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Marc has taught television, literature, writing, and film at Brown, Brandeis, and Southern California universities; he wrote about TV's impact on American culture in Demographic Vistas (1984) and Comic Visions (1989). This volume explores the impact of the new multimedia environment on the humanities--in higher education and the larger society. "Over the last two hundred years," Marc notes, "empiricism has so utterly eclipsed intuitive, imaginative sensibility as a salient standard of truth in Western civilization that the humanities are treated as a kind of quaint ornament to `real' thinking." And TV "has changed the way that people get to know things, making schools, books, historical continuity, and other basic learning structures and tools feel obsolete." Substituting visual montage for verbal logic, the multimedia world challenges the need for literacy and memory (even the mass memory that radio and TV initially supported); for young people raised in this environment, the petty wrangling of academics over political correctness simply confirms the irrelevance of the subjects they teach. Sharp, stimulating, often controversial essays, including a thoughtful analysis of the history of TV criticism. Mary Carroll
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More About the Author
Known principally for his writing on television, film, and popular culture, David Marc is currently at work on his seventh book. It concerns "The Syracuse Eight," a group of African American student athletes on the Syracuse University football team who, in 1970, protested racial bias at a school known for fostering such breakthrough stars as Jim Brown, Ernie Davis, and Floyd Little. Demographic Vistas: Television in American Culture, his first book, was published in 1984 and a second edition, containing added material, was brought out in 1998. Our Movie Houses, a collaboration with Norman O. Keim, was named "book of the year" for 2008 by the Theatre Historical Society of America. Reviews of David's books have appeared in The New York Times, The Times of London, on National Public Radio, and elsewhere. His feature articles, essays and reviews have been published in The Atlantic Monthly, The Village Voice, Television Quarterly and a long list of periodicals ranging from academic journals to airline magazines. He has contributed chapters to more than a dozen critical anthologies, including, most recently, Reading Mad Men (ed. Gary Edgerton). He has written more than 100 articles and biographical portraits for reference works, including Oxford's American National Biography (www.anb.org), Scribner's American Lives, Grolier's, and Microsoft Encarta. An experienced editor and ghost writer, he offers private tutoring in writing to business executives, scientists, and others interested in improving their skills. A graduate of Binghamton University, Marc holds a doctorate in American studies from the University of Iowa. He has taught at Brown, Brandeis, Cal Tech, USC, UCLA, UC-San Diego, and Syracuse University.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Disquieting. We are what we watch . . . .,
By A Customer
This review is from: Bonfire of the Humanities: Television, Subliteracy, and Long-Term Memory Loss (Television Series) (Paperback)
To his credit, Marc, an erstwhile literary scholar, doesn't delve into the pseudo-academic question of whether television is or isn't a cornerstone of contemporary American culture. Instead, he examines what actually has transpired in the US -- the wholesale acceptance (and enjoyment) of the medium -- and describes its impact on the ever changing landscape of the Republic. With an oftentimes acerbic wit, Marc, lifts the curtain on the great Oz, allowing us to see who we are and what we've become, intellectually and culturally, whether we want to admit it or not. Ample notes let the reader discover further musings on the effects of this commonplace appliance. Overall, a brilliant -- if not disquieting -- social critique of Americans and our often reviled, often beloved boob tube.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Finally, a realistic book about TV's effect on education.,
By A Customer
This review is from: Bonfire of the Humanities: Television, Subliteracy, and Long-Term Memory Loss (The Television) (Hardcover)
I am a doctoral student in English and I teach multiple sections of Freshman Composition. This is the first book this presents a recognizable picture of the contemporary classroom: a place where literacy is taught as a specialist's skill to students immersed in television culture. If you are interested in the future of reading and writing, I recommend this book highly. It is also hilariously funny.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Emma Loves Beavis,
By
This review is from: Bonfire of the Humanities: Television, Subliteracy, and Long-Term Memory Loss (Television Series) (Paperback)
The main point of Bonfire of the Humanities is that there isn't a difference any more between what used to be called High and Low Culture. These categories might have been hard to define, but at least academics used to know where to put Titus Andronicus and where to put Star Trek.
The Low Culture David Marc is most interested in is television, which he points out controls us by delivering pleasure, not pain, as dystopian literature sometimes predicted. But there were artists who foresaw how we would get hooked on TV. (Even the expression "hooked on" reduces the viewer to just another plug-in.) I remember a scene in Francois Truffaut's film Fahrenheit 451, where the fireman's wife is is watching/participating in a TV soap opera. The characters stop and address her by name, asking what they should do about the latest plot complication. What's worse is I don't remember if the scene is in Ray Bradbury's novel, which I read, or not. But I still remember the image from the movie. I've been educated out of the reading culture and into the viewing culture just like the character in Truffaut's film. What makes Marc's essays so informative (and a lot funnier to read in places than most university press books) is that he isn't a partisan of one culture over the other. He criticizes teachers who have allowed their students to graduate without developing a love for reading and writing as well as the professional curmudgeons who want to limit "education" to some cannon they've decided on. Did you know that reading Madame Bovary and watching Beavis and Butthead might drive you to the same kind of antisocial behavior? Huh huh huh. The film critic David Thomson said that there have been two terrible threats to humankind in the second half of the twentieth century - - nuclear weapons and television, and that the way it turned out television was the more insidious, beamed into our brains every day.
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