An Autodatic Corner Selection
This is a wonderful book for anyone who wishes to increase their understanding of how, from the days of Gilgamesh up to Harry Potter, literature has shaped society as much as the reverse.
Puchner explains how the Sumerians initially used their system of writing only for business and government matters before creating the Epic of Gilgamesh about 2500 B.C.E. Puchner details that it is not know for sure if the epic is based solely on older legends or the work of an individual author. The tale of the flood in Gilgamesh may be the source of the story of the flood in the Old Testament. He offers a fascinating account of how Gilgamesh was translated into English.
He also goes into early writing in Ancient Egypt. The difficulty of mastering Egyptian hieroglyphics limited literacy to a small elite group.
A huge step forward occurred when Arabic scholars developed a phonetic based alphabet with only a relatively few letters.
Puchner explains how an alphabetical writing method also developed in pre-colonial Meso-American. He talks about how Chinese Confucian texts were of great influence out side of China. The Buddha wrote nothing, Puchner showed me how writings were used to spread his teaching.
He advances to the invention of the Printing Press by Gutenberg and how the ability to cheaply produces thousands of copies of a work actually brought on The Protestant Reformation.
I love The Adventures of Don Quioxte and after reading Puchner's illuminating chapter I want to read it again. He explains how Goethe created the idea of World Literature.
There is much more in The Written World : the Power of Stories to Shape People, History, Civilization by Martin Puchner than I have touched upon.
Martin Puchner, the Byron and Anita Wien Professor at Harvard University, is a prize-winning author, educator, public speaker, and institution builder in the arts and humanities. His writings range from philosophy and theater to culture and technology and have been translated into many languages. Through his best-selling Norton Anthology of World Literature and his HarvardX MOOC Masterpieces of World Literature, he has brought four thousand years of literature to audiences across the globe.
"His book, The Written World, which tells the story of literature from the invention of writing to the Internet, has been widely reviewed in The New York Times, The Times (London), the Financial Times, The Times Literary Supplement, The Atlantic, The Economist, among others, covered on radio and television, and has been translated into some twenty languages. It appeared on the Wall Street Journal bestseller list and received the Massachusetts Book Award.His new book, Culture: The Story of Us, tells a global history of culture that raises fundamental questions about how culture works, and how different cultures should relate to one another.
In hundreds of lectures and workshops from the Arctic Circle to Brazil and from the Middle East to China, he has advocated for the arts and humanities in a changing world.
At Harvard, he has instituted these ideas in a new program in theater, dance and media as well as in the Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research.
Among his prizes are a Guggenheim Fellowship, fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin and at the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, the Berlin Prize, and the 2021 Humboldt Prize. He is a permanent member of the European Academy.- from the author's website.
I have his Culture: The Story of Us on my wish list.
Mel Ulm
1 comment:
Always interesting with these kind of books.
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