評論
打印
Students at the nation's best liberal arts colleges who majored in philosophy or English were constantly asked what they were "going to do with it," as though intellectual pursuits for their own sake had had their day, and lost it in the press of business. Reading for pleasure was replaced by reading for purpose, and a kind of dogged self-improvement: whereas an executive might learn far more from Moby-Dick, the book he was expected to have read might be The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People. Reading for pleasure, spurred on by some interior compulsion, became as suspect as getting on the subway to ride aimlessly from place to place.
美國最好的文理學院哲學或英語專業的學生們總是被問道你們學了這些，打算將來干什么？”好像在商業社會的壓力下，純粹的學習與研究已經過時了。過去讀書是因為樂在其中，現在變了，讀書變成了某種目的，變成一種頑固的自我發展。雖然一位高級管理人員很可能從《白鯨》這本小說中學到更多的東西，但人們卻認為他應該看《超級成功人士應該具有的七種習慣》。因內心某種追求樂趣的欲望而閱讀，已經變得讓人無法理解了，這種閱讀就好像一個人進了地鐵，毫無目的地從一個地方坐到另一個地方。
For many years I worked in the newspaper business. For many journalists, reading in the latter half of the twentieth century was most often couched as a series of problems to be addressed: Were children in public schools reading poorly? Were all Americans reading less? Was the printed word giving way to the spoken one? Had television and the movies supplanted books? The journalistic answer, most often, was yes, yes, yes, yes. And in circles devoted to literary criticism, among the professors of literature, the editors and authors of fiction, there was sometimes a kind of horrible exclusivity surrounding discussions of reading. There was good reading, and there was bad reading. There was the worthy, and the trivial. This was always couched in terms of taste, but it tasted, smelled unmistakably like snobbery.
我在報界工作過多年。很多新聞記者認為，在20世紀后半葉，大家總把閱讀作為一系列需要解決的問題來談論：現在公立學校的孩子們是不是很少讀書了？是不是美國人都比以前讀書少了？書面文字是不是被口頭文字取代了？電視、電影是不是把書本都取代了？新聞工作者在大多數情況下都回答：是，是，是，是。而在文學評論界，文學教授、小說編輯、小說家在討論閱讀時，有時會帶有一種令人望而生畏的排外性。他們會評論說哪些是好書，哪些是壞書，哪些值得讀，哪些毫無價值。他們總是在談品位，但這聽上去很勢利。
