Browsing the stacks the other day, the title goodbye Gutenberg (( Kirschenbaum, Valerie. Goodbye Gutenberg: Hello to a New Generation of Readers and Writers. New York: Global Renaissance Society, 2005. )) jumped out at me. I pulled it off the shelf and turned to a gorgeously designed page full of vivid color and images as well as text.
I turned to the introduction, which began with an anecdote about teaching The Canterbury Tales to high school students. Pointing to an image from the manuscript reproduced in their textbook, a student asked: “Ms. Kirschenbaum, how come our books are not in color, like they used to be?” The easy answer, she explains, the answer that it was cheaper and easier to print in black and white, didn’t seem adequate with the the color reproduction of the illuminated page “smiling” at them. The question sent her on a quest, and the result is the book and her argument that color and design can stimulate learning.
I mentioned this to my wife, an optometrist, who told me about Irlen filters, which are colored overlays and lenses used to help treat Scotopic Sensitivity Syndrome.
All of this, of course, is deeply connected to the canon of memory, especially some of Mary Carruthers’ work and the work Kathie‘s doing. And all of the above serves as an introduction to this passage from the book, posted here because I like it:
Some of our students are exceptionally bright and later attend Ivy League colleges such as Columbia and Cornell. I often catch them in the middle of class, sneaking a peak of a glossy magazine. They love print as much as we do. They prefer computer screens for instant messaging, e-mail, games and short blocks of text. But it would be preposterous to ask them to read War and Peace or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn on the screen. As I discuss in a later chapter, The Old Way of Reading and the New, we have made a huge conceptual mistake to think that the younger generation prefer reading literature on the screen. Or that the screen somehow is the magic key to their future. Less important is whether they read on screen or on paper. More important is that the words engage them on multiple levels. You cannot simply put black text on a white screen and think that because of the screen, kids will read it. The words need to be designed, this is the secret. Not the screen. (23)
Anyone who’s been paying attention to composition textbooks, specifically handbook, has seen these principles applied more and more frequently. (( As are textbooks from other disciplines, I’m sure. When I teach with Rob Pope’s The English Studies Book, I always spend part of one class discussing the book’s layout and design as mnemonic technologies. )) When our program first adopted Faigley’s The Brief Penguin Handbook, I know that some of our graduate student instructors decried the book’s use of color and other design elements as “pandering” to undergraduates, the unstated implication being that real books were print dense affairs done up in black and white. Ironically, some of the book’s most vocal critics I heard from were themselves medievalists. Pretty pictures, I guess, are best left to chirographic culture.