The Private Death of Public Discourse

Rating:
Summary: A flawed but valuable sequel to A is for Ox
Review: The issue, violence, and the solution, literacy, is the same. But Sanders here lays his liberal prejudices too close to the surface, and it unfairly colors or undermines some of his argument. For instance, lumping the New Criticism with Harold Bloom as narrow-minded xenophobes takes an effective tool from the fledgling reader, and reveals Sanders' lack of understanding. Sanders revels in the new conceptual based schools of criticism that abandon the text for some prejudicial dialectic or agenda; and he fails to see how a percept-based criticism, which the New Criticism is, raises literacy to a higher level and integrates it with experience. His criticisms of discarnate technologies is on the mark. It is curious that he does not mention Marshall McLuhan, who sounded the same alarm of violence and changing identities with new technologies thirty years ago in War and Peace In The Global Village.

Rating:
Summary: A flawed but valuable sequel to A is for Ox
Review: The issue, violence, and the solution, literacy, is the same. But Sanders here lays his liberal prejudices too close to the surface, and it unfairly colors or undermines some of his argument. For instance, lumping the New Criticism with Harold Bloom as narrow-minded xenophobes takes an effective tool from the fledgling reader, and reveals Sanders' lack of understanding. Sanders revels in the new conceptual based schools of criticism that abandon the text for some prejudicial dialectic or agenda; and he fails to see how a percept-based criticism, which the New Criticism is, raises literacy to a higher level and integrates it with experience. His criticisms of discarnate technologies is on the mark. It is curious that he does not mention Marshall McLuhan, who sounded the same alarm of violence and changing identities with new technologies thirty years ago in War and Peace In The Global Village.