On July 8, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) released a report entitled “Reading at Risk” which uses Census Bureau data to track a substantial decline in the percentage of Americans who read any books, but especially works of “literature” (defined simply as all forms of fiction, drama, and poetry, without regard to quality).

For those of us who are concerned about civic engagement, it is interesting that regular volunteers are more likely to read than other people. In fact, according to the NEA’s fairly sophisticated statistical model, volunteering turns out to be an independent predictor of literary reading. In other words, if you compare two people of the same race, income, age, employment, etc., if one volunteers and the other doesn’t, the volunteer is more likely to read fiction or poetry.

This is only a tidbit of information. I would love to know whether literary reading also predicts other forms of civic engagement, such as voting, joining and leading associations, and protesting. And I would be interested in qualitative research (such as in-depth interviews) that shed some light on why volunteers read–and readers volunteer. In any case, this is an important empirical question. I’m a philosopher, trained in normative (moral or ethical) reasoning, and I have written two books arguing for the moral and civic value of the humanities. But empirical questions are also important. For example, if we argue–in the tradition of Greek Sophists and Renaissance humanists–that stories teach moral lessons, then we should see some behavioral differences between avid readers and non-readers. Apparently, we do.

Rivka, author of the excellent “Respectful of Otters” blog, raises a series of doubts about the NEA study. Unfortunately, I think she’s wrong.

First, she cites a Gallup release entitled “Poll Shows Continuing Strong American Reading Habits.” That survey does present some good news and should be taken seriously. However, it’s not strictly comparable to the NEA/Census report, because it includes non-fiction, whereas the NEA focusses on fiction, drama, and poetry. Moroever, in the Gallup poll, the percentage of Americans who did not read books at all doubled between 1978 and 1990, then remained pretty stable until the last poll was conducted in 1999. This is consistent with the NEA/Census trend. I haven’t find other studies that go back several decades, but the Ipsos surveys show the same distribution of book-buyers by age, income, and region as the NEA/Census.

Second, Rivka notices readers all around her and recalls huge positive changes, such as the expansion of Barnes & Nobles franchices into towns that were previously without bookstores. How do those observations fit with the NEA study? One answer is that all concrete, personal observations are selective and need to be checked against representative data. How many independent bookstores have gone out of business while B&N expanded? For every commuter train full of readers, how many houses are there without any books? Besides, there is a pretty simple explanation for the evident quantity of readers today–population growth. There are more people, but the average person reads less, so the number of readers has remained flat since 1982: about 96 million people.

Third, Rivka detects a tone of elitism in the study and the New York Times’ coverage of it:

I’m suspicious of arguments that the majority of people are stupid, uninformed, evil, or immoral, ranged up against a tiny minority of the righteous. In the circles in which I move, the claim that ‘most people don’t read’ is often cited as evidence for this worldview. One of the most vicious online arguments I ever had was with a man who maintained that ‘only one or two percent of Americans read anything at all,’ and I see that similarly extreme claims have even made it into published books.

Fair enough, but the NEA study doesn’t call people stupid and immoral, and it doesn’t claim that no one reads. Ninety-six million adult readers are a lot of human beings by any standard. The question is: compared to what? It seems that we are less likely to read literature today than we were in the past, and that’s a bad trend. We Americans seem to be more likely to read than Belgians and Portuguese, but less likely than Canadians, Swedes, and Brits. So there is no call for rending our clothes and putting sackcloth on our loins, but we ought to ask why the rate of reading is down.

Fourth, Rivka wonders about “literature.” As she says, it’s “a word with highbrow associations,” and she wonders “how the average person applies it. If the Census Bureau asks a voracious consumer of Harlequin Romances about her tastes in ‘literature,’ will she consider that it applies to her daily reading, or will she deny that she reads any literature at all?” Actually, Census didn’t use the word “literature”: the survey asked about novels, short stories, plays, and poetry. Only the report uses “literature” as a catch-all. Perhaps some people don’t know that the romances they read are “novels,” but I would think that’s a small problem.

One final point: in an effort to bridge the “two cultures” of math/science and the arts/humanities, the NEA provides a pretty clear and succinct discussion of statistical modeling at the end of the full report (pdf). I’ve never seen an explanation of logit models before in an arts report.

In the book that I’m writing about Dante, I observe that most forms of serious historical fiction are no longer tenable today. A century ago, dramatists like Stephen Phillips in England and Gabrielle D’Annunzio in Italy could still write critically-acclaimed verse dramas set in the middle ages. Churches and other public buildings (especially on college campuses) were still built to look gothic–even in the New World, where there could have been no genuine medieval structures. And there was still a living tradition of “history painting.”

I argue that such fiction is untenable today because it embodies a kind of contradiction that we can no longer stomach. How can a scene from the distant past be depicted with the methods of the present? Victorian painters dressed their characters in medieval clothes, but their paintings were obviously conceived by nineteenth-century artists. If they had been eye-witnesses to the scenes they depicted, then they would have been medieval painters, and their style, as well as their subject, would have looked Gothic. Likewise, D?Annunzio?s Francesca da Rimini is full of historical details, but it is written in avant-garde free verse. It is obviously not a rediscovered medieval passion play, for it obeys the conventions of symbolist poetry and modern drama. D?Annunzio?s audience sat across a proscenium arch from a scene that was supposed to resemble a photograph of Ravenna taken in 1250?as if there could be any such thing. They were obviously in the hands of a modern playwright. As Paolo Valesio writes, ?The more the author tries to give the color of historical faithfulness to his designs, the more those designs appear as what they are: dreaming silhouettes.? Nietzsche has earlier remarked: ?Winckelmann?s and Goethe?s Greeks, Victor Hugo?s Orientals, Wagners? Edda characters, Walter Scott?s thirteenth-century Englishmen?some day someone will reveal the whole comedy! It was all beyond measure historically false.”

Recognizing the artificiality that’s always involved in representing the past as if one were an eye-witness, modernists of the 20th century either abandoned the effort altogether or they made a topic of the artifice, as in Joyce’s Oxen of the Sun episode.

And yet … there are still many excellent and ambitious novels that represent episodes from the past as if from an eye-witness’s perspective. Within the past few months, I have read three. Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower depicts a completely unfamiliar world: rural Germany during the Romantic era. The young poet Novalis, home from a sophisticated university, falls in love with a very ordinary 12-year-old neighbor. The values, beliefs, and behavior of the characters are plausible, even though we would never encounter anything similar today. The novel is a window into a different form of life, but its form is strictly modern.

I also read one of Patrick O’Brien’s Aubrey/Maturin novels: essentially genre fiction about the Napoleonic Wars, but very well researched and ably written, so that you feel that you are observing battles and love-affairs from the time of Jane Austen. And last night I finished Barry Unsworth’s stunning Morality Play. This work also belongs to a modern genre–detective fiction; and the first-person narrator is obviously a 20th-century creature. He observes and describes the emotions of the other characters with detail and psychological insight that could only be modern (post-Freudian), even though he is a 14th-century protagonist. The plot is unpredictable and suspenseful, yet it relies on many conventions of modern crime fiction.

If anything, I think historical fiction is more likely to “work”–to satisfy readers–than it would have been fifty years ago. Historicism is back; modernism is out. This makes me wonder whether the modernists were right to reject representations of the past as artificial. Actually, their logic compelled them to doubt representation altogether. They believed that any form of representation reflected an arbitrary cultural style, so it could not be objective. If they were wrong and one can represent the present world (as most of our novels presume to do), then one can just as well represent the past. It simply takes a bit more research.

The division of history into periods can obscure as much as it reveals, emphasizing change only at the cusps of eras, and continuity everywhere else. For example, we are accustomed to dividing the “middle ages” from the “renaissance.” This periodization (a modern choice) conceals important shifts before 1400 and exaggerates the rate of change thereafter.

In particular, it misleads us into ignoring the radical break that occurred during the 1100s (which we assume to be just a typical “medieval” century). Consider that the following elements of European civilization were widespread in 1200 but absent, or only nascent, a century before: law, understood as a consistent and comprehensive system to be refined by experts, not dictated by lords; the gothic style in art and architecture; cities with large urban populations; colleges and universities; chartered corporations; scholastic philosophy and theology, with conspicuous roots in ancient thought; popular institutions for health and education, mostly founded and staffed by mendicant friars inspired by St. Francis and St. Dominic; ideological arguments about church and state, wealth and poverty; republican government in many Italian city states but also in some northern towns; chivalric orders; elaborate Arthurian mythology as expressed in several rapidly developing modern languages; European imperialism, as exemplified by the Crusades and various forays against the Moors and Slavs; and organized nations with princely courts and secular bureaucracies. The rupture with the past was enormous, and there was more continuity than change thereafter.

(I’m influenced here by Harold Berman’s Law and Revolution I. I realize that our technology-obsessed culture tends to see the invention of the printing press (ca. 1450) as the revolutionary moment. But I have previously given some reasons not to view moveable type as overly important.)