Differential Literature :: Reading Literature Writing Authors Essays

Differential Literature The health and well-being of literature in America is something that many Americans spend a lot of time thinking, worrying, and theorizing about, a fact that can be told by the new reading promotional campaigns that roll out at seemingly regular intervals (Read!, Reading is Fundamental, Read and Rise, etc.) It is (at least partially) because of the passions aroused by this topic that when the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) released a report entitled Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America (RAR), many people voiced their opinions on the quality of the research methods used to gather the data, the accuracy of the data, and the soundness of the conclusions which were drawn from them. From nearly the day of its release up to today, people are speaking (and writing) their mind about the report’s worth. The report, which used the data from the literature portion of the census beaureau’s 2002, Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, came to many conclusions, all of which revolved around one of their determinations: Americans are reading what it calls literature less than they used to. The data that they used also suggested that the rate of this decrease is accelerating. RAR also finds this decline in the literature readership to be true for all racial, gender, and age groups, although it is slightly more pronounced in some than others – most notably men are reading less than women, reading with minorities is decreasing faster than with Caucasian, and the young faster than the middle aged. Really, though, their main worry comes from a link that has been drawn from the data collected in other studies. This conclusion is that readers of literature are more socially active, engaged, and assumedly productive. There are many conceivable reactions to the NEA’s report. To some people, reading can fairly accurately be described as their religion (Early Modern European Studies Major, 2004) and they may want to add additional information to the report. Many people want to point out the possible flaws and inaccuracies of the text and, of course, there are others who just always need to add their two cents into the pile. Whatever their reasons for their responses, the commentaries that have been written give a surprisingly diverse number of arguments for and against the validity of the report.