Abstract
This chapter explores the significance of tempo and rhythm in the classroom and inquiry by focusing on a case study for a hypertext writing assignment in a seminar on Nietzsche. The investigation integrates current research on the science of reading and learning and scrutinizes historical and contemporary fears that new media undermine not only reading comprehension but even cognition. Of particular concern is the conflation of speed and ease in some discussions. It is argued that in addition to the adaptation of new technologies to the needs of humanities research in particular, we need to develop scholarly habits appropriate for the tasks: The lento tempo of the art of exegesis, as Nietzsche describes it, might yet have allegro and staccato accompaniments, which could quickly draw unexpected connections that enhance the meaning of the whole enterprise of teaching and learning.
It is not for nothing that I have been a philologist, perhaps I am a philologist still, that is to say, a teacher of slow reading:—in the end I also write slowly. … For philology is that venerable art which demands of its votaries one thing above all: to go aside, to take time, to become still, to become slow—it is a goldsmith’s art and connoisseurship of the word which has nothing but delicate, cautious work to do and achieves nothing if it does not achieve it lento. … this art does not so easily get anything done, it teaches to read well, that is to say, to read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers … My patient friends, this book desires for itself only perfect readers and philologists: learn to read me well!
—R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1982); Preface §5
An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been “deciphered” when it has simply been read; rather, one has then to begin its exegesis, for which is required an art of exegesis.
—Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale in On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo(New York: Vintage Books, 1967); Preface §8
Our day-to-day life is bombarded with fortuities or, to be more precise, with the accidental meetings of people and events we call coincidences. “Co-incidence” means that two events unexpectedly happen at the same time, they meet: Tomas appears in the hotel restaurant at the same time the radio is playing Beethoven. We do not even notice the great majority of such coincidences. If the seat Tomas occupied had been occupied instead by the local butcher, Tereza never would have noticed that the radio was playing Beethoven (though the meeting of Beethoven and the butcher would also have been an interesting coincidence). But her nascent love inflamed her sense of beauty, and she would never forget that music. Whenever she heard it, she would be touched. Everything going on around her at that moment would be haloed by the music and take on its beauty. […] human lives are composed […] like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven’s music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual’s life. —Michael Henry Heim, (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), p. 51
An erratum to this chapter is available at 10.1007/978-90-481-9166-6_17
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Notes
- 1.
I also give more “old fashioned” assignments, including recitation in which I ask students to read sections of Nietzsche’s texts aloud. One student found this activity so helpful and stimulating that she recorded these sessions on her iPod and would listen to them on her long subway rides each day.
- 2.
Nicholas Carr, “Is Google making us stupid?” The Atlantic Monthly July/August 2008: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google (Accessed July 15, 2008). Similar views, focused on children and youth, are expressed by Mark Bauerlein in his The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30 (New York: Tarcher, 2008).
- 3.
On the interactive possibilities of electronic media in education, particularly the potentially transformative nature of hypertext, see John McEneaney, “Agent-Based Literacy Theory,” Reading Research Quarterly 41:3 (2006): 352–371.
- 4.
To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence, Research Report #47 (Washington, D.C.: National Endowment for the Arts, 2007).
- 5.
James Gee, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, revised and updated edition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
- 6.
“Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future,” Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research (CIBER) team, University College London, January 16, 2008, p. 9. Such “gathering habits” are also examined by Bill McKibben in The Age of Missing Information Expanded edition (New York: Random House, 2006) in which the author reviews more than 1,700 h of programming available on cable television, comparing it with “unmediated” experiences in nature.
- 7.
Thus, I doubt the hunch implied by of the authors of the NEA study on reading, To Read Or Not to Read, that “screen reading” might not only follow different “consumption” patterns but also effect “the development of young minds and young readers” (To Read Or Not to Read, p. 53). The authors acknowledge: “there is a shortage of scientific research on the effects of screen reading.” Their ‘hunch’ is conveyed in how they designate the potential area of research. Only parenthetically do they comment that, “A good research question is whether the hyperlinks, pop-up windows, and other extra-textual features of screen reading can sharpen a child’s ability to perform sustained reading, or whether they impose unhelpful distractions” (ibid.).
- 8.
One dimension of this debate hinges upon whether or not such media are actually integrated. Studies demonstrating the negative effects of multi-tasking on cognitive efficiency (not to mention vehicular safety!) have gained much attention in popular as well as academic texts.
- 9.
This bias is evident in the otherwise interesting work of Maryanne Wolf in Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2007). Wolf emphasizes that the development of literacy provided opportunities for reflection and innovation (both neuronal and cultural)—it allowed human beings to “think about thinking,” providing a “secret gift of time to think” (p. 221). Wolf curiously locates the space of thinking and reflection on the physical printed page as the place for such extension of thought to occur as she repeatedly and baldly asserts that screen-reading somehow “inhibits going beyond the text” (p. 225). Part of this seems to be linked with “relatively effortless internet access,” which she inexplicably thinks robs (reflective) time rather than extends it. There is even further concern that our.
- 10.
See for example, “Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future,” Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research (CIBER) team, University College London, January 16, 2008.
- 11.
“Leitmotiv” is a German word, which is why it is italicized here. It sometimes appears in English-language texts as Leitmotif. The plural form of the German is Leitmotive, which is how I state it here.
- 12.
On criticism, see R. T. Llewellyn, “Parallel Attitudes to Form in Late Beethoven and Late Goethe: Throwing Aside the Appearance of Art,” The Modern Language Review, 63, No. 2 (Apr., 1968), pp. 407–416.
- 13.
Munro Davison, “The Earliest Use of Leitmotif,” The Musical Times, February 1, 1928, p. 159.
- 14.
Carl Dahlhaus and Mary Whittall, “Wagner’s ‘A Communication to My Friends’: Reminiscence and Adaptation,” The Musical Times Vol. 124, No. 1680 (1983): 89–92.
- 15.
Simultaneously, a different “HyperNietzsche” was forming in cyberspace: http://www.hypernietzsche.org. See note 30 below.
- 16.
A survey of current literature on this topic is offered in Terry Anderson, “Towards a Theory of Online Learning,” in T. Anderson (ed.) Theory and Practice of Online Learning 2nd Ed. (Edmonton Athabasca University Press, 2008) pp. 45–74 (accessed through Google Books, November 2, 2008). However, the Pew studies suggest that high school students, at least, do make frequent use of the Internet for academic purposes, but that their usage differs significantly from what they do when supervised by a teacher. See the Pew Internet & American Life Project (http://www.pewinternet.org/). They published the first national study of teen use of the electronic media in relation to civic engagement. See “Teens, Video Games, and Civics,” Amanda Lenhart, Joseph Kahne, Ellen Middaugh, et. al. (Washington, DC: Pew Internet & American Life Project, September 16, 2008) 76p. Document no: 202–415–4500.
- 17.
But the alarmists worry about this as well. The digestion of a five-year study of “ubiquitous” use of search engines in research, which analyzed “the digital evidence that millions of scholars leave behind them when they search e-journal databases, e-book collections and research gateways” worries that librarians are at risk: “there is a real danger that the library professional will swept aside by history, as relevant to twenty-first century Britain as the hot metal typesetter” (“Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future,” p. 9). I worry that in simply analyzing digital trails, these researchers are blind to what subjects actually collected and how they comprehended it along the way. Thus, I’m skeptical about their conclusion.
- 18.
Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007) p. 236.
- 19.
Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body, p. 236.
- 20.
Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body, p. 242.
- 21.
Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body, p. 243. This idea is similar to John Dewey’s conception of experience and learning and what he calls “consummatory experiences”. See his Art as Experience in the Later Works of John Dewey, Volume 10, 1925–1953: 1934, Art as Experience (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008).
- 22.
See G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) and G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
- 23.
As he elaborates the “primary” and “source” metaphors that are essential to music, Johnson draws on extensive research in metaphor theory and cognitive linguistics. “Temporal motion” is the basis of “Musical Motion” as Johnson charts it. Research on the metaphoric character of thought in various forms, including mathematics, has been led by George Lakoff and a host of others. For example, see G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); G. Lakoff and R. Nunez, Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being. (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
- 24.
Of course, poetry seeks to achieve this aim, too, insofar as it strives to enhance possibilities for meaning by drawing on the musicality of language.
- 25.
See G. Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2002).
- 26.
See Christian J. Emden, Nietzsche on Language, Consciousness, and the Body (University of Illinois Press, 2005), pp. 27–29; and Dieter Eberwein Nietzsches Schreibkugel (Berlin: Typoskript Verlag, date unknown). For some more extended discussion of the relation between writing technologies and thinking, see Darren Wershler-Henry, The Iron Whim, A Fragmented History of the Typewriter (Cornell University Press, 2007). Had Mr. Carr (“Is Google making us stupid?” above) done a bit more research, all of which could have been accomplished on the Internet, he would have easily realized that claims of others upon which he relies in asserting that Nietzsche changed his writing style considerably (from essay to aphorism) when he briefly used the typewriter are simply false.
- 27.
On the effects of speed and immediacy of information on our ability to read and process what we see, consult Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (New York: Harper Collins, 2007).
- 28.
This is compatible with the “just in time and on demand” model of service delivery that emerged in the corporate world and has been applied to learning or “knowledge on demand.” But in the case of the latter, one need not think consider the concept solely in terms of accessibility, speed, and ease of access (although these, too, might have widespread social implications). Adaptation of this expression for education links exploiting the capabilities of electronic media to facilitate more personalized and individualized learning, allowing a student to easily acquire information, of the sort that is needed just as and right when it can be most useful. The science of learning suggests that this, in fact, is how we learn best. See James P. Gee, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, pp. 138f, 211.
- 29.
If this were a paper on Nietzsche, I would also show how Nietzsche himself acknowledges the superiority of temporal variability in thinking, which is not reflected in the epigraph I have used for my text. As just one example, consider Nietzsche’s discussion of tempo in Beyond Good and Evil section 28.
- 30.
This vision and my account of the transformations I observed in my class have affinity with Richard E. Miller’s conception of “creative reading.” See his introduction to the New Humanities Reader, ed. Richard E. Miller and Kurt Spellmeyer (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2008). That Internet-based research might generate pathways or trails for others to follow is one of the goals of Web 2.0.
- 31.
There is an internal reference to this note. If the notation is added for the initial epigraphs, the internal ref. to note 30 will need to be modified. A development that might potentially change the nature of research and teaching in the humanities is the movement toward “open source” research. Curiously, if not ironically, Nietzsche is on the leading edge here, since his works and Nietzsche scholarship are being organized in a project to create a media boilerplate that would allow scholars to have a coordinated repository and outlet for research, facilitating dialogue, critique, and peer review. Conceptually, my class assignment bears some similarity to a project that was once known as HyperNietzsche (see note 15 above; now “Nietzsche Source”: http://www.nietzschesource.org/), which intends to create a virtual archive not only of Nietzsche’s manuscripts but also of transcriptions and scholarly contributions. The principles of organization are quite interesting to read and are easily accessible on-line. These materials will have a hypertext network equivalent to a vast index locorum. Producing and refereeing this network creates a community of scholars who share a certain perspective on the state of scholarship and who are able to identify certain leading problems and issues that follow from it. These problems are then open to revision, critique, and solution by anyone with access to the Internet. For some of the organizational principles and (computer-based) ontological considerations, see Paulo D’ Iorio, “Nietzsche on New Paths” http://www.item.ens.fr/diorio/ (accessed March 12, 2007). D’ Iorio holds a major grant from COST, which is funding the development of “Open Scholarly Communities on the Web” (http://www.cost-a32.eu/).
Acknowledgments
I am grateful for feedback that helped me focus and develop my ideas in this article, including comments from Richard Burke, Gina Cherry, Brian Crowley, Manfred Kuechler, and Mark Turner. This work was completed at the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham University, and I gratefully acknowledge the intellectual space they created to support it. Many thanks also to the editors of this volume for insightful and helpful feedback along the way.
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Acampora, C.D. (2011). Tempo and Reading Well. In: Summerfield, J., Smith, C. (eds) Making Teaching and Learning Matter. Explorations of Educational Purpose, vol 11. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9166-6_12
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