What, then, will be the fate, he asked, of books and poems filled with metaphors and analogies whose referents are no longer shared knowledge? What would happen if a culture’s shared repertoire of allusions—metaphors from the Bible, myths, and fables; remembered lines of poems; characters from stories—begins to shrink and gradually disappear? What will happen, this learned publisher, who reads in multiple languages, asked, if the “language of books” no longer fits the culture’s cognitive style—fast, heavily visual, and artificially truncated? Will writing change and with it the reader, the
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