Professor Bertonneau Replies
Tom Bertonneau’s recent articles for the Pope Center have drawn some criticism on the NAS blog. He has written this reply:
The responses posted on this site to my recent Pope Center articles (“Can’t Read, Can’t Watch, Can’t Comprehend” and “Literacy Lost”) indicate a failure either to read my essays carefully or to understand them objectively. Nowhere in either of the two recent articles, or in the three previous ones from 2009, for example, do I “blame students” for their shortcomings. In the three previous articles, indeed, I go out of my way to say repeatedly that I do not blame students. In the two recent ones, I’m sure that I make it clear that where blame is assignable, I assign it to the culture, not to the students. I see the students as grossly cheated by the culture.
In respect of “Can’t Read, Can’t Watch, Can’t Comprehend,” the respondent has not noticed any of my carefully placed qualifications – simple words like “many,” which bring a portion of students under the observation but exculpate the rest. The respondent has also not noticed that my first example has to do with East Lansing, Michigan, not with Oswego, New York, students.
As for this: “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” – Well, so did I! This comment exemplifies a remark in the opening paragraph of the second recent essay, where I note that describing what students actually can or cannot do (especially the latter) drives many faculty-members into a kind of defensive emotional posture.
As for this: “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” – The respondent should reread my discussions of The Maltese Falcon and Things to Come, which make it clear that if students understood the verbal aspect of the story, they would not make the mistakes that they do make concerning the visual aspect! I am not sure what to make of the phrases “essentially sensed” or “rhetoric of the visual,” which sound like jargon to me.
As for the comments on “Literacy Lost,” insofar as I understand them, they strike me as obtuse. Postman, for example (I cite him on just this), mentions telegraph, photography, and mass-circulation newspapers as the original anti-literate technologies; in fact, he quotes from Henry David Thoreau on the probable culturally deleterious effects of the telegraph and the mass-circulation newspaper. That was in 1848. Movies, radio, and television are latecomers in the process of literacy-subversion. Postman was unaware in 1985 of video games and cell phones.
That books were relatively scarce in Lincoln’s time is beside the point. Books were central to acculturation in nineteenth century America and images were not; images were also much scarcer than books. That is the point, both Postman’s point and Ellul’s. Also, the fact that people are literate does not mean that they cease participating in oral communication. Literacy, however, informs oral communication, which is what Postman is pointing out in his discussion of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. The Lincoln-Douglas debates were oratorical performances by massively literate people addressed to a massively literate audience.
Of course, I “accept [sort of] that we are in an information age,” just as I “accept” that the water is wet and winter is cold. That is to say, along with Postman and Ellul, I acknowledge that in our day the realm of the symbolic is a shrunken one; but, like them, I do not see in the development some imposition of Fate about which it is useless or unseemly to form a judgment. To imply as much is to mistake the empirical for the necessary, a basic philosophical error. On the contrary, I regard the “information age,” as the writer euphemistically calls it, as a cultural and social disaster.
I make it clear that, in my judgment, students do, in fact, need to know how to decipher images and other non-verbal media; but my evidence – and so too my experience – tell me that they can only do so on the basis, first, of a genuine literacy, of which the prevailing culture has largely robbed many of them.
I welcome this opportunity for dialogue with Prof. Bertonneau for, as I indicated in my comments, we have much in common even if we also have some clearly divergent perspectives.
First of all, “blaming the culture” has become a coded phrase for blaming the culture of students — and thus, the students themselves — for most speakers of that phrase generally excludes themselves from the swath of that “culture” even though culture, by implication if not definition, is generally “all-encompassing.” We agree that our students have been cheated; that is the essential point.
As for the anecdotes concerning the Michigan students, yes, I did take note of them, but chose to address only those concerning the Oswego students, for there we share some personal history. I, too, noted the “defensive emotional posture” of faculty during my years at Oswego, but the constant refrain of longing for the “good old days” began to seem like a whining excuse to avoid change — change in the pedagogical approaches to the teaching of rhetoric.
Yes, indeed, an understanding of the rhetoric of the word would vastly improve students’ comprehension of film. My point, however, is that the students’ touted “visual culture” offers the instructor the opportunity to introduce students to the rhetoric of the word via the rhetoric of the image. Phrases like “rhetoric of the visual” are perhaps less familiar to professors of English than to professors of French where critics like Christian Metz set the stage, so to speak, for film analysis now decades ago.
For example, the textbook for my French cinema courses was entitled “Cles et codes du cinema” by Yveline Baticle — “Keys and codes of cinema.” Students’ greater exposure to audio-visual rather than printed works of art and culture thus provided the entree for the teaching of rhetoric. Rather like reverse engineering, by learning the vocabulary of the rhetoric of images, students learned the vocabulary of the rhetoric of language use. The double awakening in the students from this approach is, I assure you, gratifying for the instructor and student alike. But it does require that the instructor learn the rhetoric of images and marry it to traditional linguistic rhetorical analysis. In my case, I had to learn it in two (and at one point, three) languages!
As for the concept of literacy subversion effectuated by mass-circulation newspapers, well, where would Dickens and Balzac have been without newspapers for which their novels were written, chapter by chapter, and did they undermine literacy? My point is that the attack is interesting but not “air-tight” and thus subject to deconstruction.
I don’t believe that the scarcity of books in Lincoln’s time is at all “beside the point” — I think it is the point. Literacy does not depend upon the constant referral to the written word as trace of argument and language. Memorization and performance were the watchwords of Lincoln’s day — and the key to the fascination with the Lincoln-Douglas debates. In other words, the literacy of Lincoln’s day relied far more upon repeated and direct access to the sound shape of words than to their written forms — and thus, our and our students’ cultures’ loss of the skills of memory, memorization, and performance actually affect our own literacy. Literacy not as a concept linked to the printed word but rather to argument, to rhetoric, to persuasion.
As another blogger at another forum pointed out (it may have been “luther blisset”), the advent of the book, of the printing press, might have been seen as a disaster for the kinds of seqential and spatial reading and visual verification that scrolls provided. Their abandonment could thus have been seen, Luddite-like, as a step backward rather than forward for literacy.
As speaking humans, we are always creating for ourselves an “information age” — the only thing at issue is the means of transmission and the imprint of a trace, the embodiment or disembodiment of the word as sound and sign from bodies and selves in interaction.
So, it is up to us to decide whether we will embrace the possibilities of the “multimedia” of our own age as Shakespeare surely did those of his own. By way of example, at the Globe Theater, the actor who played Cordelia and the actor who played the Fool were one and the same in the troup, giving visual significance to “And my poor fool is hanged” at the end of “King Lear.” Thus, presented with the “trompe l’oeil” of the emerging technologies of our “culture,” we must decide whether the glass before us is a glass half-empty or a glass half-full — and that, perhaps, is the defining difference between our two “perspectives” on literacy and our profession: for me the glass is most decidedly half-full.
Thank you for the opportunity to engage in this dialogue.