Reference:
Review Excerpts 'The response to the machine was as significant as the machine itself. A
new expressive medium had emerged- the personal computer- but the demand
for the medium had preceded the medium itself. Technology was not
creating a demand but fulfilling one that already existed' (ix).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | medium |
'We failed to notice that the personal computer had presented itself as an
alternative to the printed book, and the electronic screen as an alternative to the
printed page. Furthermore, in the last three of four years, that alternative page
has been enhanced so that it can present and manipulate images and sounds
almost as easily as words. And it can do all this in 16.7 million colors. The long
reign of black-and-white textual truth has ended. The nature and status of textual
discourse have been altered. This movement from book to screen promises a
metamorphosis comparable in magnitude, if not in hype, to broadcast TV'
(x).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | discourse | nature |
status |
truth |
'The changes brought by electronic text, including the very redefinition of
what a "text" is, touch upon practically every central question on the current
humanist agenda' (x).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | text | 'One of the computer screen's routine marvels is manipulation of scale, and
such manipulation stands at the center of postmodern art. As we shall see in
chapter 2, wherever you touch twentieth-century visual art and architecture, it
seems both to foreshadow electronic expression and to provide and aesthetic
ready-made for it. as I point out in chapter 1, the composition, notation, and
performance of music have been transformed by digital expression. Because
word, image, and sound are expressed in a common digital code, the arts take
on a new and radical convertibility that threatens both their present
compartmentalization and its academic departmental embodiment. So, too,
poststructuralist literary theory, which has precipitated the current streetfight
between Left and Right, turns out to be just such another proleptic aesthetic;
poststructuralism and the common digital code seem part of the same event. As I
suggest here, the whole Aristotelian basis of literary criticism is undermined by
electronic expression, and so pre structuralist literary theory is similarly
transformed' (xi).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | aesthetic | basis |
code |
composition |
criticism |
event |
expression |
image |
literary |
postmodern |
poststructuralist |
radical |
theory |
word |
'The main intellectual debate of our time, I argue in chapter 3, is best
understood as a resurrection of the ancient quarrel between the philosophers
and the rhetoricians. This fundamental polarity depends heavily, it turns out, on
the mode of presentation. Print- if I may telescope an argument presented more
fully later- is a "philosophic" medium, the electronic screen a deeply "rhetorical"
one. Once again, the quarrel, the item on the intellectual agenda, preceded the
means of expression it so badly needs in order to sort itself out. Technology is
following the main "operating system" disagreement in our time, not driving it'
(xi-xii).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | argument | expression |
medium |
mode |
system |
'Electronic text creates not only a new writing space but a new educational
space as well. Not only the humanities curriculum, but school and university
structures, administrative and physical, are affected at every point, as of course is
the whole cultural repository and information system we call a library. In the
university world, it is disciplinarity and its departmental shadow that will be most
transformed' (xii).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | system | text |
world |
writing |
'Those who feel that the end of the book is the end of the world assume, and
less often argue, that books equal culture. To call that assumption into
question, as electronic text does, takes us to the central crisis of the humanities
today, our cultural accountability. Can we really argue that the arts and letters
make us better? If not, how do we justify the public expenditures now made on
them? How, for the matter of that, do we justify the time we spend teaching and
cultivating them? I call this question the "Q" question and confront it in chapter 7'
(xii).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | assumption |
culture |
teaching |
text |
world |
'Unlike most humanists discussion technology, I argue an optimistic thesis. I
think electronic expression has come not to destroy the Western arts and letters,
but to fulfill them. And I think too that the instructional practices built upon the
electronic word will not repudiate the deepest and most fundamental currents of
Western education in discourse but redeem them' (xiii).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | discourse | education |
expression |
thesis |
western |
word |
'But if you are going to read books any more, or are going to read them in
different ways, you must decide what it is that happens when you do read them.
You must know this if you are to recreate that ineffable something in another
medium. You must decide what business you are really in. You can conclude, of
course, that that ineffable something cannot be transplanted, that the business
you are really in is Reading Books. Many areas of endeavor in America
pressured by technological change have already had to decide what business
they were really in, and those making the narrow choice have usually not fared
well. The railroads had to decide whether they were in the transportation
business or the railroad business; they chose the latter and gradual extinction.
Newspapers had to decide whether they were in the information business or only
the newspaper business; most who chose the newspaper business are no longer
in it. A fascinating instance of the choice is now taking place in the piano industry.
Steinway used to own the market, and it has decided to stay in the piano
business. Yamaha decided it was in the keyboard business- acoustic and
electronic- and has, with Roland, Korg, and other manufacturers, redefined the
instrument. Time has yet to tell who will win, financially or musically. For all its
fastidious self-distancing from the world of affairs, literary study faces the same
kind of decision. If we are not in the codex book business, what business are we
really in?' (8).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | instance | literary |
medium |
reading |
study |
world |
'We have for a long time misread and mistranslated the Greek and Latin
classics according to the philosophical coordinates of print rather than their
native rhetorical orality. The electronic word is hastening this long-overdue
revaluation. Literary history, that is, like literature and literary criticism, is being
changed both forward and backward' (8-9).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | criticism | history |
literary |
word |
'We have become, I might parenthetically remark, more self-conscious about
prose itself. So used are we to thinking black-and-white, continuous printed prose
the norm of conceptual utterance, that it has taken a series of theoretical attacks
and technological metamorphoses to make us see it for what it is: an act of
extraordinary stylization, of remarkable, expressive self-denial. The lesson has
been taught from Marinetti to Burke and Derrida, and by personal computers
which restore to the reader ranges of expressivity- graphics, fonts, typography,
layout, color- that the prose stylist has abjured. Obviously these pressures will not
destroy prose, but they may change its underlying decorum. And perhaps
engender, at long last, a theory of prose style as radical artifice rather than native
transparency' (9).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | act | norm |
radical |
reader |
style |
theory |
thinking |
utterance |
'Imagine a department faculty collaborating to produce a full on-line system
of primary and secondary texts, with supporting pedagogical apparatus, to be
collectively updated and enhanced: it might encourage a real, and nowadays
rare, collegiality' (10).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | system |
'In the digital light of these technologies, the disciplinary boundaries that
currently govern academic study of the arts dissolve before our eyes, as do the
administrative structures that enshrine them. It is not only the distinction between
the creator and the critic that dissolves, but the walls between painting and music
and sculpture, music, architecture, and literature' (13).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | distinction | study |
'What will emerge finally is a new rhetoric of the arts, an unblushing and
unfiltered attempt to plot all the ranges of formal expressivity now possible,
however realized and created by whom- (or what-) ever. This rhetoric will make
no invidious distinctions between high and low culture, commercial and pure
usage, talented or chance creation, visual or auditory stimulus, iconic or
alphabetic information. And rather than outlaw self-consciousness, it will plot the
degree of it in an artistic occasion. As a start, we might think of a new locational
matrix for the arts, one based on the bi-stable decorum I have been discussion
rather than on a stable, unselfconscious transparency. It might look like this:
[show table]' (14).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | culture | plot |
rhetoric |
'The most obvious area of rhetoric's revival -- literary theory -- is so familiar
as hardly to need elaboration. The "architectonic" view of rhetoric that Kenneth
Burke developed from the 1930s onward has underwritten the Derridean
explosion -- there is no other word for it -- of literary theory since the Hopkins
symposium in 1966 put it on the map. Although, incredibly, Derrida appears not
to have known Burke's work, deconstruction's enfranchising hypothesis that
rhetorical analysis can be used on nonliterary texts and on the conventions of
social life itself is the pivotal insight of Burkean dramatism. And if Burke's work
does not fall in our period, certainly the realization of its importance does'
(56).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | analysis | hypothesis |
literary |
nonliterary |
rhetoric |
theory |
word |
'The final -- or semifinal, since in this world there is no finality -- the semifinal
result will be a motival mixture of game, play, and purpose completely different
from the print mixture. The electronic classroom has a different motivational mix
from the print classroom. And it has a different sense of "finality" too. How can
this not affect, for example, how teachers will grade students, or how students will
feel about the boundaries of a class, until now firmly fixed by opening day and
final exam?' (126-7).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | purpose | result |
world |
'The late, and now much disputed, literary theorist Paul de Man spent a lot of
time glossing the great American rhetorician Kenneth Burke's apothegm that
"every way of seeing is a way of not seeing". Electronic text allows us to see that
this version of "blindness" and "insight" is often a matter of scaling-choice. That
choice we can now manipulate ourselves; we can dial in a different scale of
difficulty, of "readability". That will often defuse, if not solve, the difficulty. If scaling
won't work, and we come to an irreducible aporia, we can include both
alternatives in a toggle switch and move on. Problem solved. Electronic text is
intrinsically a bi-stable medium, one made to accommodate exactly this difficulty.
Texts, Derrida argued, are not "a store of ready-made 'concepts' but an
activity resistant to any such reductive ploy". No need to argue that for
electronic text- it is manifestly true. The same popular commentary on
deconstruction defines it this way: "Deconstruction is therefore an activity
performed by texts which in the end have to acknowledge their own partial
complicity with what they denounce" Kenneth Burke said the same thing in 1935,
but without the political spin of "denunciation" and "complicity": "Even when one
attempts to criticize the structure, one must leave some parts of it intact in order
to have a point of reference for his criticism. However, for all the self-perpetuating
qualities of an orientation, it contains the germs of its dissolution". Electronic text,
by its very manipulability, builds in a maximum of the textual self-consciousness
such declarations point to. Add all this reflection together (and a lot more one
could do), and it is hard not to think that, at the end of the day, electronic text will
seem the natural fulfillment of much current literary theory, and resolve many of its
questions' (129-30).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | apothegm | criticism |
deconstruction |
literary |
medium |
orientation |
problem |
reference |
structure |
text |
text |
theory |
Last Modified:
July-12-96 10:3:44
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