Unit One Text A The Age of Show Business Text B The Dangers of Reality TV: Ideology, Capitalism, Competition, Style and Education Unit Two Text A How Do You Know It’s Good? Text B On Art and Artists Unit Three Text A Cultural Imperialism Text B Necessary Fictions Unit Four Text A It’s Time to Rethink ‘Temporary’ Text B Beauty Unit Five Text A What to Listen for in Music Text B Isadora Duncan: a Pioneer in Modern Dance Unit Six Text A Van Gogh Text B Michelangelo Unit Seven Text A The Five Rules For A Thriving Museum Text B European Museums Open Door to Corporate Donors Unit Eight Text A On Photography Text B The Impact of Photography on Painting
精彩片断
A dedicated graduate student I know returned to his small apartment the night before a major examination only to discover that his solitary lamp was broken beyond repair. After a whiff of panic, he was able to restore both his equanimity and his chances for a satisfactory grade by turning on the television set, turning off the sound, and with his back to the set, using its light to read important passages on which he was to be tested. This is one use of television—as a source of illuminating the printed page. But the television screen is more than a light source. It is also a smooth, nearly flat surface on which the printed word may be displayed. We have all stayed at hotels in which the TV set has had a special channel for describing the day’s events in letters rolled endlessly across the screen. This is another use of television—as an electronic bulletin board. Many television sets are also large and sturdy enough to bear the weight of a small library. The top of an old-fashioned RCA console can handle as many as thirty books, and I know one woman who has securely placed her entire collection of Dickens, Flaubert, and Turgenev on top of a 21-inch Westinghouse. Here is still another use of television—as bookcase. I bring forward these quixotic uses of television to ridicule the hope harbored by some that television can be used to support the literate tradition. Such a hope represents exactly what Marshall McLuhan used to call “rear-view mirror” thinking: the assumption that a new medium is merely an extension or amplification of an older one; that an automobile, for example, is only a fast horse, or an electric light a powerful candle. To make such a mistake in the matter at hand is to misconstrue entirely how television defines the meaning of public discourse. Television does not extend or amplify literate culture. It attacks it. If television is a continuation of anything, it is of a tradition begun by the telegraph and photograph in the mid-nineteenth century, not by the printing press in the fifteenth.
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