article in the Chronicle Review by William Deresiewicz.
The End of Solitude
seem to be echoes with Sven Birkerts on privacy and the concern with the social. Given his use of romanticism (thoreau, emerson, whitman), we need to think about just how anti-social these writers are.
Some issues in particular that I noted (using reframe it). Two areas where the author’s lack of connectivity in making an argument against a networked writing actually limits the essay. The first is the sampling (or echoes) of Birkerts: specifically in using the image of a networked ‘hive’ and in his focus on privacy, solitude. While direct quotation may not be required, failing to ‘connect’ to this prior argument (and very similar approach and meditation)–a connection I would require of my student: justify this, complicate, if not outright cite what is a clear sample–makes me suspicious. That WD mediates his argument with past writings and with his reading (yes, this is what we do with our writing and reading, we mediate our thought) but is reluctant to think about it or reveal such traces of mediation—because he is making an argument that wants to view mediation largely are recent–even though he is aware the printing is a technology of communication. Though rather than see this in psychological terms of a repressed center or other in his thinking, I would frame it this way: he fails to connect, in ways that we are supposed to connect in our reading and writing–our thinking as scholars. Put differently, using the langague of current tools, if WD had ‘googled’ some of his thinking or drafting, perhaps even blogged it, he might have made the connection to Birkerts sooner.
A second lack of connection, of networked reading: in his use of Emerson and his views of reading–extending to the university and learning. He quotes Emerson, as many do, freeely, loosely. Another way to say this, out of the context of Emerson’s own network of thinking and writing. He makes Emerson solitary in his thinking, when he is more interested (seen in his network) in the social connections of learning and writing. And also more concerned about books and reading. The point is not that we can read Emerson differently by quoting him elsewhere (for example,’All I know is reception,’ quoted against WD’s emphasis on tele-technology as merely reception); we can always do this. But rather, that understanding Emerson (and understanding Emerson on reading) requires a networked connection. Emerson refers to it as his cyclopedia; it is the network of his metonymic thinking. I can’t say what Emerson or thoreau might have thought of text-messaging. But we can say that Emerson is interested in the recognition of a text that is more fluid (more gerundive?) than a book, or beyond a book. Interested, to echo Poirier, in thinking over thought. So, text-making; and the text not existing apart from its network of reception and connections.
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