Amazon has designed the Kindle to operate totally independent of a computer: you can use it to go to the store, browse for books, check out your personalized recommendations, and read reader reviews and post new ones, tapping out the words on a thumb-friendly keyboard. Buying a book with a Kindle is a one-touch process" (Levy 2007). It encourages consumption and purchasing of literary material filtered through one corporation's portal. Independent bookstores that showcased new authors will find it even more difficult to survive in the new, 'Kindled' world.
The Kindle's domination extends not only to fiction, but also to news. The Kindle "not only displays the news" but it "also speaks it with a computerized voice" with free downloadable new pronunciations for the week's newsmakers (Arango 2009). However, the domination of the Kindle in the news media could come at a heavy price -- by only offering selected news outlets, an increasingly limited array of media channels could grow even more insidiously narrow, as more people use the Kindle. Combined with the ability of the newsreader online to cherry-pick what ideological blogs he or she enjoys reading online and limited newspapers available on the Kindle, the range of views and story offerings could contract even further in the near future. Consumers are already loathe to pay for paper newspapers, now that an entire generation has grown accustomed to accessing the news online, the Kindle seems like a natural outgrowth of this dependency -- even readers on planes and subways will no longer want to read a paper newspaper. Once again, stumbling upon a new newspaper or media outlet is less likely with the Kindle. People will very likely not bother to read local newspapers on a 'stopover' or a short vacation, perhaps even if they move to a new area.
However, if the average Kindle reader could become an overly captive audience for Amazon.com books and Kindle-available news, an even more captive audience is perhaps the poor college student, caught in a web of classes that require college textbooks. Of course, college students have always complained about the prices of textbooks. But at least penny-pinching students could share with other students in the class, read the text on reserve, or better yet buy second-hand textbooks. Now, more and more courses are requiring...
North American Literature of the 20th Century: A Literature of Alienation North American literature of the twentieth century began as a predominantly white male-dominated literature, on the heels of 19th century romantic literary expression, such as within the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Stephen Crane, and others. Similarly, in the early decades of the 20th century, American literature was dominated by the likes of William
Psychology and Literature Both psychology and literature explore how people interact with each other. Both psychology and literature explore how prior events affect what follows. Both psychology and literature look at how a person grows, develops and changes over time. However, psychology looks at how events affect what people do and how they act in very precise ways, while literature fictionalizes and supposes what an imaginary person might do. Psychology looks
classroom, regardless of the age of the learner, we realize that there are multiple learning styles and responses to divergent stimuli. The modern pedagogical environment is faced with a number of challenges that are directly related to learning. In fact, as an educational pendulum swings, we find any number of methods that are thought to be new and innovative; yet it is sometimes the tried and true methods that
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Courtly love your purchase. COURTLY LOVE AND MIDDLE AGES LITERATURE In this paper, we shall study the tradition of Courtly love in the Middle Ages as reflected by literary works produced in that period. The paper will first focus on what the exact nature of Courtly Love, then proceed to briefly discuss its development and finally take into account the literary works of Middle Ages that contained elements of this tradition. Courtly love
Abbe Prevost's tale of Manon Lescaut performs several different functions at once. It is in part a cautionary story. It is in part a push to create a fully modern sensibility in French literature. It is in part an exploration of the trope of Romanticism. And in all of these things it is partly a story about the New World, for to Prevost, as to other Europeans of his time,
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