The Gutenberg elegies : the fate of reading in an electronic age
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The Gutenberg elegies : the fate of reading in an electronic age
Faber and Faber, c1994
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 231)
"Some of the essays in this book originally appeared in slightly different form in the following periodicals; "The woman in the garden" in Agni; "Paging the self: privacies of reading," "From the window of a train," and "Into the electronic millennium" in the Boston review; and "Close listening" and excerpts from "The Faustian pact" in Harper's" -- T.p. verso
""The Western gulf" and "The death of literature" were delivered as lectures at Bennington College for the M.F.A. program" -- T.p. verso
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Discussing in personal and cultural terms the values of reading, and examining what may be lost as society turns towards CD-ROM, hypertext and audio books, the critic Sven Birkerts, whose essays and reviews have appeared in "The New York Times Book Review", "The Atlantic" and "Harper's", offers a defence of the place of reading and the printed word in the face of rapid technological advances. He argues that we are living in a state of intellectual emergency - an emergency caused by our willingness to embrace new technologies at the expense of the printed word. As we rush to get on-line, as we make the transition from book to screen, we are turning against some of the core premises of humanization. The printed page and the circuit-driven information technologies are not related - for Birkerts they represent fundamentally opposed forces, and in their inevitable confrontation our deepest values will be tested.
by "Nielsen BookData"