Response to "Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print" (Alvin Kernan)

A single moment in history can sometimes reflect a sweeping historical change. Alvin Kernan brilliantly describes such a moment in “Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print.” On February 10, 1767, in his palace library, King George III politely insists that the noted writer Samuel Johnson pen a literary biography of England; Johnson repeatedly declines, before ultimately yielding, then taking more than 12 years to comply. The moment holds within it the fading power of the monarchy to hold literature in its service, and the growing authority of the writer to serve the public, and even his own wishes. The printing press and the spread of literacy had made such an enormous social and psychological change possible.

It has taken less than three centuries for the writer’s authority to shift again. As Kernan goes on to describe, before the eighteenth century, writers took no claim to “authorship;” much of what they put to manuscript was a version of shared oral culture. Samuel Johnson and his fellow writers were the first whose authority did not devolve from the court or church and the first whose works were viewed as objective records of truth. In our day, writing isn’t always a one-way street; the reader has more freedom to interpret the merit and meaning of the printed word, no matter who writes it. As my classmates in “Introduction to Language Studies” know, Roland Barthes argues in “The Rustle of Language” (1970) “for centuries we have been overly interested in the author and insufficiently in the reader….” Instead, Barthes claims, the printed word is merely a jumping off point for “that text which we write in our head when we look up [from it].”

Twenty-first century technology—digital devices and social networking--are fueling the change, allowing readers to critique, comment, insert opinion, and demand more. One fabled scene that might reflect THIS sweeping historical change, is the one in Apple Computer’s TV ad, entitled “1984”: a young woman dressed in red athletic shorts runs into an auditorium full of identically-dressed, gray-toned people; they are staring fixedly at a screen on which a giant, disembodied head intones the virtues of uniformity. As storm troopers close in on her from the rear, the runner tosses a mallet at the head on the screen, and the entire scene explodes in a blaze of white light. 
See it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_d5R6Il0II