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The following is excerpted from the Doonescafe review of Stan Persky's Reading the 21st Century:
I’ve reprised in detail the content of Reading’s first four chapters to give a sense of my engagement with the text and to convey something of the flavour of Persky’s style and approach to reading and writing practice. When approached by dooneyscafe.com to write this piece I realized pretty quickly that the standard review format, complete with mild semi self-congratulatory commentary and breathlessly quotable blurblines like “this is the most important book of literary criticism written by a Canadian in the last twenty-five years”—which is, amazingly enough, in this case true—was not applicable. So I decided to take a long-form Reading-Persky-Reading approach, which, given that the twilight of serious book reviewing is one of Reading’s key laments, seemed appropriate for the occasion. My 28,000 word first draft was, predictably, too long for both website and magazine consumption (I was overly enthusiastic, like my snowman, and reprised every chapter) and so I offer in its place this—to borrow a Persky book title from some years ago—Short Version.
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“The state of our overall cultural context is obscured for many,” Persky writes in his concluding chaptetr, “Code Red,” “by the present technological revolution in digital information and entertainment devices, which is itself part of the cultural context.” He reiterates the “paradox” that writing in the 21st century’s first decade is flourishing while “book reading is in decline, especially among young people. The situation ought to set off alarms, even if not yet of the code red variety.” The “glittering emporia where the latest infotainment devices are on sale” obscures this reality, and does its bit to turn reading from “understanding” into “scanning for information.” He explains that “cultural context” refers to “an entire ensemble of activities and artifacts that occupies significant portions of our lives. It includes reading but also takes in playing video games, chatting on cellphones (or ‘texting’ or ‘sexting’), Internet surfing, watching YouTube or ‘friending’ people on Facebook and other social networking sites. It includes much of the political apparatus, the entire education system, television, films, advertising, pornography, and the vast, lucrative realm of sport spectatorship—much of it accompanied by the ubiquitous iPod soundtrack that provides the pulse of many people’s lives. Examination of our cultural context inevitably involves judgments about the quality of materials with which we’re engaged…and, as I’ve suggested by discussing a broad range of books about current events, evaluation of our cultural context is inseparable from politics, economics, moral progress (or the lack thereof) and our understanding of our own historical situation.”
So we are back here with the key questions about memory, intellectual thought and life, informed democratic citizenship, knowledge deficits, the need for reflective long-term reading attention (what Persky in another context has labeled “mono-” as opposed to “multi-tasking”) and the nature of story reading as opposed to fact gathering as the basis for reasoned decision making. Persky cites a few of the many books from the 21st century’s second decade on the question of what digital and Internet communication is “doing to our brains,” and while he does not consider this debate to be “unique to our era…Each generation in every culture faces its own intellectual challenges, but what’s at stake here is how we succeed or fail in addressing the particular issues of our time.”
Persky finds much of the discussion on the issues to be too narrow to address the cultural context and finds the “denial that there’s a problem” and the “scoffing at what are seen as perennial complaints of the elderly about the behaviour of the young,” tiresome. He considers a lot of this discussion misguided: “The question of whether we read our books in the form of a ‘printed codex’ or on an e-reader can obscure the issue of whether we’re reading at all, and if we are, whether what we’re reading is any good.” Furthermore, “The effort to understand what the Internet and other devices are doing to our brains is interesting but shouldn’t divert us from critically examining the contexts of the information systems we’re employing.” Persky wants Marshall McLuhan’s famous claim that “the medium is the message” to be corrected to “acknowledge that the message is also the message, irrespective of how it is transmitted by various media.” He disputes the nay-sayers’ claims that book reading is not deteriorating and engendering knowledge defects by re-citing the statistics put forth in the books he’s discussed, and calling to our attention his experience as a university teacher. His own and others’ students “maintain a variety of individual identities,” he repeats, “but their sense of being citizens of a democracy, if it ever existed, has atrophied.”
Persky concludes, “the schematic version of what is a far more complex argument that can be essayed in a brief conclusion is that if a sufficient number of people read the ‘books of the decade,’ ignorance would be diminished, the threat of amnesia averted, and the possibility of sustaining a democratic society and significant intellectual life would be enhanced. (My use of ‘books’ here serves as a metonym for the larger cultural context.)”
To learn more about Reading the 21st Century, or to order online, click here.
To arrange an interview with the author, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.
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