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| Collections of essays are often disjointed. However, the nine essays which constitute this book cohere around this central thesis. Grammatical Fictions and Balnibarbian Architecture respectively accuse technocrats of reducing language to context-less technique and bureaucrats of being parasites in the community of scholars; The Anecdotal Function describes how members of the community share stories and What About Food? focuses on misunderstandings about the community; Script and Nondescript and Charlie Don't Surf respectively bemoan the decline in language and in values; Dead Teachers Society questions a popular vision of the teacher; The Bipolar Paradigm and Teaching Down or Learning Up respectively describe the teacher as both medium and message and as the keeper of standards. Solway must be a fine teacher. I can imagine, however, the quizzical expressions of the many whose only question is will-this-be-on-the-exam as his erudite mind and articulate mouth soars and swoops from topic to topic. The few who make that magical transition from student to scholar will appreciate him. Scholarship is caught rather than taught and David Solway must have infected many young scholars. This is an excellent book. I'd raise its grade from A to A+, however, if the author granted me three little wishes. First, a less dismissive discussion of video- and computer-based media. Evolution, culminating in its magnificent invention of speech, tells our story from the amoeba to Socrates. However, the story from Socrates to you and I is best told as our co-evolution with our media. We learned the tricks of processing information outside our bodies - storing it ( print and film), transmitting it (television and telephone) and both storing and transmitting it (multimedia and internet). The author must either concede that the rot set in with his beloved print (Socrates rightly protested writing would destroy memory) or grant some merit to our subsequent inventions. We scholars, reeling from the quick one-two punch of two generations of media in a single century, must learn what balance of media is appropriate in each context. |
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