- 282 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
About this book
Scholars have been puzzling over the "future of the book" since Marshall McLuhan's famous maxim "the medium is the message" in the early 1950s. McLuhan famously argued that electronic media was creating a global village in which books would become obsolete. Such views were ahead of their time, but today they are all too relevant as declining sales, even among classic texts, have become a serious matter in academic publishing.Does anyone still read long and complex works, either from the past or the present? Is the role of a professional reader and reviewer of manuscripts still relevant? Book Matters closely analyses these questions and others. Alan Sica surmises that the concentration span required for studying and discussing complex texts has slipped away, as undergraduate classes are becoming inundated by shorter, easier-to-teach scholarly and literary works. He considers such matters in part from the point of view of a former editor of scholarly journals. In an engaging style, he gives readers succinct analyses of books and ideas that once held the interest of millions of discerning readers, such as Simone de Beavoir's Second Sex and the works of David Graham Phillips and C. Wright Mills, among others.Book Matters is not a nostalgic cry for lost ideas, but instead a stark reminder of just how aware and analytically illuminating certain scholars were prior to the Internet, and how endangered the book is in this era of pixelated communication.
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Yes, you can access Book Matters by Alan Sica in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & Literary Criticism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Table of contents
- Cover Page
- Half Title
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Introduction Distractions from the Printed Word
- One The Art of Reading and Reviewing
- 1 Speaking One’s Mind
- 2 For the (Printed) Book
- 3 Expressing Oneself
- Two Past Masters Reconsidered
- 4 Origin of the Public Sphere: Addison and Steele
- 5 The Masses Meet Social Science: Everyman and The Modern Library
- 6 Noble Muckraking: David Graham Phillips
- 7 Integrated Scholarship: Booker T. Washington, Robert E. Park, and W. E. B. Du Bois
- 8 The Textbook that Codified a School: Robert Park and Ernest Burgess
- 9 The Maddening University: Upton Sinclair and Ben Ginsberg
- 10 The Journalist as Social Scientist: Walter Lippmann
- 11 Facing the Irrational Fearlessly: Vilfredo Pareto
- 12 The Necessary Big Picture: Lewis Mumford
- 13 Unsurpassable Greatness: Max Weber
- 14 Founding Feminism for Intellectuals: Simone de Beauvoir
- 15 Micro Meets Macro: Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills
- 16 Sociological Psychiatry: Harry Stack Sullivan
- 17 Postwar America Defined Again: Max Lerner
- 18 When Theory Tipped the Scales: Talcott Parsons and Associates
- 19 “Living Theory”?: A Pedagogical Debate
- 20 Virtuoso Reviewing Today: Andrew Abbott
- Coda Tribute to Irving Louis Horowitz
- Coda Tribute to Irving Louis Horowitz
- Index