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.