Commentary on technologies of reading, writing, research, and, generally, knowledge. As these technologies change and develop, what do we lose, what do we gain, what is (fundamentally or trivially) altered? And, not least, what’s fun?
By: Alan Jacobs
October 19, 2009
October 19, 2009
From Susan Hill’s new book Howards End Is On the Landing: It began like this. I went to the shelves on the landing to look for a book I knew was there. It was not. But plenty of others were and among them I noticed at least a dozen I realised I had never read.I pursued the elusive book through several rooms and did not find it in any...
October 16, 2009
In response to my recent post on the decline and fall of myth, I got a fascinating email from Matt Sterenberg, a historian currently teaching at Northwestern University. With his permission I’m posting it here.A couple years ago I wrote my dissertation on on a related topic, namely, mythic thinking in twentieth-century Britain. . . ....
October 16, 2009
October 16, 2009
I stick by my last word on the Google Books Settlement, but I just want to acknowledge this really smart point by Erick Schonfeld: But Google is not digitizing these books so it can sell copies of them. They are out of print for a reason. There is no market for them as whole books. Their value lies in cutting them up into snippets and...
October 15, 2009
Okay, so, long post here. Stop tweeting and pay attention. Jessica Vascellaro has an essay in the WSJ in which she says, Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over.In its place, a new generation of services is starting to take hold—services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying for a piece...
October 14, 2009
My review of Anthony Grafton’s book on the Republic of Letters, Worlds Made of Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West, is up at the First Things website. Excerpt: Grafton shows that in the republic’s early centuries the bracketing of religious differences tended to confuse those who did not understand, or did not...
October 14, 2009
Consider this my initial deposit on a topic I hope to return to. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the decline and fall of mythology and folktale. Between the period of Frazer’s Golden Bough and, say, Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957) — and probably for some years after that — perhaps nothing was more...
October 13, 2009
From the utterly fabulous Letters of Note, this request: produced this response from Isaac Asimov: but also this response from Jerzy Kosinski: You really should have Letters of Note in your RSS reader. It’s a daily delight.
October 13, 2009
I don’t think this post by Alex Reid is on the right track: Close reading, if you don’t know, comes out the 30s and 40s with New Criticism as a kind of scientific method for literary analysis. It manages to survive the postmodern shift into theory and cultural studies, so that today we continue to advocate “close...