Saul Bellow Response essay
In Saul Bellow’s essay, Hidden Within Technology's Kingdom, a Republic of Letters, he reveals to us that by the 1930’s the media was beginning to make the written word obsolete.
Most of Americans are losing their since of literature. Bellow tells us of how Oswald Spengler, one of the most widely read authors of the early '30s, taught that our tired old civilization was very nearly finished. His advice to the young was to avoid literature and the arts and to embrace mechanization and become engineers. Shocked by Oswald Spengler conclusion Bellow refused to me obsolete. He had faced the challenge and defied the evolutionist historians. A few years later, in an issue of The Wall Street Journal, Bellow came upon an old Spenglerian argument in a contemporary form. “Terry Teachout, unlike Spengler, does not dump paralyzing mountains of historical theory upon us, but there are signs that he has weighed, sifted and pondered the evidence.” He tells us. Teachout spoke of our "atomized culture," and his is a responsible, up-to- date and carefully considered opinion. He speaks of "art forms as technologies." Teachout explains to us that movies will soon be "downloadable", that is, transferable from one computer to the memory of another device, and he predicts that films will soon be marketed like books.
Americans are in fact reading a lot less the they use to. Current surveys have that found an increasing number of adult Americans were not even reading one book a year. A new study examined how many 9-year-olds read every day for "fun" (54 percent) to the percentage of high school graduates deemed by employers as "deficient" in writing in English (72 percent). Among new findings, on average, Americans ages 15 to 24 spend almost two hours a day watching TV, and only seven minutes of their daily leisure time on reading. Reading scores for American adults of almost all education levels have deteriorated, notably among the
Most of Americans are losing their since of literature. Bellow tells us of how Oswald Spengler, one of the most widely read authors of the early '30s, taught that our tired old civilization was very nearly finished. His advice to the young was to avoid literature and the arts and to embrace mechanization and become engineers. Shocked by Oswald Spengler conclusion Bellow refused to me obsolete. He had faced the challenge and defied the evolutionist historians. A few years later, in an issue of The Wall Street Journal, Bellow came upon an old Spenglerian argument in a contemporary form. “Terry Teachout, unlike Spengler, does not dump paralyzing mountains of historical theory upon us, but there are signs that he has weighed, sifted and pondered the evidence.” He tells us. Teachout spoke of our "atomized culture," and his is a responsible, up-to- date and carefully considered opinion. He speaks of "art forms as technologies." Teachout explains to us that movies will soon be "downloadable", that is, transferable from one computer to the memory of another device, and he predicts that films will soon be marketed like books.
Americans are in fact reading a lot less the they use to. Current surveys have that found an increasing number of adult Americans were not even reading one book a year. A new study examined how many 9-year-olds read every day for "fun" (54 percent) to the percentage of high school graduates deemed by employers as "deficient" in writing in English (72 percent). Among new findings, on average, Americans ages 15 to 24 spend almost two hours a day watching TV, and only seven minutes of their daily leisure time on reading. Reading scores for American adults of almost all education levels have deteriorated, notably among the