Pretty Pictures

This week a book rep handed me a copy of yet another introduction to literature textbook, this time Nicholas Delbanco’s and Alan Cheuse’s Literature: Craft and Voice. Some may recognize Alan Cheuse as the commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered. The book rep mentioned as a selling feature the emphasis on visual images and graphics within the textbook, and indeed that is the first thing I noticed. Every page is brimming with photographs in brilliant colors, text wrapping around graphics or hovering over half-opacity images, quotations from the texts in green flashing in the middle of short stories, and excerpts of interviews by the author lurking in the introductory materials.

In their preface, the editors argue that this text is designed for a “visual age” and “to harness the power of media and use it to help students learn the art of sustained reading.” Students, they note “should engage their senses; they must listen as well as look.” As is standard with almost all literature textbooks, Delbanco and Cheuse package along with their text a DVD of videos, mostly interviews, but I had to admit that their concerted graphic design, a veritable Southern Living textbook, is very striking.

(While I applaud the idea of using higher media to engage students, the cynic in me can’t help but realize that such DVD inclusions more often than not force students to buy new textbooks rather than trade with their roommates and friends or acquire from sources other than the college bookstore.)

At first I agreed with them. I’ve seen firsthand how eagerly students engage with rhetoric readers when the texts are designed with visual elements in mind. John Mauk’s and John Metz’s Inventing Arguments, Andrea Lunsford’s Everything’s an Argument and Robert Lamm’s and Justin Everett’s Dynamic Arguments have been very popular with students, while Laurie Kirsner’s and Stephen Mandell’s Patterns and Laurence Behrens’ and Leonard Rosen’s Writing and Reading across the Curriculum have fallen flat. And even though these textbooks have different composition teaching theories at work, let’s face it, the essays in these readers are generally the same. And if the essays do change, the authors typically don’t. Secondly, not only do students become more engaged when the textbooks pop with graphic design, but I can also use the textbook itself as a form of visual rhetoric, a sort of meta-textbook.

Then I realized how I use overly designed rhetoric textbooks—as a meta-text—and ask students to question the design, to explore how the textbook designers attempt to control and manipulate them as readers. That is a benefit to a rhetoric class. Literature, on the other hand, is a different beast. Delbanco’s and Cheuse’s textbook images don’t just enliven the text, they impose interpretations. For example, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” includes an image of the Devil card from a Tarot pack. Granted, the devil is certainly an issue in the short story, but what of the Tarot? For Jack London’s “A Wicked Woman,” the text of the story concerning Ned Bashford’s Greek temperament wraps around Michelangelo’s David; one wonders how an Italian image of a nude Israelite compares. Also, the quotations used to highlight the text, always in green, usually in the center of the page, much larger in print and in a separate font, call attention to passages, as if to alert students that these words are more important than any other in the story. In London’s case, those words are “He did not believe in the truth of women…” In Hawthorne’s case, those words are “He looked up to the sky, doubting whether there really was a heaven above him.”

How can I teach students to come to their own conclusions on a text, based on evidence and reasoning, when the text influences them to such a degree?

Later I grew disturbed by the entire nature of the textbook. Do students really need flashy graphics for a literature textbook? Isn’t imagination enough, and for an introduction to literature, shouldn’t we also be introducing imagination to new readers? The graphic for Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” includes a large beetle, but shouldn’t students decide for themselves if Kafka’s bug refers to a beetle or a cockroach? Doesn’t an image of a gun embedded in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” give away the ending? Where is the “internal movie” that invariably trumps the Hollywood version when the graphic artists impose their own vision?

And have we really become such a nation of dullards that flash is needed? Of classrooms filled with Alice sniffing, “and what is the use of a book . . . without pictures or conversations?”

Delbanco’s and Cheuse’s project brings to mind another debate, one for which I haven’t found my footing yet. Should we be turning academic studies into a television and magazine culture under the guise of “engaging,” or should we place students in an environment that is somewhat disorienting and unfamiliar under the guise of “challenging”? At the moment, I find the Lewis Carroll quotation from Alice in Wonderland very telling; it shows that for many, many years now there has been a dividing line between those illustrated tales for children, the “picture book” and the pure text of adulthood. That today’s students are more engaged with illustrated texts is no new thing and is not a fresh effect of the Internet and MTV. When should we ask people to put away childish things and become an adult? When they are 10, or 23?