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Alan Sica

Författare till Hermeneutics: Questions and Prospects

13+ verk 62 medlemmar 2 recensioner

Om författaren

Alan Sica is a professor of sociology and founding director of the Social Thought Program at Pennsylvania State University, former editor of Sociological Theory and Contemporary Sociology, and author or editor of numerous books.

Verk av Alan Sica

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Hans kunglig höghet (1909) — Inledning, vissa utgåvor600 exemplar

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Note: I accessed a digital review copy of this book through Edelweiss.
 
Flaggad
fernandie | 1 annan recension | Sep 15, 2022 |
The subtitle of Alan Sica's Book Matters is "The Changing Nature of Literacy." Those who pick up this book to better understand what literacy means in the 21st century will be sorely disappointed, however, because that subject is touched upon only in the 26-page-long introduction. The remaining 220 pages (not including the 11-page bibliography) can best be described as a screed about the poor quality of the reviewers who contributed to the scholarly journal Contemporary Sociology under Sica's editorship. Not only is this discussion irrelevant to anyone other than professional sociologists, but interspersed throughout are painfully tedious quotations from The Tatler, an exhaustive (and exhausting) recounting of critical responses to various seminal texts in the field, and huge chunks of pointless text such as the following:

"In 1952, the dynamo who co-founded The Free Press, Jeremiah Kaplan (1927-1993), had asked Parsons and Edward Shils (1910-1995), perhaps on the basis of their Toward a General Theory of Action (1951), to put together an anthology of theoretical classics which could be adopted for textbook use (Parsons et al, 1961: p. xxv). Many others were already in print, but the G.I. market was still functioning, and the Harvard team seemed well-positioned to capitalize on the rapidly growing demand for sociology books compared with previous decades. The Lonely Crowd and other postwar books had created a hunger for sociology that The Free Press thrived on feeding. Only after Shils essentially left the project were Jesse Pitts (1921-2003) and Kaspar Naegele (1923-1965), both Parsons' students at Harvard, added to the editorial team as junior members. Each editor was allowed to select excerpts under certain headings and to write extensive introductory material. In Shils' case he relinquished the role of editor proper, and instead wrote a postscript to the two volumes, "The Calling of Sociology," a 40,000-word monograph (pp. 1405-1448) that became famous in its own right. It was reissued (1980) in one of Shils' essay collections, serving as the volume's title."

As this quotation suggests (if you managed to make it all the way to the end), Sica's subject is not literacy, but academic publishing and, to a lesser extent, areas he considers ripe for further scholarly exploration. In fact, several chapters end with suggested graduate research projects, from a dissertation showing the impact of muckraking fiction and journalism on the field of sociology a century ago to a "prolonged meditation" on the contents of Max Weber's Economy and Society. These may well be fertile avenues for additional work, but I can't imagine that any general lay reader looking upon such prospects with enthusiasm.

This sums up my disappointment with Book Matters. I was expecting an analysis of the sociological factors which may have contributed to the growing illiteracy (in both the cultural and reading/writing proficiency senses) of today's students. Sica, however, is writing for an academic audience, as evidenced by his decision to include citations in the body of the text, rather than as footnotes or, even better, endnotes. As a lawyer, I consider myself fairly literate (and my undergraduate degree was in sociology), yet even I had trouble following the flow of Sica's argument because my eyes kept catching on the parenthetical references.

My notes reveal that I became briefly optimistic on page 231, when it appeared that Sica was finally going to talk about students and teaching, only to have my hopes dashed: "nope, fooled me; chapter is apparently response to critic of Sica's own work." According to Sica, Book Matters is an

"extended plea for the continuing significance of printed books, for the unending charm and scholarly necessity of large, airy buildings filled with paper and print, for the "Life of the Mind" (Hannah Arendt's modestly titled final work) as it has developed over the last three centuries, ever since Vico wrote The New Science.

There are few sensations so stimulating as the smell of a printed book, old or new."

While I agree with this final proposition, Book Matters is the exception that proves the rule.

This review was based on a free ARC provided by the publisher.
… (mer)
 
Flaggad
BrandieC | 1 annan recension | Dec 13, 2016 |

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Associerade författare

Anthony Giddens Contributor
Hans-Georg Gadamer Contributor
Hubert L. Dreyfus Contributor
John O'Neill Contributor
Richard E. Palmer Contributor
Gerald L. Bruns Contributor
Fred R. Dallmayr Contributor
Emilio Betti Contributor
W H. Dray Contributor
Rex Martin Contributor
J. N. Mohanty Contributor
Gary Lee Stonum Contributor
Paul Demann Contributor

Statistik

Verk
13
Även av
1
Medlemmar
62
Popularitet
#271,094
Betyg
½ 3.5
Recensioner
2
ISBN
31

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