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| The Electronic Word : Democracy, Technology, and the Arts
ISBN: 9780226469126
Platform/Publisher: Ebook Central / University of Chicago Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Limited; Download: 7 Days at a Time
Subjects: Social Science; Computer Science/ IT;
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 * (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Born on April 26, 1936, Richard Lanham was educated at Yale, receiving a B.A. in 1956, an M.A. in 1960, and a Ph.D. in 1963. After serving in the U.S. Army for two years, Lanham worked briefly for the Smithsonian Institution and then took a position teaching English at Dartmouth College. In 1965, he moved to the University of California at Los Angeles, eventually becoming the executive director of writing programs. He was a National Endowment for the Humanities senior fellow in 1973-74. Lanham is the author of numerous books on writing, including Style: An Anti-textbook, The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance, Revising Prose, Revising Business Prose, Analyzing Prose, and Literacy and the Survival of Humanism. He has also contributed articles to English Literary Renaissance, Modern Language Quarterly, English Studies, and other journals. Richard Lanham married Carol Dana in 1957. (Bowker Author Biography) |
