The Owl Has Flown Analysis Essay Example

In Sven Birkert’s “The Owl Has Flown”, Birkerts uses his essay to analyze the change in reading and in thinking. “Reading and thinking are kindred operations, if only because both are actually and historically invisible.”  What is needed to understand the point of this essay is to understand his use of rhetoric in his essay. All three types of rhetoric are easily identified in the text, but the question should be asked, which is used the most and inherently the strongest.

Logos, logically, he connects the reader to the text by analyzing how story-telling and reading has morphed over time. “We know from historians, for example, that before the seventh century there were few who read silently (writing some centuries before, Saint Augustine professed astonishment that Saint Ambrose read without moving his lips); that in Europe in the late Middle Ages.” At that time, it was seen as unheard of to read silently. Birkerts takes on the task of analyzing how the culture read stories and in fact communicated. 

In a logical standpoint, Birkerts analyzes how and why reading has changed and how it will change in the future with the advancement of technology. The main advancement of technology that he talks about is the addition of the mechanical production of books.  Birkerts also used logos to analyze culture and to explain the “cultural tendencies” of reading and technology at that.” “That centrifugal tendency has of course escalated right into our present, prompted as much by the expansion of higher education and the demands of social and professional commerce as by the astronomical increase in the quantity of available print. Newspapers, magazines, brochures, advertisements, and labels surround us everywhere-surround us, indeed, to the point of having turned our waking environment into a palimpsest of texts to be read, glanced at, or ignored. It is startling to recall the anecdote about the philosopher Erasmus pausing on a muddy thoroughfare to study a rare scrap of printed paper flickering at his feet.” Logically, cultural tendencies change over time with the increase of advanced technology. The idea of how culture was before the printing press was heavily analyzed in the text. He goes on to say “After Menocchio's day, with the proliferation of mechanically produced books and the general democratization of education, reading not only spread rapidly, but changed its basic nature.”

In his article, Birkerts writes that knowledge has lost nearly all of its depth and reading has shifted from vertical to horizontal. He suggests this  by providing the example of Menocchio, a 16th century man who nearly memorized the few books that he owned. He argues that the generations before the 17th century did not have access to the vast number of books that those of the future generations do. Birkerts even goes on to call the comfort we have out by saying “In our culture, access is not a problem, but proliferation is. And the reading act is necessarily different than it was in its earliest days. Awed and intimidated by the availability of texts, faced with the all but impossible task of discriminating among them, the reader tends to move across surfaces, skimming, hastening from one site to the next without allowing the words to resonate inwardly. The inscription is light but it covers vast territories: quantity is elevated over quality.” With the exponential growth in the number of available books and limited time to read them, Birkerts believes that the newer generations have neglected wisdom altogether. He felt that as a generation, people were becoming to comfortable with having written text at their finger tips whenever they pleased. He warns how this relaxation with the idea that books will always be around for us to enjoy, and how ignorant that idea is.

He even goes on to state “What is most conspicuous as we survey the general trajectory of reading across the centuries is what I think of as the gradual displacement of the vertical by the horizontal-the sacrifice pf depth to lateral range, or, in, Darnton’s terms above, a shift from intensive to extensive reading. When books are rare, hard to obtain, and expensive, the reader must compensate through intensified focus, must like Menocchio read the same passages over and over, memorizing, inscribing the words deeply on the slate of the attention, subjecting them to an interpretive pressure not unlike what students of scripture practice upon their texts. This is ferocious reading-prison or "desert island" reading-and where it does not assume depth, it creates it.”

Pathos, emotionally, he reminisces on change. Birkerts notes “As we now find ourselves at a cultural watershed-as the fundamental process of transmitting information is shifting from mechanical to circuit-driven, from page to screen-it may be time to ask how modifications in our way of reading may impinge upon our mental life. For how we receive information bears vitally on the ways we experience and interpret reality.” By using the term “cultural watershed” I personally feel the emotional tug on how our culture is changing, and as humans are programed for, change is bad. 

Change is something that as a human being, we are programed to be afraid of it. The text is supposed to spike the realization that in fact, something as little as reading can change, and how important reading is in our culture and our life. Birkerts makes us picture a day where “ When books are rare, hard to obtain and to find.” This idea, to me, invokes the most thought in me, which I feel is what rhetoric is supposed to do. With emotion, Birkerts can cause a reader to fear the day when precious books have became scarce and our only choice to reading would be digital. 

Ethos, what I would call culturally, he keys in how culture is influenced by the change in technology and how that in turn influenced reading. While “The Owl Has Flown” has had some cultural influence, this text is heavily influenced by the culture itself. In a sense, the entire reasoning of this text is how culture and technology has impacted the style of communication, specifically story-telling. 

Birkerts provides us this evidence by citing how the invention of the printing press has changed our culture. Originally it was quite the task to hand copy stories to the point where that much effort seemed pointless. Because of this, the culture of that time relied heavily on memorization and oral story telling. So in order to hear stories in that time, people would gather in cities and towns to listen and tell stories to one another. Doing this would lead to tighter knit communities because, in fact, those stories brought people together over time. This is actually described by Birkerts himself in his essay. He goes quite in depth on the mater on how a villager has his perspective controlled by how he is controlled by a rural area. Birkerts says “The villager may have possessed his world more pungently, more sensuously; he may have found more sense in things owing both to the limited scope of his concern and the depth of his information-not to mention his basic spiritual assumptions. But I also take seriously Marx's quip about the "idiocy of rural life." Circumscribed conditions and habit suggest greater immersion in circumstance, but also dullness and limitation. The lack of a larger perspective hobbles the mind, leads to suspiciousness and wary conservativism; the cliches about peasants are probably not without foundation. But by the same token, the constant availability of data and macro perspectives has its own diminishing returns.”

Culture and reading are intertwined together, as reading culture changed, so did reading and how stories were communicated at that time. Birkerts intentionally showed how culture did impact reading and how technology changed culture, which in turn changed reading. With the invention of the printing press, books became renewable. This meant that as a culture, there was a need for people to learn to read and gain an education. With more educated people, stories became more accessible for an individual to read. Ethos is the idea of a cultural manifestation. While Birkerts essay did not really manifest into a culture like some stories do, the culture manifested into his essay.

Overall with his tools of rhetoric, Birkerts was successfully able to analyze the culture, reading, and technology in “The Owl Has Flown”. I feel that Birkerts heavily relied on pathos as the strongest rhetorical device in his essay. The idea of change does in fact invoke emotion into people. While some people can be won over by logic and some can be won over by the culture or the flow of people. Everyone, save a psychopath, will be influenced by emotion. Because of this, Birkerts intentionally uses emotion to connect the reader to his text. With ethos as his main tool, I feel that logos is easily a close second. Most readers could be called logical people. Because of this, I believe Birkerts was trying to connect with those readers by providing the evidence in his essay to prove that his essay was in fact true and relevant.