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the breakfast table: An e-mail conversation about the news of the day.

Richard Lanham and James O'Donnell

the breakfast table
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from: Richard Lanham

The Economics of Attention, Illiteracy, and Stoppard's Broadway Hit

Posted Tuesday, April 17, 2001, at 11:54 AM ET

Jim,

Two questions, and I think I disagree with you at least on the first. I think that we are, for the first time, going to require something like "high literacy" (clever example of this to follow) for, if not everyone, a lot more people than ever lived in such a world before. That is really what "navigating in an information-rich universe" is all about. And what I keep calling "the economics of attention" is all about. But such an argument is no doubt the English professor coming out in me since trying to pull off such a trick is what English departments have always tried to do. If I were amenable to rational persuasion on this issue, 40 years of academic life would have convinced me otherwise, but I still believe that people have much more creative imagination than they are usually asked to exhibit. When given a chance, extraordinary things emerge. But that's just the optimism that I keep taking my lumps for (even in your book!).

The fourth-grade reading scores article, though, really asks a different question. What about an America where half the people can't add and subtract simple sums or read anything more than store signs, if that? A different but not unrelated problem. You are certainly right that colleges and universities have never really "gotten any purchase on the subject." But that's because we've never tried. The subject is one we just don't want to put our minds to.

Now, let me seize the opportunity of technical difficulties at your end to change the subject and ask you a question that really fits the format of these breakfast conversations. What do I read in today's Los Angeles Times (which I got up an hour early to peruse and react to before I go off to the chiropractor) but an article reporting that Stoppard's The Invention of Love has become "the improbable snob hit of the current Broadway season." What do you think of the play? I haven't seen it, but I read it (in the second edition, 1998) with delight. I thought, such are my prophetic powers: "Well, Stoppard has finally written a play which is unplayable in America. Just too much of an in joke."

One of the treats I gave myself to prepare for our conversations was to re-read both your Cassiodorus book (reflecting on your comments in Avatars of the Word that you had in some way become Cassiodorus--another theme which I'd love to hear you develop) and Avatars. You begin your "Classics and Western Civilization" chapter in Avatars by talking about Housman and then go on to talk about one of the themes that the play has fun with: "the ideology of British educational self-understanding was classical." So have you seen the play? What do you think of it? Whatever do people make of it who don't know anything about Housman or the place of classics in British education in the 19th century, or ... or ... etc. Another, as we may now call it, "hypertextual" link that I've wanted to talk about ever since I read that chapter was its relation to the argument Correlli Barnett develops in The Audit of War. Barnett argues that classical studies stood for everything that brought about Britain's decline as an industrial power. It is an argument developed at greater length in Martin Wiener's English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit. Have you read either of these? Barnett's book is really powerful, and glory be, the prose is marvelous. I don't know anyone whose views on these books, and this subject, I would rather hear than yours.

So in case you run out of the Algonquin lunch table parry-and-thrust items that I fear the organizers of this conversation had in mind for this series, you might start with The Invention of Love and what depends from it. If that's not "high literacy," where is it to be found? Now, off to the bone-cracker.

Dick

the breakfast table
entries
1234567891011121314
from: Richard Lanham

The Economics of Attention, Illiteracy, and Stoppard's Broadway Hit

Posted Tuesday, April 17, 2001, at 11:54 AM ET
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Richard Lanham spent his active academic career teaching and writing about medieval and Renaissance literature at UCLA, but now spends his retirement fiddling around with electronic text. He is the author of The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts. James O'Donnell is a classics professor at the University of Pennsylvania and vice provost of computing. He is the author of Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace.
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