed, though conservatives opposed it because of the risk that it might make working class people uppity, and few cities funded them. In the US there was no national act to establish libraries, but a movement swept the country in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Boston Public Library
By 1876 there were 188 free public libraries. Between 1883 and 1929, Andrew Carnegie contributed to the founding of more than 2,500 public libraries. To a large extent, obtaining funds for a public library was spearheaded by women’s groups, who had to demonstrate a need, find a site, and provide for ongoing funding. Now there are more public libraries in the US than there are MacDonald’s. It’s so universally expected that it can come as a huge shock when funding issues force closures.
Jackson County Libraries - Closed
A library system in Oregon was shut down for months because of funding issues and only reopened on a limited basis when the county government hired a for-profit company to run it for them. The article about the “book mules” delivering books in Venezuela and the donkeys carrying books in Ethiopia demonstrates the value of books when they are not otherwise available.
Libraries have a lot of built-in contradictions. They are both a source of warm-and-fuzzy feelings and of a certain amount of anxiety about rules and overdue fines. They are democratic institutions, but they can also be palatial, formal, imposing places that might not be welcoming to all. They are traditional – preserving culture – but also forward looking, to the point that traditionalists like Sally Tisdale are annoyed by it.
Umberto Eco wrote about two kinds of libraries in ”De Bibliotheca.” (Bostonia Spring1993: 57-60). One is a nightmare with a great many rules. The information desk for readers must be inaccessible. Borrowing should be discouraged. Interlibrary loans should be impossible, or take months. Hours of opening should coincide with working hours. Refreshments of all kinds will be forbidden. To the extent possible there will be no toilets. Ideally, no reader should be allowed inside the library.
Then he describes library utopia. Apart from providing good espresso and comfortable chairs, these libraries encourage exploration. “The whole idea of a library is based on a misunderstanding: that the reader goes into the library to find a book whose title he knows. . . . The essential function of a library . . . is to discover books of whose existence the reader has no idea.” This discovery is a collaboration between the seeker and the shelves, a mix of deliberation and serendipity. “This sort of library is made for me. I can pass a whole joyful day there. I read the papers, I take some books to the bar, I fetch others, I make discoveries. I entered to work, in true empirical English fashion; instead I find myself among commentators on Aristotle, I wind up on the wrong floor, I go into a section, say Medicine, in which I never thought to stray, and suddenly I stumble upon works about Galen, full of philosophical references. This way, a library is an adventure” (59).
British Museum Reading Room
Not long ago, a big library consortium commissioned a market survey that found that people by and large have good feelings about libraries but they were upset to discover that most people think of books when they think of libraries.
It would be delightful to assume that when respondents say “books,” what they really mean to say is that books, in essence, stand for those intangible qualities of information familiarity, information trust and information quality. The data did not reveal it. We looked hard. We reviewed thousands of responses to the open-ended questions that inquired about positive library associations and library purpose. We searched for words and phrases that included mentions of “quality,” “trust,” “knowledge,” “learning,” “education,” etc. We found mentions of each, but they were relatively few in number. “Books” dominated – across all regions surveyed and across all age groups.
So in answer to this “problem,” they suggest leveraging this archaic belief into a stronger brand for the library – because libraries aren’t supposed to be about books, they’re meant to be about information.
This need to focus on a kind of usefulness that is more than merely providing books goes back a long way. At the beginning of the twentieth century it had a name: the “fiction problem.” Public libraries, that were intended to elevate and educate the masses, had trouble discouraging their patrons from choosing fiction. At the end of the 19th century, the library director in Allegheny, Pennsylvania reported he had successfully rid his library of Horatio Alger stories and other popular material, saying “It is certainly not the function of the public library to foster the mind-weakening habit of novel-reading among the very classes – the uneducated, busy or idle – whom it is the duty of the public library to lift to a higher plane of thinking.” Reading fiction was not only unproductive it was dangerously addictive: “once the habit . . . is formed, it seems as difficult to throw off as the opium habit.” In the same vein, in 1906 the Toronto Public library’s annual report bragged about their success in decreasing in the circulation of fiction as if they had averted a public health crisis: “there is an indulgence in the reading of trashy novels which is destructive to the mind.”
Fortunately, most libraries got over the notion that they were supposed to improve people by force. In fact, the public library has provided a diverse banquet of books that suit many tastes. One library historian says libraries have served “the democracies of culture” by allowing people to choose their own books and “evolve multiple canons unique to their own culture.”
Libraries, Freedom to Read, and Civil Liberties
Libraries support uncensored access to information and strongly support the idea that privacy is a necessary condition to the freedom to read without fear of consequences. The idea is basically this: people need to be able to explore ideas, even reprehensible ideas. They should be free to read and to think what they like. Reading can never be a criminal offense. However, books can be controversial, as Banned Books Week reminds us every fall. And almost all public libraries provide access to the Internet. While reading itself cannot be a crime, crimes can be committed on computers connected to the Internet.
Here are some scenarios to think about:
- pornography on the Internet – obscene speech is not protected by the first amendment, but filters that block porn also block perfectly legitimate sites. Libraries have resisted installing filters because they block access to sites on things like breast cancer and information about sexuality. Yet sometimes people use library computers to look at porn, which is offensive to library users. In one system, library staff sued their own library for creating a “hostile work environment.” What to do?
- people are used to giving up privacy in exchange for personalization. They may want to create lists of the books they’ve read or have a “my library” function that records what they’ve checked out and use that information to make recommendations as Amazon does. They might be interested in knowing which books are checked out the most. Librarians want to protect privacy, but with companies like Google and Facebook routinely keeping information and using it to supposedly “improve the customer experience” – e.g. customize advertising messages – library users don’t always want privacy.
- libraries want to give teenagers the same privacy they afford adults, but adults often pay the bills when books are lost or overdue. How would you respond if you asked a librarian for a list of books checked out by your scatterbrained fourteen year old and were told “I can’t do that. You’ll have to ask your child”?
- police in Boston got a tip that a bomb had been placed in a public building. Believing there was relevant information on a computer in a public library, they went to the library and tried to remove the computer without a warrant. The librarian pointed out that if she complied, she would break a Massachusetts state law. Her abiding by the law caused an outcry.
- a Vermont librarian demanded a warrant when police wanted to seize library computers, suspecting a teen had used one to communicate with her abductor. The girl was later found dead. The information on the computer does not appear to have been material to case, yet at the time police felt the girl’s life was at risk.
01.02.09
images to use in design
Since we’ll be trying our hand at book jacket designs for the next two days, these sites for royalty-free images might come in handy. These may also be useful for your final projects . . . but be sure you keep track of where your images came from and who should be credited for that project.
Flickr – a social networking site for photos. To find photos you can use, use the advanced search option and select “creative commons” toward the bottom of the page.
Flickr Commons – a collection of photos from cultural institutions (such as the Library of Congress) that have no known copyright restrictions. These have been put online partly to make them available for use, but also so that people who might recognize subjects can tag them. Not to be confused with the “creative commons” pool at Flickr where members have agreed to make photos available for reuse with only “some rights reserved.”
Life Magazine photos hosted by Google – these low-resolution images are apparently available for non-commercial use
MorgueFile – a collection of royalty-free photos you can reuse
New York Public Library photos via Flickr – with no known copyright restrictions
WorldImages - a collection of 70,000 art, architecture, and historical images that can be used for educational purposes
01.01.09
Is Reading at Risk?
In 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts published an alarming report that proclaimed reading was at risk. It summarized data from a study that found fewer people were reading fiction for pleasure than since the early 1980s. Further analysis published in 2007 suggested that reading is associated with multiple good things: participating in sports, doing good deeds, visiting museums, making money. And it suggested that if this decline continued, soon nobody would be reading.
The report didn’t highlight one intriguing fact: that writing for pleasure was on the increase. It also reported sales of books were down, but didn’t account for the enormous growth in used book sales or in library circulations. It also bemoaned the lowering of standardized reading scores among high-schoolers without celebrating the fact that scores were up in earlier grades. It only looked at reading of fiction and equated that with “literary reading” – and only counted reading that had nothing to do with school or work. It didn’t look at data from years before 1982, which yields a very different picture. Nor did it consider the fact that what “counts” as valuable reading has changed vastly over time. In short, the analysis seemed determined to find bad news.
Interestingly, just before the NEA chairman left his post as the new adminstration swept into town, a report summarizing preliminary data from a new study found reading fiction for pleasure was on the rise, especially among youth. What is soft-peddled in that report is the head-scratching finding that reading all sorts of books for pleasure (non-fiction included) other than required by work or school was down by 4%. This is good news? I guess it depends on what you’re looking for.
