William Sparke

I have a modest collection of old textbooks, but if I were to choose the single one that stands out as the best, it would have to be Montage, edited by William Sparke and Clark McKowen. It’s a book that has to be experienced as well as read, and through the experience one will learn.

A book of readings intended for college composition classes, using visual as well as verbal materials, it is subtitled Investigations in Language. No doubt about it, it was a book from and for the Sixties. Before there were hypertexts, Montage was a hypertext in print. Looked at from a conventional point of view, it could be seen as a book of readings on such topics as the nature of language, visual literacy, journalism, film, writing, and reading.

From the cover itself, however, you knew this wasn’t going to be a typical college textbook: the word Montage in several kinds of letters squeezed together almost screams in dazzling electric green and neon pink. Each page of the textbook presents a scattering of items competing for your attention: games, texts, quotations, separate words, questions, handwritten notes, paintings, photographs, cartoons, bright colors and designs.

The whole first section has these fragmented images and texts scattered around the pages. While the reader is trying to concentrate on doing the exercises, reading the texts, and answering questions, the landscape of the page keeps interfering—or is this extraneous material somehow related to the message? Besides games, puzzles, a vocabulary quiz, and instructions in linguistics, this first section also has the Bible story of the tower of Babel, a John Keats sonnet, a Walt Whitman poem, the Lord’s prayer in Old English, Middle English, Elizabethan English, and Modern English, a Peanuts cartoon, a short story and—oh yes, a photograph of a sultry blonde with several cartoon characters staring at her.

Of course, the content on each page leads students to explore the nature of language, to raise and answer questions about how their language works, to notice things that they probably had never noticed before. On a couple of these pages, illustrating linguistic principles, is the profile of a human face. And scattered on several of the pages are little black and white photographs: a fragment of burlap, soap suds, a poker chip, tinfoil, weathered wood, a rusty old padlock, sandpaper, and the like. Trash, you think. Why in the world would these irrelevant images be scattered around a text about language and linguistics. Then suddenly you turn to p. 44.

There in brilliant color on slick, glossy paper is a collage of the human profile, made up of—yes, you guessed it, the burlap, soap suds, poker chip, tinfoil, etc., that had been scattered on the previous pages. All the pieces now fit together into a strange but dramatic work of art. In the margin beside the profile, in handwriting, is the word "combination." Then, putting two and two together, you realize that certain isolated words that have been superimposed over the texts of these pages in magenta and bright orange have also created a whole. In fact, they have repeated the text given on the very first page of this section.

There is only
ONE WAY
in which
a person
acquires a
NEW IDEA:
by the combination
or association
of two or more ideas
he already has
into
a new
JUXTAPOSITION
in such a manner
as to discover
a relationship
among them
of which
he was not previously
aware.

AN IDEA IS A FEAT OF ASSOCIATION.

(Regrettably LibraryThing will not permit the spacing of these words in their original format.) The two quotations are a poem by Francis A. Cartier and a brief quotation from Robert Frost. The collage of the human profile is a work of art by Birney A. Lettick.

In their Teacher’s Manual, Sparke and McKowen, comment briefly on the way they hope students will come to think of the profile: "Leave this page for students to discover and explore on their own. They should have no trouble seeing this montage as a metaphor for the whole section: it is a unique, imaginative, and colorful combination of separate entities into a shaped, meaningful totality."

Similarly, they recommend that the instructor ask students to synthesize what they have experienced in responding to this first section of the textbook. “It would be possible merely to list everything,” they say, “but that would be like the list of nonsense words before they were structured.” Students are asked to propose a structure for all these ideas. “Is not the structure extremely significant here?” they are encouraged to wonder.

I could go on and on. Each section of the book uses unconventional techniques to elicit student response to the topic at hand, but in each case the techniques turn out to be particularly appropriate to the topic. For example, the section on journalism is presented in the form of a magazine. The cover of the magazine, called Investigations, is a bright, colorful photograph on stiff, glossy paper. The subject of the photograph? Why, the sultry blonde in the small black and white photograph from p. 38 of the first section. The guest editor of the magazine is listed as none other than George Bernard Shaw, whose editorial begins, “Journalism can claim to be the highest form of literature; for all the highest literature is journalism,” and concludes, “The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.”

Throughout the book, more and more responsibility is relegated to students; more and more independence expected on their part. But the format of the book continues to challenge them and to mediate the meaning. Concluding their teachers’ manual, the editors insist, “Part of the aim of [this] text is to help students develop the awareness by which they can devise their own methods of investigation and their own techniques for making [such] materials come alive.”… (más)