Lanham Dialectical Notebook

“So books are not going to die, and neither is the literature contained in them. That is not the question the future market place will debate” (16).

           

Considering this article was published in 2001, I wonder what Lanham would make of e-readers? Today, I am not so positive that print books won’t become a thing of the past, I wonder if Lanham would be.

“No bad decision to make—it still includes the vast majority of writers (including me, right here—but unmistakably antiquarian and, as the modes of textual display improve and proliferate, increasingly so” (17).

I like that Lanham acknowledges the fact that he isn’t using digital means to convey his message. And, if he is trying to reach out to other scholars who wish to continue working within the comfortable confines of print text, then the best way to reach them is through their chosen medium.

“Sure, she will probably repeat the arguments of her book, but just seeing and hearing her gives us a sense of how to read the book, tells us what kind of person wrote it” (20).

Lanham explains the effect of having the author interact with her text. She gives new meaning, new depth to the text. We hear her voice

            “But, in an electronic text ‘printout,’ the oral world stands there in the margin talking to the literate world. Two different worlds slide uneasily against each other like two tectonic plates” (20).

            I like the way Lanham describes the interaction between the literate and the oral versions of text. Their coexistence is uneasy, but the result can be quite extraordinary.

            “The whole weight of these alternative display modes receptures this history instead of, as the media prophets of doom argue, repudiating it. We have always craved mixed, rich, competitive, antiphonal signs” (21).

            Lanham argues that the literate tradition stems from the oral tradition, and that we have always been striving for multi-modal forms of communication. Seen in this light, digital displays are not seeking to supplant text, but to coexist with them.

“We want to be able to read in layers, for main argument, secondary ones, detailed evidence, in ways not linear but, as now we must call them, hypertextual” (25).

This reminds me of Bernhardt’s article, in which he says that the localization of text allows for different readers to get exactly what they need from the text.

“We want the shape of words to look like the structure of thought express, if only because we evolved to live in a world of shapes” (28).

Lanham says that we yearn for three dimensionality so much that we want words to physically resemble the meaning they represent. 

“Concepts came embodied. You did not discuss courage. You observed Achilles. Animated letters rush into the breach between the two. They seek to heal the breach between orality and literacy” (30).

Lanham explains the propensity of modern advertisers to use animated letters in their commercials. He discusses Homeric epic, saying that concepts were not talked about, they were performed. Animated letters are essentially  a compromise. They are both the physical embodiment of the word as well as the concept.

“This stuff isn’t repudiating the past. It is redeeming it. Galvanizing it. Showing us, for the first time, what this whole suppressed agenda was all about” (33).

Lanham helps to further reject the claim that digital technologies aren’t cannibalizing the print texts. They are achieving a multi-modal for of expression that mankind has strived for since the time of oral storytelling.

“Happily, all these folks are part of the current disciplinary scene. Less happily, they dwell in separate capsules, which, if not hermetically sealed, seldom breathe the same air” (33).

To make this multi-modal world of informational display, Lanham says that we will need to enlist the expertise of all the disciplines. This may prove to be a challenge, as they are somewhat secluded from one another as a rule.

“We cannot exist, after all, only by breathing out abstraction, alphabets which do not think; nor only by breathing in animation, alphabets which do; but only by respiration, the life-giving oscillation of the two. That oscillation is what’s next for text” (34).

Lanham proposes a “both/and” solution (to borrow a phrase from Elbow) to the evolution of text. He says we should embrace words as abstract ideas, but also words as animate concepts, and go back and forth between the two often.