[-empyre-] Narrativity and Reading Regimes

[Emmett Stinson]

I would be very skeptical of any attempts to define a book in terms of
narrative. There are obvious difficulties such as the fact that many, if not
most, currently extant books aren't narrative, and other kinds of writing
that are clearly not books (short stories, newspaper articles), would seem
to be elevated to 'book' status. My larger concern, however, is that
'narrative' itself is not actually a very useful category. To use a classic
lit. crit. example, Auerbach's 'Odysseus' Scar' (the opening chapter of
Mimesis) delineates the radical difference between two narrative forms (the
Odyssey and the Old Testament). Les Miserables and Le Chanson du Roland are
both narrative, but the differences between their narrative deployment are
far more significant than the fact that they both employ narrative. There
are, of course, linguistic theories available (e.g. Labov), but I'm not sure
how useful they'd be here.

In discussing reading regimes in relation to the internet it is typical to
oppose 'immersive' reading (i.e., reading novels and scholarly monographs)
against 'hypertextual scanning' (i.e. internet reading). It's worth noting
however that the internet is not sui generis in this regard. The inverted
pyramid structure of newspaper articles is designed for 'hypertextual
scanning', as are dictionaries, cookbooks, how-to manuals etc. Immersive
reading practices were historically the domain of the well-off (those who
have a great deal of free time), and it may not be reasonable, in societies
with universal literacy, to expect immersive reading to be the standard.
Moreover, I remain highly skeptical of claims that the internet will destroy
immersive reading; we've heard these claims before in attacks on television,
and, before that, the novel itself. Richard Lanham's The Economics of
Attention is interesting on these issues.

As a literary critic, I highly value immersive reading and desire it to
continue. I suspect, however, that the enemy here is not the internet, but
rather the neo-liberal economic rationalism that results in ever-increasing
work hours, and diminishes the free time required for people to engage in
sustained reading practices.
-- 
Emmett Stinson
Lecturer, Publishing and Communications
School of Culture and Communication
The University of Melbourne
Parkville, Victoria, Australia 3010
Ph: 613-8344-3017 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20100611/dfbe7cab/attachment.html>