On Starr, Chapter 4 (and tangents assuredly related)

            I approached Starr with a personal goal this week: to lesson my ire toward the kind of tale he is trying to weave for us—a tale (in my humble opinion) of how political systems gave rise to an exceptional American communications systems. I read Hayden White. I did some deep breathing. I opened the book while sitting down to sup, and I smiled. Starting his chapter with the abysmal reviews early American literature received from abroad and at home, I knew Starr was going to have some fun telling us how American literature rose from the ashes into the realm of respectability and acclaim. And I was okay with that.

I was admittedly upset that Starr ignored the transatlantic interplay of what was happening in American and British journalism and literature. He speaks of the rise of crime literature and the reporting of scandalous murders, such as the Helen Jewett case, as though it happened in a vacuum. What about, to give one example, the Newgate Novels that had become all the rage in Britain? What’s your opinion, Professor Starr? How did the British publishing world influence America, and how did the American publishing world influence Britain?  But I calmed myself down. Matters of the transatlantic sort are not part of Starr’s agenda. A history book cannot be exhaustive in its coverage, I concede. Nor can it be expected to answer all of my questions. Expecting that would make me horribly self-centered.

I did chuckle when Starr wrote about “the advent of journalism as form of entertainment in which fidelity to facts was subordinate to the interest in a compelling story” (134). What about the advent of historiography, Starr? The way you are reading the facts is influenced by the story—which you clearly find compelling—you’re trying to tell. Did Starr realize he was providing commentary on his own text within his text? If so, a humorous nod to the fact would have been grand.

            The rise of the popular press and sensation journalism, says Starr, helped to give rise to the American renaissance—writers “transformed the sensibility of their time into enduring literature” (137). I see how there is a baseline American influence for these American writers, but what about all of the British literature they were reading? (In 1820, British reprints still accounted for 70 percent of all books being published and sold in America.) What was the interplay there? Why don’t you mention that, Starr? (I know: I answered this question already. Clearly I don't find my own answer to be sufficient.) Why you don’t mention women authors is another beef I had, but Larisa’s blog writes a wonderful letter to Starr on that subject, so I shall not expand on it here.

            I think it’s great that books and thus information were able to travel so far—that there was even “village enlightenment.” And the rise in printing cheap papers and novels that were popular—sometimes tasteful, sometimes not—if nothing else helped to ensure the rise of literacy rates. What we ended up with was what Starr calls the “diffusion of useful knowledge.” Does he actually mean knowledge here, or information? Again, what are we getting from newspapers? What are we getting from books? I accept Starr’s book as a “diffusion of useful knowledge,” but now I’m not really sure what I mean when I say that.

            I found Starr’s overview of copyright struggles very enlightening, particularly when pertaining to an individual author’s rights. Poet Joel Barlow’s remark that “There is certainly no kind of property, in the nature of things, so much his own, as the works which a person originates from his own creative imagination” (120) certainly moved me, as an individual who produces works of the mind. Fighting to own the creations of one’s mind is certainly a fight worth fighting for, though these days we have given ownership of much of what we produce online to certain companies (Facebook, twitter, etc.). Of course, we let that happen. I let that happen. It’s a price to pay, I suppose, for being linked into communication superhighways. The Internet can also control our right to free speech, in a sense—if you post something a webmaster, blog writer, etc. finds offensive, it can simply be removed. You are free to say what you want, but there is no guarantee others will be free to read it. There is a level of policing going on that I fear may expand in frightening ways.

The fact that (as I mentioned above), in 1820, British reprints still accounted for 70 percent of all books being published and sold in America makes the periodical research we are doing--thanks to the Internet--invaluable. In these newspapers, in these journals, we find stories—fictictious and factual—that give us insight into what it was like to be an American during these years. Without these insights, we’re left with the bare bone facts, which historians such as Starr deliver to us in carefully constructed packages. Of course, newspapers are edited, and there is no way to really know if what we are reading is "authentic" (whatever that means), but accepting some things as basic premises is the only way to push forward, and I choose to accept what we are finding when scouring the databases as nuggets of true insight into American life.

            And the papers confirm some of what Starr tells us—reading became a source of diversion, and reading became a far more extensive than intensive activity. There was so much being produced, so much to read, and the urge for consumption of so much new material was so high that people would fly through a newspaper today to be ready for tomorrow's, fly through a book segment to be ready for the next installment—in this sense, there is little wonder as to how we (and other developed nations, too) became so information hungry. Knowledge was not being mass marketed as hip and trendy—why sit down and spend hour upon hour examining the works of Aristotle when you could read what's hot off the presses? And the prices in America! I was amazed at how cheaply things were printed here in comparison to pricing in England at the time. You could afford to be voracious.

Fast-forwarding this conversation, I question what impact the Internet has had on our reading. Without the Internet, we wouldn’t be able to access the American Periodicals database. It has done wonderful things for nonlinear reading—stories presented as hypertext often help to illuminate their meaning. But it is also that much easier to scroll and skim, to disengage. On airplanes now, everyone has an e-reader or an iPad. (I own a Kindle—I use it for pleasure reading.) Just how different is it to read on a screen as opposed to a paper page? Are we losing power and control over our reading experience?

I should like to conclude by mentioning an article Linda Hughes sent our Victorian Periodicals course from the most recent  New York Times Book Review, as I think it is relevant to our conversation as well. Lev Grossman’s “From Scroll to Screen” asserts that the digitization of books has forced us back into a nonlinear form of reading, a form the advent of the codex in the first century A.D. freed us from so that we could interact with texts in more engaging ways. By reading on the Kindle, the Nook, Grossman says, we are giving up the power to control our own reading experience. He ends by saying, “until I hear God personally say to me, ‘Boot up and read,’ I won’t be giving it [reading on paper] up.” I laughed. And I related. And I wondered what Starr version 2.0 will have to say about the creation of media in the 21^st century 100 years from now, too.