home
***
CD-ROM
|
disk
|
FTP
|
other
***
search
/
Understanding McLuhan
/
Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso
/
pc
/
mcluhan.dxr
/
08349_Field_TCGG T114.txt
< prev
next >
Wrap
Text File
|
1996-04-10
|
934b
|
16 lines
The quite irrelevant ground that Carothers assigns to
explaining the earlier Chinese indifference to industrialism is
that Chinese writing—or printing—requires much erudition for
its understanding. The same is true in varying degrees of all
non-alphabetic forms of writing. The comment of Latourette on
this point will help here as well as later:
The greater part of the voluminous literature in Chinese
has been written in the classical style . . . The Chinese
classical language presents difficulties. It is highly
artificial. It is often replete with allusions and quotations
and to appreciate and even to understand much of it the
reader has to bring to it a vast store of knowledge of
existing literature . . . It is only by going through a
prodigious amount of literature and especially by
memorizing quantities of it that the scholar obtains a