It’s been a couple weeks since I finished Michael Bérubé‘s new book, What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? I didn’t find anything in the last hundred pages or so to make me change my mind about the praise I bestowed in my premature, sidelong review. It’s a very good book, and you should read it.
But I was looking through the recent Scientific American today, and found a disturbing study that indicated literacy in the US may be much lower, for all practical purposes, than any of us had imagined. When researchers tallied not only the people who were profoundly illiterate — able to read stop signs and such, but not much else — with people who were what you might call socially illiterate — able to extract the information they need from, say, an owners’ manual, but incapable of acquiring and retaining moderately complex concepts in written material — it turns out that as many as a third of Americans can be considered illiterate.
Of course, my first thought in reading this disturbing news was concern for Michael’s book. It’s a complex book, what with its references to literature and politics and academia and such, and likely to be intimidating at first glance to conservative readers or to others who are at all insecure about their literacy.
This cannot, obviously, be allowed to stand. Something must be done, I thought, to promote Michael’s wonderful book to a new audience.
And so, in the spirit of bridge-building, I present to you What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? The Graphic Novel. (4MB PDF.)
(Updated again: I’ve moved the file. The internet just ate twice my monthly allotted bandwidth in six hours. Let Apple take the hit.)
Note:Many old comments were lost in a database crash in 2008. Some conversations may seem to make less sense than they would have. A few will make more sense now.
41 comments on "What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?"“Emboldened by the adjunct’s praise, the two tackled a backlog of departmental procedure memos.”
Brilliant!
Another vote for the social realism pose. I just know I won’t be able to stop striking such for days after this.
People stealing your stuff without attribution? Say it ain’t so.
Yeah, I know. There was a time when you could steal images from something and then add text to them that riffed on another guy’s hard work and put the result somewhere and people would respect your property.
I am annoying everyone with my cackling over this masterpiece!
One panel of this would have been funny. Six or eight would have been funny.
But the whole book? Gee whiz….
Is good. Now I must be off to burn a flag in effigy, corrupt some youth with some good ‘red’bud and sing ‘The Internationale’ before nationalizing some capitalist running dog’s property.
Bloggers of the World U.N.ite !
Well, as usual, I see that hemp has been ignored. If hemp was legalized, all of our problems would be over.
Yours in Ire-Green, B.D.L.
Everyone (well, apparently not everyone) has a favorite line—mine is “The committee agreed to reconvene that evening at the Olive Garden.” Good stuff!
One panel of this would have been funny. Six or eight would have been funny.
In view of the comment above, I wish to disassociate myself from Emperor Joseph II, lest people leap to the conclusion that I am a monarchist.
OK, that was funny.
seriously, i think we read this for 6th grade history at franklin school of the arts in berkeley, CA circa 1976.
Shouldn’t the apostatic/recidivist sheep have been named Jonah?
That is unbelievably awesome. I want a copy, small, and bound in red leather.