Reading, Technology, and the Nature of Man: An Interpretation
1980; Modern Humanities Research Association; Volume: 10; Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/3506938
ISSN2222-4289
Autores Tópico(s)Digital Games and Media
ResumoIn the United States and Western Europe the past decade has seen an unprecedented development of a highly intellectualized interest in reading and readers. This interest has thus far been relatively elitist, quite distinct from the concurrent distress over practical reading skills and more unprecedented than this distress, for, as historians of education well know, dismay over lack of reading skills and other language skills has been a normal and even fashionable mood in academia over the centuries. The newer interest in reading and readers springs from theoretical rather than practical concerns, although its implications for practical pedagogy can be, or can become, quite real. An indication of the present state of affairs could be seen at the December 1976 convention of the Modern Language Association of America in New York City, when the Forum on the Reader of Literature attracted an audience of around I,ooo to 1,200 persons (transients make exact figures impossible). Hundreds of these pursued the reader question still further in one or more of the six satellite workshops that continued discussion of the subject through the rest of the three-day convention. The Forum itself was billed as providing 'A New Perspective in Criticism and Teaching' and proposed as its focal topic 'Do Readers Make Meaning?': strategic wording, raising teachers' hopes and flattering readers, a self-consciously depressed majority, as well as titillating dabblers in subjectivism. Most persons at the Forum, however, were there not for wish-fulfilment but for more informed and sophisticated reasons. Collectively, they had been reading or hearing of works published in the past decade or so by members of the Tel quel circle in France such as Roland Barthes, Philippe Sollers, Tzvetan Todorov, and Jacques Derrida. They knew something of the Heideggerian and Husserlian thought that lay behind these works, something of the related phenomenology of discourse developed by Paul Ricoeur and by the late Maurice Merleau-Ponty, probably less about the earlier phenomenologist Louis Lavelle and the much earlier and precocious Maine de Biran,
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