Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/08680_Field_TCGG T445.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 921b | 16 lines

idea that punctuation in 1623 and earlier was for the ear and
not for the eye.

     Until Addison, as we shall see, the author felt little
pressure to maintain a single attitude to his subject or a
consistent tone to the reader. In short, prose remained oral
rather than visual for centuries after printing. Instead of
homogeneity there was heterogeneity of tone and attitude, so
that the author felt able to shift these in mid-sentence at any
time, just as in poetry. (38) It was disturbing to scholars to
discover in recent years that Chaucer’s personal pronoun or his
“poetic self” as narrator was not a consistent persona . The “I”
of medieval narrative did not provide a point of view so much
as immediacy of effect. In the same way grammatical tenses
and syntax were managed by medieval writers, not with an idea
to sequence in time or in space, but to indicate importance of