"When we fail to test our scholarship by making its most important results accessible to non-specialists, we also lose our capacity to address and thus recreate in each generation, the literate public who can understand its stake in what we do. . . . Our critical and scholarly jargons grow more recondite by the day. While there's nothing inherently wrong in specialized vocabulary for special subjects, there is something inherently pathetic in a profession that cannot explain its work to the public at least as well as the more articulate sciences manage to explain theirs."

—Wayne Booth, "Presidential Address" to the Modern Language Assoc., PMLA, 98, 1983

"The professionalization of knowledge has thus narrowed the grasp of the individual professor; the means of his success further this trend; and in the social studies and the humanities, the attempt to imitate exact science narrows the mind to microscopic fields of inquiry, rather than expanding it to embrace man and society as a whole."

—C. Wright Mills, White Collar, (Oxford Univ. Press, 1951): 131

"During the Renaissance, humanists led the educational reforms associated with the rise of literacy and the new technology of the press. Humanists today are no less responsible for developing the educational potential of the new technologies of memory and communication. Following the lessons of our Renaissance counterparts, this responsibility is two-fold: first, to translate into the 'vulgate' (audio-visual writing in the formats of film and video, rather than the national languages) the principal works of the disciplines of knowledge; and second, to develop new genres that will serve educators in the electronic era as well as did the literary essay in the Gutenberg era."

—Gregory Ulmer, Teletheory (Routledge, 1989): viii-ix

What the modern means of reproduction have done is to destroy the authority of art and to remove it—or rather to remove its images which they reproduce—from any preserve. For the first time ever, images of art have become ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, free. They surround us in the same way as a language surrounds us. They have entered the mainstream of life over which they no longer, in themselves, have power.
      Yet very few people are aware of what has happened because the means of reproduction are used nearly all the time to promote the illusion that nothing has changed except that the masses, thanks to reproductions, can now begin to appreciate art as the cultured minority once did.

—John Berger, Ways of Seeing (BBC & Penguin, 1972): 32-33