December 29, 2007
The Scandal of Literacy
In his presidential address last night, Michael Holquist used the history of the MLA, of linguistics, and of language itself to point out that the anxiety felt by students of language today is hardly new: Studying language has always been an uneasy, even dangerous act.
The 117th president of the MLA began with a look at the MLA presidential address, usually constructed as “an argument arranged as a contest between two antitheses.” In the “early years of heroic discipline building,” Mr. Holquist said, the contest involved science and aesthetics. In the early 20th century, it pitted “values appropriate to the profession” against “values held by the society at large”—a theme not far from listeners’ mind in 2007.
Mr. Holquist detected a “near universal rhetoric of defensiveness” that went back far beyond the MLA’s founding. “Ultimately, I suspect, the unease is ineluctably inscribed in the very nature of the subject we profess.”
The root of the unease is language itself, he said. “Language—and the wisdom and community that are impossible without it—is a human prerequisite, arguably THE prerequisite,” Mr. Holquist argued. “Literacy has the power to free us from the constraints of instinct.”
In that sense, it is unnatural—and that makes people uncomfortable. “The presence of reading and writing provides a vivid and constant reminder of our alienation from the system of signs we unthinkingly assume to be natural when we speak,” the president said. “The scandal of literacy forces us to remember.”
Mr. Holquist ranged widely back through time and linguistic theory, touching on the ancient dawn of literacy, the decline of Sumerian as a spoken language, the birth of philology, then on to the German Romantic period, to Kant and the idea of synthesis, and Wilhelm von Humbodt’s seminal linguistic work in response. He invoked Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” in which knowledge is literally inscribed on the body, to suggest how painful the struggle for knowledge and autonomy can be. And he sent the audience off with a reading of Constantin Cavafy’s poem “Ithaka.”
“The Humanities are now—as they have always been—at work in the world because there is no undertaking that does not involve the subject of their study—language, and the alienation and self-discovery that attend it,” Mr. Holquist said, bringing the talk back at last to this year’s theme.“Our nature is to be unnatural.”
Jennifer Howard | Posted on Saturday December 29, 2007 | Permalink