Leading on from the first reading group meeting where we discussed Brian Rotman's take on alphabetic writing, its affect on Western subjectivity and its displacement by new technologies in Becoming Beside Ourselves, we will be reading two more texts about the alphabet:
An extract from The Gutenberg Galaxy - Marshall McLuhan
And Brought to you by the letter I - Jessica Winter
>> to book a place and to receive an email with both texts
Written in 1962, The Gutenberg Galaxy makes a much more nuanced analysis of the affect of alphabetic technology in two stages - pre and post the advent of the printed word following Gutenberg's first use of moveable type around 1439.
Jessica Winter - Brought to you by the letter I
I. The pleasure of the text
“I invited a friend of mine over for dinner,” says the man ruefully. The gray-faced, middle-aged fellow is a squiggly animation, made of skinny, put-upon lines that form sluggish shapes. His dinner guest is nothing like him. The little friend who bounces through the French doors is the letter M, angular and robust. M has googly eyes at the tops of his twin peaks, which extend downward to become super-springy legs and dancing feet that also serve as his hands. M hops into his host’s outstretched palm, then rubs against his jowls like a cat. The gray man, beleaguered by these shows of affection, trudges toward a grand table piled with a colorful smorgasbord, plus candelabra. He slumps in his seat and invites the bug-eyed M to dig in. “Mmmmm, marvelous!” the M cries. “Meat! Munch! Magnificent!” M’s center of gravity is his mouth; a rib-eye steak, a loaf of bread, a glass of wine vanish into the V-shaped dip. The bottom point of this center “V” is also a straw, slurping up a glass of milk in one go. “Milk!” he says. The two upside-down Vs on either side of M’s mouth are pincers, chomping instantaneously through an entire melon. “Mmm-melon!” he says.
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