how we read now

A while ago, a friend of mine recommended that I read a book called How I Live Now, by Meg Rosoff. It takes place, apparently, during a third world war, so it sort of falls into that apocalyptic/dystopian world sort of fiction that I really love right now. I haven't read it yet, but there's something about the title that always floats into my head lately, and this could have something to do with the fact that I have an inherent sense that everything in my world has changed very recently, and more is about to change. Much is uncertain for me right now, and I think all the time about what my life will be like six months from now. How I live now, indeed.

I've been thinking a lot about grad school too, and where I would like to apply, and what I would like to really focus my studies on. Part of me wants to study life writing. Part of me wants to study dystopias. Part of me wants to study comic books. I get kind of tired of trying to convince people that comics are worth studying, and this will continue until scholarship starts to be generated and people start to realize that comics are actually ridiculously cool (it took me at least a decade to convince my brother of the awesomeness of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but he finally gave it a chance, and he is firmly on my side of the argument now - I believe that the same thing can happen for comics in general). I've already spoken out about how I feel about comics on this blog, and I'm not going to go into it again, but whenever I find someone who loves comics I feel a kind of immediate bond with him/her, and when I find these people in university English departments, I get really excited.

A large part of how I live now is connected to the idea of how I read now. And that has changed significantly in the last five years, since I've been in school. Sometimes I wish I could read a book just for plot, just to see what happens next, just in a casual, layman's kind of way. Not anymore, though. I read and I think of imagery and symbols and reoccurring motifs, and I think about plot development more than I think about the plot itself, I think about reader response and historical contexts and reliable versus unreliable narrators. All of this seems good to me, all of this seems like an indication that I'm really reading now, like I finally understand that reading a book is about so much more than reading a plot. Consequently, I read much more carefully, and much more slowly than I used to. I do it with comics too. I've been reading V for Vendetta for the last four days or so, at work. I've been talking to Dawson Creek about it; he read it about 15 or 20 years ago, he says, and he really liked it, and he wants to know all about what I think of it. And, of course, I think lots of things about it now. But today, my co-worker asked me why it was taking so long for me to read it when there's hardly any text, and then he said, "although I suppose it's kind of fun to look at the pictures." I forget the point of telling this, except my general annoyance at him for not understanding that the illustrations are an integral part of a comic's narrative structure. I mean, how can you understand V for Vendetta without reading the pictures too? What about the frames with no text at all? They don't cease to have meaning. They can't just be removed from the book because their lack of text renders them unimportant.

But this brings me back to the idea of how we read. And the question of how we read, to me, seems inextricably linked to the question of what we read. At the risk of offending a huge demographic, I think a lot of English departments are a bit stuck right now. Imagine you're a fifth-year English major and you're reading Shakespeare's sonnets for the eighteenth time of your degree. I imagine that every single one of us can understand this example. Have you begun to wonder yet if there's a reason that you're reading Shakespeare for the eighteenth time, other than the fact that Shakespeare is in the canon and we always study the history of literature? I'm not suggesting that we should stop studying Shakespeare, but I don't necessarily disagree with the students who question the relevance of studying Shakespeare today. Why do we still study these things? Why do we study Dickens, or Jane Austen, or Wordsworth, or any of the others? How is it relevant to our world, to the way we read now, to what we read now, to the way we approach learning and teaching, and perhaps most importantly, to the way young people understand and use language today? English departments are shrinking, at least in part for this very reason, because people are starting to have trouble seeing exactly why studying Dickens is going to help them understand their world.

Part of the reason I love comics is that they challenge the way we read. Yeah, actually, take something that hardly has any words and call it literary, and that is a challenge to what the word literary means. I'm not saying that comics are the answer, but how can we get people to start seeing the importance of literature again? And how can we deny that students seem to want something different from their English departments when courses in Harry Potter, science fiction, and Game of Thrones are packed full while courses in the Romantics are stuttering on with an enrolment of four or five students? I remember encountering this same debate when I was going to photography school, and digital happened. No one saw the need to teach dark room work anymore, and people didn't seem to want to learn about exposure, because if an image doesn't turn out well, it can just be fixed in Photoshop now. But working in the darkroom and learning about light teaches you about so many fundamentally important aspects of making images - basic things like contrast, colour balance and saturation, quality and colour of light, movement and depth of field, all of the things that essentially allow you to be in control of the image you're making right from the start, from its origin - in the same way that people who want to understand literature really must understand it from its origin. But the cost of film and chemical-based photo instruction became prohibitive, and no one in the industry used it anymore, and funnily enough, no one wants to study medieval literature anymore either. What do we do about this? Is literature of the past facing its own apocalyptic ending, like the world as we know it in Rosoff's novel?

I want to do something that is going to take literature studies forward, if I decide to study literature in grad school. But I've spent so much time studying the past over the last five years, that I don't know how to study the present. What's happening in books today? What are they saying? How do they work? Do I need to learn how to read all over again?