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Words Stare like a Glass Eye: From Literary to Visual to Disability Studies and Back Again

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Tobin Siebers
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Extract

The students of the present generation are the first in a long time who will not take their cultural identities from books. Statistics reveal that film, museum, concert, and sports attendances are up but that fewer and fewer people are reading books. Those strange moments in nineteenth-century novels when young heroes strike poses, dress, coif, and woo by the book are gone, perhaps forever. Our students are more likely to take their models from television, films, glossy magazines, video games, or the Abercrombie and Fitch catalog. My colleagues in the profession report that, thanks to the expansion of visual culture, students now possess an enviable talent for decoding images, often to the detriment of reading ability. To be frank, I am not so convinced: in my experience, the most literate students continue to be the best readers of images. But I agree that we are in the midst of an unprecedented explosion of visuality. A new era has dawned, and we are not prepared for it. We need to change our teaching and scholarship to keep up with our students.

Type
The Changing Profession
Information
PMLA , Volume 119 , Issue 5 , October 2004 , pp. 1315 - 1324
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2004

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