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The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts
 
 
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The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts [Paperback]

Richard A. Lanham (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)

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Book Description

0226468852 978-0226468853 March 1, 1995
The personal computer has revolutionized communication, and digitized text has introduced a radically new medium of expression. Interactive, volatile, mixing word and image, the electronic word challenges our assumptions about the shape of culture itself.

This highly acclaimed collection of Richard Lanham's witty, provocative, and engaging essays surveys the effects of electronic text on the arts and letters. Lanham explores how electronic text fulfills the expressive agenda of twentieth-century visual art and music, revolutionizes the curriculum, democratizes the instruments of art, and poses anew the cultural accountability of humanism itself.

Persuading us with uncommon grace and power that the move from book to screen gives cause for optimism, not despair, Lanham proclaims that "electronic expression has come not to destroy the Western arts but to fulfill them."

The Electronic Word is also available as a Chicago Expanded Book for your Macintosh®. This hypertext edition allows readers to move freely through the text, marking "pages," annotating passages, searching words and phrases, and immediately accessing annotations, which have been enhanced for this edition. In a special prefatory essay, Lanham introduces the features of this electronic edition and gives a vividly applied critique of this dynamic new edition.

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this heady glimpse at an electronic universe, UCLA English professor Lanham contends that the digitized text of the computer screen offers a richer, more complex perceptual field than the printed book. He further claims that interactive electronic text creates a playful, creative medium akin to the rhetoric of the ancient Greeks. In Lanham's scenario, rhetoric was an open-ended pattern of Western education that was supplanted by Newtonian thought and the printed book. These academic essays grandiosely maintain that digitized technology can democratize higher education, open up the arts to a full range of human talent and foster a convergence between the "two cultures" of science and the humanities. Lanham surveys interactive novels, video-and-text programs for business and government, electronic textbooks and common ground between the computer and the aesthetics of futurism, dada and postmodern visual art. And, yes, the book is available in electronic form; as the first in the Chicago Expanded Book series, there will be a hypertext edition, shipped on 1.4 MB high-density floppy disks ($19.95 *
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Lanham, UCLA English professor and author of nine books, turns his attention to the impact of electronic text upon rhetorical discourse and humanities education. This collection of ten essays, a mixture of new and revised contributions, successfully presents a cohesive and engaging overview of the challenges introduced by electronic publishing upon traditional models of research, instruction, and even the nature of academic departments. Writing in a pleasant, readable manner that is scholarly and witty, Lanham takes a more optimistic and realistic approach to this subject than many other humanists. Reflecting this attitude, the publisher is simultaneously publishing an electronic hypertext edition not seen by this reviewer. Recommended for academic collections.
- Robin P. Peek, GSLIS, Simmons Coll., Boston
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

  • Paperback: 302 pages
  • Publisher: University Of Chicago Press (March 1, 1995)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0226468852
  • ISBN-13: 978-0226468853
  • Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,244,091 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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7 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars thoughtful and elegant, May 7, 1999
This review is from: The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts (Paperback)
He describes the transformation of idea and language in the electronic age with grace and wit and joy. For everyone of us who has greeted the information age with something less than wholehearted enthusiasm, I recommend Lanham's deeply thoughtful, elegant philosophy.
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Inside This Book (learn more)
First Sentence:
In this essay, first published in 1989, I tried to suggest the broad spectrum of changes brought by electronic text. Read the first page
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
rhetorical paideia, motival structure, architectonic rhetoric, movement from book, binary oscillation, electronic expression, useful miracle, alphabetic information, humanist inquiry, rhetorical thinking, rhetorical figuration, electronic word, oral rhetoric, formal pleasure, digital expression, rhetorical education, codex book, extraordinary convergence, electronic text, specialized inquiry, literacy crisis, humanities curriculum, electronic screen
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
New York, Kenneth Burke, Running Fence, Allan Bloom, Harvard University Press, Los Angeles, Strong Defense, New Haven, Yale University Press, George Steiner, University of California Press, Eric Havelock, Steven Levy, Weak Defense, Clifford Geertz, World War, Oxford University Press, Sidney Hook, First Amendment, Gregory Bateson, Las Vegas, Middle Ages, Neil Postman, Peter Ramus, University of Chicago Press
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