Alberto Manguel Research Articles

BY THE BOOK

1 3 4 Y B Y T H E B O O K E D I S O N M I Y A W A K I My hope is that neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene’s new book on how we read will be read widely. The main reason has to do with the way he writes, in a style free of self-congratulation, with gems to be found on random pages. Dehaene quotes from Alberto Manguel ’s History of Reading in an early chapter: ‘‘Only when the able eye makes contact with the markings on the tablet does the text come to active life. All writing depends on the generosity of the reader.’’ To which, one might append, science writing can be too ungenerous at times – a scientist, intending to be accessible and lucid, confirms only that science is distant, luster absent; the words are opaque. Readerly largesse isn’t possible, and the author has a problem that modern science can’t fix: he just can’t write well. Not so with Dehaene. Once a mathematician, later a psychologist , he has read all kinds of books and has ‘‘listened to the dead with his eyes’’ (as Francisco de Quevedo defined reading, quoted on page 1); now Dehaene studies what he calls ‘‘reading in the brain’’ at the Collège de France. His subject is of particular interest for R e a d i n g i n t h e B r a i n : T h e S c i e n c e a n d E v o l u t i o n o f a H u m a n I n v e n t i o n , by Stanislas Dehaene (Viking, 388 pp., $27.95) 1 3 5 R teachers at all levels, from earliest years to the university. How does the brain process the markings on the tablet (or, more commonly these days, on the tiny hand-held screen)? How does the brain learn to do so, and – importantly in life – when? What does science say about what Montaigne called the ‘‘insatiable, versatile, and erratic’’ nature of the mind moving among pleasures such as a good book? Let’s start with Manguel’s able eye – which is to say, with how eyes see words. Dehaene describes an important ine≈ciency or eccentricity: in the quiet of a study, reading with seeming ease and calm, the reader’s eyes jerk forward and backward at a rate of four or five tiny side glances per second, as if they were watching an intense tennis match on the page. These ‘‘saccades’’ of the eyes are necessary because the eyes must be positioned and repositioned just so. They need to focus the words on the page in a small part of the retina, where vision is clearest and the appreciation of detail most precise. At best, we acutely see only a dozen words at a time, maybe three or four to the left of a fixation point (the center of visual focus) and seven or eight to the right. For those who read Hebrew or Arabic, the asymmetry is reversed: several words to the right of the fixation point and more to the left, as these languages are read from right to left. For Asian languages, in which the complexity of an individual character is greater on average than in the West, the number of saccades per second is greater. ‘‘Reading is nothing but the word-by-word mental restitution of a text through a series of snapshots,’’ Dehaene concludes, as if to suggest that reading is the experience of a fractured photographic collage by David Hockney. Perhaps it is, by the way. Eyes can move minutely only so quickly, no matter how much we might train or condition ourselves. This has a practical implication : based on the constraint of our jerking eyes, readers of the English language who clip along at four hundred to five hundred words per minute are reading at near optimum. So, for example , if it has taken you a little over a minute to get to the present sentence, you are flirting with peak physiological e≈ciency. Dehaene suggests...

The Library at Night

Inspired by the process of creating a library for his fifteenth-century home near the Loire in France, Alberto Manguel, the acclaimed writer on books and reading, has taken up the subject of libraries. 'Libraries', he says, 'have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I've been seduced by their labyrinthine logic'. In this personal, deliberately unsystematic, and wide-ranging book, he offers a captivating meditation on the meaning of libraries.Manguel, a guide of irrepressible enthusiasm, conducts a unique library tour that extends from his childhood bookshelves to the 'complete' libraries of the Internet, from Ancient Egypt and Greece to the Arab world, from China and Rome to Google. He ponders the doomed library of Alexandria as well as the personal libraries of Charles Dickens, Jorge Luis Borges, and others. He recounts stories of people who have struggled against tyranny to preserve freedom of thought - the Polish librarian who smuggled books to safety as the Nazis began their destruction of Jewish libraries; the Afghani bookseller who kept his store open through decades of unrest. Oral 'memory libraries' kept alive by prisoners, libraries of banned books, the imaginary library of Count Dracula, the library of books never written - Manguel illuminates the mysteries of libraries as no other writer could.With scores of wonderful images throughout, The Library at Night is a fascinating voyage through Manguel's mind, memory, and vast knowledge of books and civilizations.

Birds of a Feather: Emily Dickinson, Alberto Manguel, and the Nature Poet's Dilemma

“The impossible task of the ecopoet,” Jonathan Bate starkly asserts in The Song of the Earth, “is to speak the silence of the place” (151). In making this claim, however, he simultaneously allows for some flexibility in his position by offering Wordsworth's “Tintern Abbey” as an example of a text that comes as close, as he puts it, “as any poem has ever reached to such a speaking” (151). Nonetheless, Bate's declaration is a powerful statement of what may well be the central problem in ecocentric discourse, or in what he calls “ecopoesis” (149)—a problem that can be defined as the attempt to convey in words a reality that is foreign to words and that resists them. It may also be the case, though, that Wordsworth himself comes equally close to acknowledging the very same difficulty to which Bate refers. In what follows I shall be considering several key texts by Emily Dickinson and Alberto Manguel which, like Wordsworth's great poem, address the difficulty of their task by, to varying degrees, acknowledging it, or at least indicating some awareness of the distance between nature and their representations of it.

Novos meios de memória: livros e leitura na época dos weblogs

A memória é construída a partir do presente por uma tensão entre duas ações: lembrar e esquecer, e está sempre dialogando com os objetos que recortamos para analisar a condição do conhecimento na contemporaneidade. O texto deste artigo está organizado em três partes. Na primeira parte, enfrentamos o objeto “livro”, seu surgimento na sociedade, sua importância para a transmissão dos saberes, o poder de controle de atitudes, como os homens–memórias criados por Bradbury em Fahrenheit 451 e seu possível ocaso face às tecnologias de suporte da informação. A segunda parte desatrela a ação de ler de seu suporte mais tradicional e trata a “leitura” como objeto independente, sugerindo-se, a partir das reflexões de Regina Zilberman, Alberto Manguel e Paulo Freire que somos constituídos para ler o mundo, não importam os mecanismos que nos valemos para alcançar esse objetivo. Na terceira e última parte, apresentamos alguns indicadores de modos possíveis de existência de meios de memória no ambiente virtual, com comentários sobre o papel dos blogs e websites em relação à escrita firmada em papel.

Bibliomania and the Folly of Reading

��� Antiquity was a relaxed period in terms of reading. With only a few texts around, there was a small number of well-known authors, and one knew them well or even by heart. It was paradise compared to our modern world of millions of new releases each year and the burden of all the historic books, with never enough time to take notice, let alone to read them all. But as every reader of Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading orotherworksonthistopicwillknow,thecomplaintovertoomanybooks and too little time is as old as the history of the written book or even the book-scroll. 1 Literacy once promised to save time, but the opposite happened. In hisEpistulae ad LuciliumSeneca gives the dietetic advice to read less instead of reading everything and to choose carefully: ‘Illud autem vide, ne ista lectio auctorum multorum et omnis generis voluminum habeat aliquid vagum et instabile. [...] Distringit librorum multitudo. Itaque cum legere non possis, quantum habueris, satis est habere, quantum legas.’ 2 This is the problem which is at stake here–but there are solutions to it. The bibliomaniac or book fool, as he is named since Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools (1492), breaks Seneca’s rule of Satis est habere, quantum legas. He possesses more books than he is able to read–as all of us do–and often he doesn’t read them at all, since shopping, collecting and possessing are already too demanding and time-consuming; hopefully this is not true for any of us. The book fool unifies many key aspects related to reading, print culture, and scholarship. He stands for the distinction between using vs. collecting booksorreadingvs.notreadingatall.Allbibliomaniacshavetremendous libraries, yet they don’t use them. At least not in a philologically accepted way: by exact, intense, and attentive reading and writing about the reading. The bibliomaniac is the counterpart of the scholar; he is the

Reverend Watkin\'s books

During the second half of 1891 the heroic account of Methodist missionary Owen Watkins's journey from the Transvaal to Mashonaland was published in the Wesleyan missionary Notices. As such it was absorbed into a wider corpus of imperial travel and adventure literature on the colonisation of this area. Scrutinising those fragments of information that were included in Watkins's private journal but removed from the version prepared for publication provides one with deeper insight into the complexity of missionary Watkins's role in the legitimation of British imperialism. In his private journal, Watkins left numerous clues about his reading practices, his methods of obtaining, validating and processing knowledge. Watkins's comments on the books he read are juxtaposed with his reportage on his behaviour in Mashonaland as well as the more general attitudes and convictions he expressed in both the private and the published versions of his diary. From this it becomes apparent that to Watkins, reading served to refurbish his own comfort zones rather than to have moved him to question or to challenge the order of his day. There may be a sense of redundancy in exploring on the page a world similar to the one surrounding us at the very moment of reading. I think of Andre Gide reading Boileau as he was being ferried down the Congo, and the counterpoint between the lush, disorderly vegetation and the chiselled, formal seventeenth-century verse seems exactly right. Somehow, this remark in Alberto Manguel's otherwise so enjoyable A history of reading (1997) just does not seem ‘exactly right' when thinking of a Wesleyan missionary reading Ruskin while travelling in 1891 on a wagon through Mashonaland – his mission to paint the map red – for Wesleyan Methodism, but in the slipstream of British imperial expansion. Or is there something more about the books on the Reverend Owen Watkins's wagon that can help us find some counterpoint between reading about ‘home' and writing from ‘abroad'? Innovation Vol. 35 2007 pp. 56-80

Nihil Obstat: An Exhibition of Banned, Censored, and Challenged Books in the West, 1491—2000. Pearce J. Carefoote , Alberto ManguelCanlit Without Covers: Recent Acquisitions of Canadian Literary Manuscripts: Exhibition and Catalogue. Anne Dondertman

Previous articleNext article No AccessSHORT REVIEWSNihil Obstat: An Exhibition of Banned, Censored, and Challenged Books in the West, 1491—2000. Pearce J. Carefoote , Alberto Manguel Canlit Without Covers: Recent Acquisitions of Canadian Literary Manuscripts: Exhibition and Catalogue. Anne Dondertman PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America Volume 100, Number 1MARCH 2006 Published for the Bibliographical Society of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/pbsa.100.1.24293845 Views: 2Total views on this site COPYRIGHT © 2006 THE BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICAPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

An Elated Eye: Scandinavian Perspectives

In <em>A History of Reading, </em>Alberto Manguel draws our attention to an (apparently) obvious fact: "Books declare themselves through their titles, their authors, their places in a catalogue or on a bookshelf, the illustrations on their jackets." He announces with gusto, "I judge a book by its cover; I judge a book by its shape" (125). Indeed, the cover of <em>Blissful Bewilderment </em>is intriguing and elicits an immediate flash of recognition from a reader of Pynchon. A warm, deep-sepia background identifiable as a segment of an old map of North America sets off a cold, bluish-gray iris, part of which is a clock face. The clockwork eye subtly emphasizes the connection between the book, whose editors and nearly all its contributors are Scandinavians, and a Scandinavian motif in Pynchon's oeuvre. After all, the last trace of V.'s clockwork artificial eye leads Stencil to Stockholm. On the other hand, the cover image of the eye may well be seen as the reader's guide to the tenor of the essays collected in <em>Blissful Bewilderment.</em>

The library, the catalogue, the broker: Brokering access to information in the hybrid library

In his chapter on libraries and librarians in A history of reading, Alberto Manguel calls librarians ‘ordainers of the universe’, an epithet used, he tells us, by the Sumerians. He discusses the efforts of Callimachus to ordain the order of books at The Library of Alexandria and notes that ‘With Callimachus, the library became an organised reading‐space’. (1) These phrases are useful handles on which to hang a view of what it is libraries do. Libraries may no longer aim to collect and classify all documented knowledge,, but their selection and acquisition policies have ‘ordained’ the view of knowledge and learning their readers have had, as well as which materials have become a part of the intellectual record libraries jointly create with archives, museums and others. The library has further organised these materials in ways that are useful to their users; it is not merely an unordered aggregation. In this paper I want to explore some aspects of this organisation in a new environment. What ‘organised reading‐spaces’ will libraries create in a network society?