On holiday. It's the old tradition around here, a week off once in awhile. Back on Sunday... [0 & P]

The most significant change. "We are living in the time of the most significant change in human expression in human history," said Richard E. Miller at 1:25 of "The Future is Now," the video I posted yesterday. A little more than a minute into that piece, he turns from a general description of the excellence of the Rutgers University English Department to this vision for the future of a "New Humanities" that will engage English studies with the changes we are now seeing.

In a networked textual and image world, he says, people communicate instantly and globally; English, as a field that addresses human expression and culture, should be at the forefront of these developments. As people contribute to the making of knowledge on the web, English must train people to live in this new realm where authority has been remade. This stretches most people's vision of English studies to include images and moving images and is a portion of a larger reimagination of the humanities for the new century, Miller continues.

A collective and collaborative web is enriched by the contributions of the university -- the academy's sustained study and understanding -- and with this addition, he says, society is better positioned to live creatively and solve problems that we are facing. All students are served by training in the "central activity of multimedia composition," he says near the end. Multiply-authored, multiply-produced writing, says Miller, is the future.

A couple of years ago Miller and Kurt Spellmeyer began to explore the implications for pedagogy, too -- perhaps most efficiently introduced in "Teaching the Action Horizon," a headnote to their New Humanities reader.

It's still rare enough for academics to "get" what they're getting, and more unusual for them to see structural changes to the university as part of a proper response. [0 & P]

English Department 2.0. After spending about a minute establishing that his department has the finest credentials in traditional areas of literary scholarship, Richard E. Miller of Rutgers University turns for the remaining few minutes of this YouTube video to a vision of the New Humanities centered on the new media and the shifting access to authority that goes with it. It's got to be one of the most hopeful and visionary things I've heard anyone say about an American university in a long time.


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Choice, solidarity, truth. Just back from a lovely production of Death of a Salesman at our beautiful downtown South Bend Civic Theater. In the first act, the moral center of the play is the mother, who recognizes her husband's decline and whose outraged speech to her sons near the end of the act is electrifying:

I don't say he's a great man. Willie Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall in his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.

The moral center in the second act shifts to the son Biff, who tries at last to get beyond bitterness and illusion to the truth of his ordinary life, believing that by acknowledging the truth he can proceed to choose the life he actually desires, not the dream he has been tempted by for so long. He tries to bring the others along, but fails as his brother vows not very convincingly at the end to give up his corrupt and self-deceiving ways and become a success. But this dream is brutally undercut by the indifference of the business figures in the play -- which Willy himself summarizes in a heart-breaking scene in which his boss refuses to help him after a lifetime of service:

You can't eat the orange and throw the peel away - a man is not a piece of fruit.

And yet that his how he is treated. I identify three main values here: the wife's allegiance to her vulnerable husband in his decline, the son's decision to choose his own path rather than be swept away by the pyramid scheme that is business in this play, and an increasing allegiance to telling the truth. Choice, solidarity, truth...

If you feel you have no choices, if you can't get closer to the truth of your life, if you have no community you can rely on -- a person in these circumstances might easily be destroyed. If you see some room to move, if you have some allies, if you can involve yourself in conversations that bring you closer to the knowledge you need to proceed, then even in difficult times a person will probably be okay. The play implies a little theory of mental and wider social health, then.

It's a bit of a stretch to carry on the discussion to other realms, but why not do it anyway? The long-delayed gratification of much of our schooling, the Darwinian struggle of our politics and a good part of our political blogging -- these seem to miss the three insights of the play.

There are moments when something reminds us that it could be otherwise. See the countering gesture in Senator Obama's speech on race several weeks ago, for example, or the impromptu speech Robert F. Kennedy gave in Indianapolis the night Martin Luther King died, which included a call for conversation and which asserted a powerful common ground:

It's perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in . . . . But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings that abide in our land. (Full text)

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An auspicious start. The bloggers at our campus's Freedom Summer 2008 site are gearing up for a bus trip to some of the most important sites of civil rights struggle in the American South, and, happily for the rest of us, they look like they enjoy writing for the benefit of the folks back home. Check out David James, for example, whose long entry on protest music also describes a long career of political engagement and often-thwarted hope. And don't overlook the link he provides to Robert Kennedy's impromptu speech in Indianapolis on the night Martin Luther King was killed; those lines from the ancient Greek poet, recited from memory, are stunning. I wonder if we will ever make any progress as long as most of our politicians are unable to write their own speeches out of the carefully-chosen contents of their own well-stocked minds?

In our sleep,
pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart
until, in our own despair,
and against our will, comes wisdom
by the awful grace of God. (Aeschylus) [0 & P]

Overheard in the corridor. One professor to another, "Your handwriting is indecipherable."
Reply: "Why not? It's not as though our words make any difference."

And near the copy machine:

"I don't think the populace as a group has a very high intelligence. As individuals, yes, but as a group, very low indeed."

Perhaps because we lack the practices -- group and individual practices -- that allow a group to learn from experience, to deliberate, to choose to act? In that light, blogs, as a collection of social practices, give us reason to hope and to begin to lose hope. [0 & P]

Alive. I'm in one room surfing for Indiana primary results, my spouse is in another room doing the same, and we're emailing a buddy a couple of blocks away, also surfing for results. How many people live in Lake County, Indiana, where 559 precincts still have not reported? How many votes per precinct? Can Obama close the gap with this many precincts out? And so forth.

It feels alive here -- when the state has a say, unexpectedly. That's the way you want to feel, always. [0 & P]