The Cult of the Individual

Funny how my readings for my English classes seem to mirror the texts I’m reading for other classes. In my English Education Methods class, we’re looking at ways to approach teaching lit theory in the classroom. The book we’ve been reading, Critical Encounters in High School English, discusses reader response theory and how it is usually touched on in English classes but never fully realized (and rarely ever made explicit to students). When teaching reader response theory, you are effectively teaching students how to read. Sure, you’re skipping all the phonics stuff, but you’re still introducing student readers to a new way to understand texts. But when reader response is taught ineffectively, it runs the risk of becoming too focused on individual response and not enough on how that particular response is generated through dialogue with the text, or through ideological/sociological influences. This quickly leads to the “no wrong answers” sentiments towards reading that causes many people to shrug off the discipline, and make it difficult for people who haven’t been properly instructed in theory to take reader response seriously. Students are told that when they read a text, they can create their own unique meaning; while it’s important to have students connect the text to their own experiences, they should do so without digressing to “Romeo and Juliet reminds me of that one time my boyfriend broke up with me and it sucked, and that’s why I like this play.” The writer of my textbook calls this mistaken reader response approach “the cult of the individual.”

So where am I going with all of this? I’m still only five chapters into Mao II, and I read the assigned articles with some frustration. Crowds and Power mentioned several times how the crowd is the antithesis to the individual. In the crowd, everyone is equal… individual differences cease to exist. Along with this, being in a crowd means individual accountability–individual creation and destruction–is surrendered. Through my reading on teaching reader response theory, I began to think about ways in which reading is a fundamentally individual act, and stretching that even further, writing can often be thought of as an individual act as well. While the acts of reading and writing necessarily depend on each other to exist, they exist as a conversation between two individuals. Such conversations cannot exist within a crowd or crowd mentality.

Thus, crowds can be thought of as the antithesis–or even the arch enemy–to reading and writing. Perhaps in Mao II, DeLillo is trying to examine the way that modern impulses toward crowd logic (or “groupthink,” to borrow a familiar term) lead us further and further away from a culture that celebrates individual readers and writers. Along with this came a series of other questions: How do crowds perceive texts? Can they perceive texts? And if they can’t, is it because their impulse towards groupthink don’t allow it? If the answer to the last question is yes, it affirms our belief that reading is truly an individual act.

But even further… how can we relate this to our understanding of the way authors exist alongside the “revolutionary” e-books? Internet and electronic publishing have made it easy for anyone to become an author, and in a way, when you spend an hour surfing the web you probably read texts written by anywhere from 10-20 authors (who are writing those tweets? youtube comments? status updates? blog posts?). Has the internet effectively transformed into a “crowd” of authors? Or is this statement contradictory in terms? I might be digressing a little, but  I think these are all important questions that could relate to our understanding of the fundamentals attributes to reading and writing, and the status of reading and writing in a post-print world.