_Proust and the Squid_ Response #1 & 2

This week I returned to Maryanne Wolf's Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.  A professor of child development, Wolf examines reading from historical, cultural, and biological perspectives.  Wolf has a particular interest in dyslexia, which her oldest son has.  The book emerges from her concern that, as reading becomes more and more an online experience, the human brain is losing some of the unique capacities enabled by traditional print reading.

So far I am enjoying the book...but skeptical.  I hear echoes in her argument of some older arguments about how literacy changes the brain that I thought were pretty much dismantled by the New Literacy Studies group.  Once I get further in, I will go back to some of the NLS work to compare and develop a stronger opinion about that.  For now I'm trying to suspend judgment.  I'm also not easily convinced by arguments that digital literacies are either THE future of literacy (in a positive sense) or will result in the death of our current forms of literacy (in a negative sense).  I'm also suspending judgment on that issue until I have a better sense of her argument and can better put it in context.

Whatever my final thoughts on her arguments are, Wolf does say and quote some lovely things about reading that certainly ring true for me.  "The generative capacity of reading," she writes, "parallels the fundamental plasticity in the circuit wiring of our brains: both permit us to go beyond the particulars of the given" (17).  She continues, "the rich associations, inferences, and insights emerging from this capacity allow, and indeed invite, us to reach beyond the specific content of what we read to form new thoughts" (17).  I read for many reasons; one of the most important ones is that reading makes me think in ways that are neither direct results of what I'm reading nor possible without it.  Wolf describes this as a "paradox: the goal of reading is to go beyond the author's ideas to thoughts that are increasingly autonomous, transformative, and ultimately independent of the written text" (17-18).