Editor’s note: For a related article, please see “The
decline of reading,” by Roger Kimball (Armavirumque,
7.14.2004).

“Reading
at Risk is not a report that the National
Endowment for the Arts is happy to issue,” writes Dana
Gioia, the Endowment’s chairman, in his introduction to that
lament for the decline of literary reading in America. Maybe so,
but they’re prepared to put up with the report’s sad
news, if the alternative is wading into controversy. It’s
easy to shake the head and cluck the tongue about the fatal
allure, particularly for the young, of television and the
Internet, but what seems to me to be the primary cause of the
public’s indifference to literature—namely the way it
is now being taught in schools and universities—cannot be
mentioned, for fear of antagonizing the professoriate. As George
Will put it, “Professors, lusting after tenure and prestige,
teach that the great works of the Western canon, properly
deconstructed, are not explorations of the human spirit but mere
reflections of power relations and social pathologies.”

Those with long memories may remember how the National Endowment
for the Arts came under fire in the Eighties and early Nineties for its support of
controversial works, regarded as offensive by many, by the likes of Robert
Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano. Serrano’s “Piss Christ” remains to this day the
one work of modern art that millions of ordinary people can name—because they
regard