‘Ulysses’ Without Guilt – New York Times (Subscription Required)
Stacy Schiff, a guest columnist at the Times writes today about Pierre Bayard’s “How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read,” which seems like a great invite to talk about a book that I haven’t read. From what I understand, Bayard’s basic argument is that exposing oneself to a breadth of material is just as good as knowing something deeply. Schiff writes:
Say what you will about Professor Bayard, he forces us to confront a paradox of our age. By one estimate, 27 novels are published every day in America. A new blog is created every second. We would appear to be in the midst of a full-blown epidemic of graphomania. Surely we have never read, or written, so many words a day. Yet increasingly we deal in atomized bits of information, the hors d’oeuvres of education. We read not in continuous narratives but by linkage, the movable type of the 21st century. Our appetites are gargantuan, our attention spans anorectic.
She then goes on to posit that technologies like search, “arguably the very definition of reading has changed.”
These are phenomena that the process of studying for preliminary exams made me deeply aware of. As information grows over time, the amount of material one must read becomes increasingly dense. I once knew a professor who, when she was studying for prems, was instructed to read everything about her (broad) subject. I don’t think that is remotely possible anymore–but technolgies like search and news aggreation might offer ways to get at what we’re interested in. Hopefully it doesn’t come at the cost of well crafted prose.