To a wandering mind, the Internet poses as a platform for endless opportunities of intellectual stimulation, and limitless boundaries for a curious consciousness. However, to the well-versed Matthew Thomas, he is convinced that this contemporary virtual playground masks the textual nature of literature that this world is beginning to forget. To a young, yet well-seasoned expert in the field of literature, Thomas has a multitude of experiences and life events he endured, which served as a major inspiration for his novels. Moreover, the fact that he is so bold as to contest a platform as popular as the Internet in a world where it is taking over, his methodologies and reasoning provide significant value and contrast. Lastly, his in depth …show more content…
Through his presentation he revealed his thought process on how this novel really was constructed in his mind: “ I like to think of myself as a rhythm, I like the rhythm of prose, I am a huge fan of long sentences and endless clauses, but his intention is to provide a landscape of sentences” (Thomas, 2015). Evidently, his choices for the fundamentals of his novel are unique to his identity, and this includes the title of the novel. He was fixated on the title he chose as it was too inspired by a favorite line in King Lear beginning with “We are not ourselves”. He expressed that it explains how Lear’s mind will be stripped naked like his body and his identity will crumble, which deeply inspired the novel and title. Also, another question he was excited to answer was regarding his opinion on how literature is heading towards the Dark Ages. He agreed it was heading in that direction, but followed with the idea that he has faith in the youth of today to maintain a tight bond with literature that their ancestors have had. Moreover, he revealed insight into a moment spent with the great Alice McDermott as he studied under her and revealed to the audience a glimpse of her spirit and love for writing. She has been a bright light in the world of literature for years and so getting any information from her is value in
Carr, Nicholas G. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010. Print.
With the rise of technology and the staggering availability of information, the digital age has come about in full force, and will only grow from here. Any individual with an internet connection has a vast amount of knowledge at his fingertips. As long as one is online, he is mere clicks away from Wikipedia or Google, which allows him to find what he needs to know. Despite this, Nicholas Carr questions whether Google has a positive impact on the way people take in information. In his article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Carr explores the internet’s impact on the way people read. He argues that the availability of so much information has diminished the ability to concentrate on reading, referencing stories of literary types who no longer have the capacity to sit down and read a book, as well as his own personal experiences with this issue. The internet presents tons of data at once, and it is Carr’s assumption that our brains will slowly become wired to better receive this information.
The entirety of Ray Bradbury’s life revolved around literature. Ever since Bradbury was a child, he had possessed an affinity towards to writing. Bradbury’s writings were not purely influenced by his passion of literature, however. Growing up the author would’ve learned about the frail nature of books: the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, the Nazi’s book burnings, and Stalin’s “Great Purge”. Bradbury also witnessed the golden age of radio and its transition into the golden age of television, all of which Bradbury believed detracted from the beauty and knowledge that could be attained through a written medium. The American author worried about the fall of his beloved literate dreams.
William Powers is a New York Times bestselling author of the novel Hamlets Blackberry; a book that thoroughly expounds on the need for society to detach from technology. The inspiration for his novel blossomed during Powers’s research at Harvard University and his passion for the subject only grew from there. He developed into an esteemed author and won the Arthur Rowse Award for media and criticism twice. Powers’s passion for digital balance is very apparent in his life and in his writing. In Hamlets Blackberry he successfully uses many persuasion techniques to help establish and support his argument. In chapter thirteen, Powers utilizes many rhetorical modes such as narrative, Ethos, and Pathos to help support his
King Lear is often regarded as one of Shakespeare’s finest pieces of literature. One reason this is true is because Shakespeare singlehandedly shows the reader what the human condition looks like as the play unfolds. Shakespeare lets the reader watch this develop in Lear’s own decisions and search for the purpose of life while unable to escape his solitude and ultimately his own death. Examining the philosophies Shakespeare embeds into the language and actions of King Lear allows the reader a better understanding of the play and why the play is important to life today.
In conclusion, we see that the nature of printed literature has changed nowadays as well as the way of thinking. We are on the road of losing our concentration, awareness and serious thinking abilities. We are faced with such negative effects as cyber bullying and Internet manipulations. I think it is not the direction we should move on.
...toward the close of the novel that "He had only heard and seen the world as it had always was: no boundaries, only transitions through all distances and time" (246). Ironically, though these transitions, changes in the specific vernacular or ritual may be significant from generation to generation, the underlying theme remains constant: we are inseparable from the universe. "I already heard these stories before... only thing is the names sound different" (260). Within the self imposed boundaries of the text, each story creates new space for thoughts and emotions which are common to the human condition. Perhaps because the story houses the possibility for our ultimate destruction or redemption, Silko describes the story, its creation, its meaning, as the defining moment of humanity.
First, he provides an overview of the history and development of the book as well as the development of reading. Carr analyzes and explains the effects of these developments on the individuals. Furthermore, he notes that the Internet recreates and alters a medium’s content by the use of hyperlinks, which ultimately distracts readers, and by separating the content into organized chunks. These characteristics make the content “searchable” which stimulates skimming behavior or superficial reading. As a result, readers retain less information due to the lack of deep, analytical reading. In addition, online texts often incorporate opinions, beliefs, or skewed viewpoints of certain topics, which can have negative effects on readers. Carr also addresses that some opponents believe that hardcopy reading was a result of “impoverished access” (111) and that the desire to use the fast paced web is a result of a quickening pace of life and work over the past few
Both Nicholas Carr and Malcolm Gladwell debated how the Internet has affected humankind in both positive and negative ways. Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer for the New Yorker and the author of Small Change:Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted. Nicholas Carr is a writer who has formerly written for the New York Times, The Guardian etc, he also wrote Is Google Making Us Stupid? Gladwell’s and Carr’s essays identifies how the internet has a damaging effect on people.
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored man by James Weldon Johnson is a story about a bi-racial man’s life growing up in the post-Civil War era in the United States. The story is told from a male narrator that remains unnamed throughout the story. Johnson takes the reader on a journey with this character of whom deals with many internal struggles when trying to find his place in American society. The narrator’s struggles are not the typical struggles of an African American man during that time period nor the struggles that were faced by white men. Although racial differences in art, culture, and social classes were very real in the narrator’s life, the primary struggle he faced with his own identity is what plagued him the most and continued to plaque him throughout his lifetime.
...a masterful work of art is that it conveys this universal truth, and at the same time conveys the sharp emotional anxiety that is concurrent with the universal truth. Lear constructs the universal human condition.
Bradbury attacks loss of literature in the society of Fahrenheit 451 to warn our current society about how literature is disappearing and the effects on the people are negative. While Montag is at Faber’s house, Faber explains why books are so important by saying, “Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores” (79). Faber is trying to display the importance of books and how without them people lack quality information. In Electronics and the Decline of Books by Eli Noam it is predicted that “books will become secondary tools in academia, usurped by electronic media” and the only reason books will be purchased will be for leisure, but even that will diminish due to electronic readers. Books are significant because they are able to be passed down through generation. While online things are not concrete, you can not physically hold the words. Reading boost creativity and imagination and that could be lost by shifting to qui...
Despite its undeniable greatness, throughout the last four centuries King Lear has left audiences, readers and critics alike emotionally exhausted and mentally unsatisfied by its conclusion. Shakespeare seems to have created a world too cruel and unmerciful to be true to life and too filled with horror and unrelieved suffering to be true to the art of tragedy. These divergent impressions arise from the fact that of all Shakespeare's works, King Lear expresses human existence in its most universal aspect and in its profoundest depths. A psychological analysis of the characters such as Bradley undertook cannot by itself resolve or place in proper perspective all the elements which contribute to these impressions because there is much here beyond the normal scope of psychology and the conscious or unconscious motivations in men.
"Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home." Anna Quindlen (1998). Books are so important even when time passes. Furthermore, books always be like a friend that never lets you down. Nowadays, it seems like internet spread in everywhere—all people now are using internet instead of books to reach whatever they want to know or do. To be cultured, knowledge, and acquainted with everything, a normal person should have at least read through 6,000 books in a lifetime—30 books each year, whereas actually there are almost 130 million books that have been published in the history of humanity (The Book of Life n.d). While, some people may say that the internet
The particular importance of networked textuality—that is, textuality written, stored, and read on a computer network—appears when technology transforms readers into reader-authors or “wreaders,” because any contribution, any change in the web created by one reader, quickly becomes available to other readers. This ability to write within a particular web in turn transforms comments from private notes, such as one takes in margins of ones’ own copy of a text, into public statements than, especially within educational settings, have powerfully democratizing effects (Landow 14).