Lanham: Electronic Word: Chapter 1

"The Electronic Word: Literary Study and the Digital Revolution"

4 "Electronic typography is both creator-controlled and reader-controlled."
5 discussion of text and looking AT it and then looking THROUGH it. This discussion is very important, and it should be reviewed multiple times.
6 "The interactive reader of the electronic word incarnates the resopnsive reader of whom we make so much." I am not so sure about that. Must ponder.
9 "So used are we to thinking black-and-white, continuous printed prose the norm of conceptula 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 extraoridnary stylization, of remarkable, expressive self-denial... 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." [italics author's]
11 digitization provides for endless editing and alteration of texts
15 discussion of competitive games versus play; mention of Greeks and Sophists
17 "Theory is in fact rhetorical practice, as we are becoming increasingly aware, part of a returning rhetorical paideia that began with the didacticism of Futurism and Dada and has been colonizing the humanities and social science ever since."
20 book and text as talismanic objects
24 more on paideia
24 more on AT and THROUGH--revisit this



vocab: aleatory, condign, suspirations, capacious

Mentioned sources that looked interesting:
Havelock, Eric. The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences
Illich, Ivan and Barry Sanders. ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind

Lanham: Electronic Word: Preface

Lanham, Richard A. The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago. 1993.

Lanham was raised in Classical Rhetoric class. It sounded intimidating, and then it sounded interesting. So I am slowly reading it.

x Lanham cites Jay David Bolter: we'll lose literacy for print, not literacy itself
xi electronic text liberates language from the rules of print
xi electronic word "incarnates the distinction between literate and oral cultures..."
xi manipulation of scale in electronic realm
xii print is philosophic medium; electronic screen is rhetorical mediuam
xiii "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."