NAS Blog

I am struck by the statements in the Pope Center article because attacks on students which blame them for their failed comprehension of novels and of films appear to be a case of students’ receiving the blame for years of failed teaching.

I taught Oswego students film courses in foreign language department courses, sometimes with a separate component for students who only spoke English. I generally constructed courses where the films were based in a literary work so that the written word and the visual and auditory esthetic were compared and contrasted.

We didn’t just do “thematics” — in fact, we didn’t start with a film at all. We started with the rhetoric of film. Students had to learn about shots and angles and film structure and how these visual and sound techniques related to metaphor, etc. in spoken language and esthetics. This meant that the foreign language students were learning the vocabulary of film in TWO languages!

Each film we viewed was discussed not only in terms of “story” and thematics, but in terms of specific technical structures which are inseparable from the story line in the production of comprehension. Once the students got enough film rhetoric under their belts, they reported that they could no longer sit still before the television with their friends — they were constantly analyzing how they were being manipulated, how the visual and linguistic “rhetoric” of the commercial or the film was structured. And this realization was, they reported, LIBERATING. They were no longer passive — but ACTIVE. For some, it was likely an epiphany that educational settings had never offered them before.

My students’ term papers in those courses far exceeded in quality and depth those in “straight” literature courses where I was less able to tap into the students’ interest and energy for the visual and sound media as an entree into the rhetoric of language.

To my mind, it isn’t enough to excoriate our students’ lack of comprehension of language and literature — it is essential to understand our own role as educators in leading them to understanding how comprehension is constructed. If they have never had the opportunity to learn this in secondary education, then it falls upon the post-secondary faculty to take up the gauntlet and work with the students, and the schools, to change that.

It is not the students’ obligation to revert to the printed-word-only-centered education of the faculty’s long-lost youth. It is the instructors’ obligation to learn how to integrate the printed word into an information age education, to see and understand the power and strength that the word can hold in this age of information, of multimedia and multidimensional learning and thinking.

It is as if, in this world of thought, Shakespeare, for example, would be proposed as best understood by our reading, rather than attending, the play. Is not theater the progenitor of the novel, for example, and not the reverse?

As in the Pope Center article, so many faculty expound upon _rhetoric_ and film — again, all without ever having learned and guided students into the realm of the rhetoric of the image and how it functions in concert with or in counterpoint to the rhetoric of the word. Once the student understands how the image is structured, s/he wants to know more about how language is manipulated and created. The two are interwoven in film, as in theater — and many theoreticians want to privilege one over the other rather than understand that the word is NEVER TRULY DISEMBODIED ONTO A PAGE. Homer was only later transcribed — the word was spoken, was heard, was memorized (oral “reading,” as it were), was savored, before it was read on a page.

The problem may be that most faculty have not mastered the rhetoric of the visual, the auditory, hypertext, multimedia, etc. and therefore are less capable of even, themselves, truly fully comprehending the films which they analyze without the essentially-sensed dimensions of the rhetoric of the visual, etc.

In any event, I am convinced that Shakespeare would be on the side of multimedia — he always was. His sonnets were simply rehearsals for the soliloquies on the stage.