Revisiting Lanham’s Analyzing Prose

I was recently rereading sections from Richard Lanham’s Analyzing Prose as I am prepping for a course I’m teaching this fall titled Writing for Digital Environments, and I had forgot how much I enjoyed the book and particularly the epilogue, “What’s next for text?”, which he added in the 2nd edition of the book.  Granted it has some of the thinking from his Economics of Attention book, but he does a very nice job of setting up many threads or issues that persist in multimedia scholarship and/or its relation to text (as in the legacy of the printed word).  He tells us, in no particular order, that electronic texts allow the author to speak from the margins (236), that we readers of texts and/or consumers of information “crave the rich signal” (237), and that the fixity of print will always remain a choice, but we should acknowledge (more explicitly than we have) that fixity is, in fact, a choice and not the de facto position of text (236).

He also writes, “We always have wanted to mix word and image, abstract and behavioral space [. . . . and we] have always wanted to put words in motion, dramatize their relationships to one another” (237).  This desire, it seems, comes from our existence as beings in a multimodal and multimediated world.  Words alone, while of value, cannot do what multiple media together can do.  It is the same with human-to-human (face-to-face) interaction, where the combination of words, voice, gestures, setting, context, situation, and so on are all at play.  To reduce ourselves to a single mode of expression is, in a certain way, a reduction of self, a reduction of capacity, a reduction of human possibility.

One of my other favorite lines, which reminds me of Ulmer’s work, is when Lanham writes, “digital prose works in, around, over, and through images” (237).  Prose, aside from its existence as an image as well, works in image reasoning and/or Ulmer’s “image reasoneon” (which he builds/borrows from Walter Benjamin).  There is not only something visual about prose (or text in general) , but there is an image logic that can be found moving amid the at/through oscillation Lanham speaks of.  Ulmer picks this up with Derrida working at the level of the gram, but also with this notion of “image reasoneon” where we might think of the importance of neon words in advertisement and, more generally, our larger consumerist culture.

There is much more in this chapter, and this work, especially his working with/through his notion of “alphabetic counterculture,” but I do enjoy this work and will be