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PARTISAN REVIEW
Robert Hass:
I teach those Mexican students. And not only are they in–
terested in Shakespeare and Goethe, the classes are always overenrolled.
They are hungry to learn. If there is anything different about this genera–
tion of students, Afro-American, Hispanic, or Asian-American, it is that
they are pouring into literature and philosophy. They're anxious to claim
a heritage. It is quite ironic in terms of the most unimaginative forms of
multiculturalism, which requires them to remain stuck in one part of their
identity..
I would like to tum back to this issue of the future of literacy and the
kind of instrumentalities that are going to be created by it, and therefore
the kind of reader and citizen and human beings we're going to get. I
think that if you actually look at some of the work being done on
CD/ROM
and their possibility, it makes clear two things. Whatever the
commercial uses these media are going to be put to, the artistic uses will
be interesting, and artists haven't even begun to explore those possiblities.
The other crucial thing will be an enormous amount of commercial
exploitation of the most boring kind. The really innovative ways of
thinking, of presenting knowledge, and creating the kind of readers who
are responding to it and being formed by it, will happen in the academies,
in the new textbooks, in the new kinds of essays that are going to be
written, the new novels and poetry. It's going to require and indeed
stimulate a greater literacy.
Elizabeth Spires:
Are you saying that you envision poetry and fiction be–
coming interactive? I don't see how
CD/ROM
is going to actually affect
the writing or reading of a poem.
Robert Hass:
I think that it will happen, that new forms will emerge. For
example, you will be able to read the poem and also will be able to call
up the voice or the image or both of the poet reading, if that's of interest.
You'll also be able to call up interviews with writers. In the hands of
imaginative teachers, these new technologies are going to be used outside
the market place. The inventive aspects of learning and teaching are go–
ing to become more crucial in the next century.
Denis Donoghue:
I find myself in some disagreement with Mr. Hass on
this point. I recently saw a
CD/ROM
of Joyce's
Ulysses,
produced by
Professor John Kidd at Boston University. What you get, from the first
page on, is Joyce's text. You also get Joyce's tower just outside Dublin, a
picture of Dublin Bay, the landscape sweeping right out to it, you get
voices including the mind's voices. You also get all of the available anno-
