Richard A. Lanham

American literary scholar
Richard Alan Lanham (born April 26, 1936) is an American literary scholar. He has written on writing style and rhetoric.

Richard Alan Lanham was born on April 26, 1936, in Washington, D. C. He attended Yale University (AB, 1956; MA, 1960; PhD, 1963). Lanham identifies two defenses of the morality of rhetoric. The so called weak defense (which Quintilian makes as well as Ramus) suggests that rhetoric is separate from philosophy and one first becomes a good person and then can add good speaking on top (158). More modern (and postmodern) theories contribute to Lanham's "Strong Defense" which "argues that, since truth comes to humankind in so many diverse and disagreeing forms, we cannot base a polity upon it. We must, instead, devise some system by which we can agree on a series of contingent operating premises" (187 8). The Strong Defense opposes the universal rational truth and suggests that "what links virtuosity, the love of form, and virtue, is virtu. power " (189).

In his The Economics of Attention, Lanham points that human attention is one of the most scarce resources.

The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance. Yale University Press. 1976. Analyzing Prose. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1983. 2nd Ed, Continuum, 2003. The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Electronic Communication. University of Chicago Press. 2006. The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology and the Arts. University of Chicago Press, 1993.