Comes the Revolution

Abstract

‘Theory’, in the various ways it is written about and taught, is often, so it seems, a separate, self-sustaining set of practices. In the author’s view, however, theory is of no use except as ancillary to ‘reading’. Theory’s function is to serve as a handmaiden to concrete acts of reading texts or of interpreting works in other media. Theory-based readings may help those artefacts be constructively effective in the personal and social life of those who read a poem or play a video game. It should not be forgotten, however, that theory (often, but by no means always, in the form of unconscious presuppositions) guides reading. Seek and ye shall find.

In this chapter, the author stresses the ‘material’ change that should perhaps most matter to us humanists these days. That is the rapid global transformation from a print culture to a digital culture. People used to learn how to behave in courtship, marriage, and social behaviour generally in part from novels and poems. Now films, television, advertising, and, increasingly, video games play that role for many. Video games are played by 58 % of Americans, 40 % of whom are women. The most popular of these games are narratives of incredible interactive violence. The player twists the ‘joystick’ to pull out the teeth of victims of torture. Video games must be having a large effect on the ethos of our citizens. Novels and poems, moreover, are increasingly read not in printed books but as e-texts on a Kindle. That changed material base makes a big difference to the act of reading, one that needs theorizing and empirical investigation.

Development of theories that will help understand these new media is a major desideratum these days. The chapter identifies what it might mean to ‘read’ works in the new digital forms, that is, to transfer some of the protocols of ‘rhetorical reading’ to works that are multimedia mixtures of words, sounds, and visual images, along with the material, bodily, gestures of hand–eye coordination (digital dexterity) necessary, for example, to play a video game. What happens when you use ‘narrative theory’ to account for a video game? Such games, after all, have an essential storytelling aspect.