Meg sent me this short YouTube promotion for Steven Johnson's upcoming book on creativity. Its worth the time. My one-line response: one book's distraction is one browser's connection.
I like this talk because I've been thinking of Richard Miller's recent discussion of "slow reading" (which I discovered browsing through Facebook, and then browsing over at the Blogora). From what I gather, Miller developed the idea out of Roland Barthes' Pleasure of the Text (in my quick searching, I couldn't find anything by Miller on this subject, but I did find a recent ADE Bulletin article by Jonathan Culler on Close Reading). From what I gather from reading about it, Miller's idea is for students to read one book over the course of the semester (about 15 pages a week). There's no pre-planned syllabus, student assignments develop from the reading on an idiosyncratic basis, negotiated by teacher and student. As a commenter on Facebook gestured, I have a fun time thinking about how USF's recently minted "Office of Assessment" would respond to such an idea (but I dwell in a completely enframed, technological, bureaucratic UNIverse). Such an idea, however, seems connected to the premise of Johnson's upcoming book--that great ideas are a result of careful contemplation and chaotic encounter.
Thankfully, today, our libraries provide opportunity for both.
2 comments:
Culler may mention Pleasure of the Text, but Miller didn't while giving the talk here (though he may be influenced by Barthes, I have no idea). Slow reading, though, wasn't posed so much as close reading, but taking the time to explore and investigate allusions, references, context, etc. In the end, there is a type of quest to discover meanings one wouldn't if reading for coverage. This reading, though, produces a writing methodology - now we see, for instance, how Sontag wrote On Photography, let's do our own writing on a subject.
Thanks fabulous. I didn't have time to read the Culler piece yet, but my feeling from a quick skim is that he's probably going to try and rehabilitate it to mean something closer to what you posit here then what I, a product of a small New England liberal arts University, was trained to do (dissect and explicate a poem with attention to literary techniques and prosody). I do like the emphasis you place here on reading as a path to invention--this is something I try to enforce in my Expository Writing as Digital Citizenship (blogging) classes, and why I like using They Say, I Say as the text for that class.
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