Shit English Majors Say (and shit they don't anymore)

One thing I've come to see from talking with my students about reading is that arguments over platforms are of little or no interest to them. Most of them own Kindles or Nooks, which they use mostly for recreational reading. Most of their school texts are books, and they do most of their other reading online.

And I think it's fair to say that—aside from the opportunities for diversion they offer—most such innovations in computing and communication technology facilitate book publishing. What I have found striking is the change in classroom discourse about what's actually in the books. For example, not only was none my students familiar with the phrase "over the transom," none of them was familiar with a transom. And they had heard nothing whatsoever of Joseph Conrad. I'd brought the name up in relation to the sinking of the Italian cruise liner and how that captain's predicament was similar to that of Conrad's title character Lord Jim, who also abandons ship in a moment of panic and is tormented by the act for the rest of his life.

Not one of the students in the class knew the character or the author. I have always been impatient with instructors who express shock at what their students have not read; however, it was remarkable to me—as one who had encountered Heart of Darkness in two or three different classes, and on the screen in the DNA of Apocalypse Now—that a work that was to my generation a proto-critique of colonialism from the point of view of the colonialist in the waning years of colonialism would be unknown to this one.

Obviously, Conrad was a flashpoint author during the culture wars of the 80s and 90s (as expressed in Chinua Achebe's famous essay), who's been demoted in the canon as a result of those conversations and frequently replaced by more authentic voices from the former colonies in question, such as Achebe's. And now arguments that used to feel like intellectual life and death seem very distant from discussions of Twitter passwords and the navigation architecture of online style manuals.