Why Teach Literature Stuff: #4 Books Versus Video

When I was teaching, and I had extra time on my hands, I would reflect on the work--the whys and hows and whats. So in solidarity with my former colleagues, I'm going to write a series about every English teacher's favorite thing-- teaching literature, and why we do it. There will be some number of posts (I don't have a plan here).

Also, it would be nice to write and read about something positive, and I don't know anything much more positive than what teachers do and why they do it.

You may have read the first three installments and thought (or imagined your students thinking) "Heck, I can get all that by watching tv or videos." Here's why I disagree.

For non-fiction, video can be useful. An afternoon of Crash Course on YouTube is pretty educational. I will even credit the medium with making the speaker's voice plain, so that bias is readily visible and identifiable. But video, because it's way more linear than text (you are compelled to watch the frames in a particular order) and because it demands steady and constant focus, is severely limited. There's a reason TED talks are short, that educational videos are super-brief. You can only watch for so long. That in turn limits the depth that can be covered. To turn a great work like Ron Chernow's Hamilton biography into a visual medium resulted in a stage show that takes a few hours to watch and still cuts corners from Chernow's original work.

Video is simply too limited to do any heavy lifting in the non-fiction world. Factoids, juicy tidbits, isolated items-- sure. But no more. There will always be more there there on the printed page than in any other medium.

With fiction, those advantages of print are even greater.

Movies and television have become more sophisticated over the years, but tv in particular features an awful lot of bad acting. Our students absorb a lot of that, a lot of "Oh, so that's how a person looks when they're shocked" or "That's how a person acts when they're sad." TV gives us lots of character shorthand in which actors boldly and unsubtly mug their character's feelings for the camera. It's quick and clear and lets the production zip through a story swiftly, but does it show students much about how real, live human beings function? It's a complex issue in some ways, because we've now had several generations growing up thinking that, say, the hyper-dramatic bloviations of professional wrestling are real life, and have used tv acting as a guide, a long and messy process that arguably helped bring us to the point of putting a shallow, lying reality tv star in the White House.

I know that I'm being a bit of a snob, and that humans and human drama are better portrayed on screens today than in the past (certainly better than the hacky tv of my own youth). And a visual medium can do things with imagery and non-verbal portraits that the printed word cannot. I would not for a million dollars bar students from learning via video.

But.

A performance of a work is built around a single interpretation. Where a work on the page may be open to interpretation and arguments about what is going on, what it means, all such arguments have to be settled before the cameras can roll. The video version requires actors and directors to settle on an interpretation of the character, to identify a particular idea as the theme. There is little room on the screen for what my old college professor called "the ambiguity that enriches." Video can't help but lean toward the notion that there is only One True Reading of the text. Reading literature invites us to a relationship with the text, a relationship that can grow and change over the years. A video is a lecture, a demonstration of one specific chosen path.

For my money, literature in this respect far more closely resembles actual life in the world.

There are the limits of space and time, the hyperlinear quality of video that leaves us little chance to re-examine or drill into a particular passage, because it's always moving forward at its own speed. There's little room to dig in or break down what we're seeing, while the written word allows us to move at our pace, to double back, dig in, pause and reflect.

Videos, movie, tv, new hybrid steaming forms of screen stuff-- it's all valuable, and it all has stuff tom offer. But it's still less than literature.

Decades ago, pundits predicted that screens would replace books, that students would get all of their education from video tape and movies. More recently, people bet on Youtube as the nation's educator.  But it didn't happen. None of it happened. Because literature, the printed word, still contains more depth-- more accessible depth-- than anything else we've come up with, with the possible exception of conversation with real live humans.

So, no. As I work my way through this series of posts, I don't think we can just as easily replace books with screens.