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By Root 820 0

who read “literary” works. Drawing upon responses to the 2002 Census survey, which had asked more than seventeen thousand adults whether they had read any novels, short stories, poetry, or plays in their leisure time, the NEA noted that 45 percent said they had read some fiction, 12 percent had read some poetry, and only 4 percent had read a play. These findings, published in Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America, showed an alarming decline of reading in all age groups across the country, and especially among eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds. The chairman of the NEA termed the results an indication of a “national crisis,” one that reflected “a general collapse in advanced literacy,” and a loss that “impoverishes both cultural and civic life.”1

Among the report’s “10 key findings” were that under half of the adult American population now reads literature; that although women read more than men (“Only slightly more than one-third of adult American males now read literature”), reading rates were declining for both men and women; that reading among persons at every level of education, including college graduates and postgraduates, had declined over the past twenty years; and that “literary reading strongly correlates other forms of active civic participation,” including volunteer and charity work, cultural involvement with museums and the performing arts, and attendance at sporting events. It was less surprising to find that competition with other modes of information, like the Internet, video games, and portable digital devices, had a negative effect upon the number of adults who regularly read.2 Race and ethnicity seemed not to be crucial factors: the rates of decline included whites, African Americans, and Hispanics. “Listening” to literature counted as a kind of reading for this survey, although watching films did not: women are more likely to listen to novels or poetry than men, whites more likely to listen to book readings, African Americans most likely to listen to poetry readings. Here the report suggests that “in part” the reason may be “the popularity of dub and slam poetry readings in the U.S.”3

The idea that fiction/nonfiction should be the determining category for “literary/nonliterary” is spelled out in a brief section called “Literature vs. Books,” in which “literature” is explicitly defined as including “popular genres such as mysteries, as well as contemporary and classic literary fiction. No distinctions were drawn on the quality of literary works.”4 So a work of “literature” for the purposes of respondents to this survey could be a Harlequin romance or a Sidney Sheldon novel but not Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, or Machiavelli’s The Prince, or David McCullough’s biography of Harry Truman. I can understand why the survey wanted to make some kind of distinction, and I agree with the democratic decision not to judge works on their putative “quality” (which, in any case, a longer historical view would show is likely to change over time). But the decision to exclude “nonfiction,” or what an older tradition once dubbed “intellectual prose,” does seem to undercut a little the message that “anyone who loves literature or values the cultural, intellectual, and political importance of active and engaged literacy in American society will respond to this report with grave concern.”5

There was a time when the word literature meant an acquaintance with “letters” or books—the confident possession, that is, of humane learning and literary culture. “He had probably more than common literature,” wrote Dr. Johnson about the poet John Milton. “His literature was unquestionably great. He read all the languages which are considered either as learned or polite”6 Although Milton wrote great literature, that is not what Johnson’s sentence says. It says that he had literature, which is to say learning, a familiarity with and understanding of words and texts. The nineteenth-century novelist Maria Edgeworth uses literature in a similar way, describing “A woman of considerable information