Gutenberg Elegies : The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age

by BIRKERTS, SVEN

• ISBN13: 9780449910092
• ISBN10: 0449910091
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 1995-11-01
• Publisher: Ballantine Books

Summary

"[A] THOUGHTFUL AND HEARTFELT BOOK...A literary cri de coeur--a lament for literature and everything implicit in it." --The Washington Post In our zeal to embrace the wonders of the electronic age, are we sacrificing our literary culture? Renowned critic Sven Birkerts believes the answer is an alarming yes. In The Gutenberg Elegies, he explores the impact of technology on the experience of reading. Drawing on his own passionate, lifelong love of books, Birkerts examines how literature intimately shapes and nourishes the inner life. What does it mean to "hear" a book on audiotape, decipher its words on a screen, or interact with it on CD-ROM? Are books as we know them dead? At once a celebration of the complex pleasures of reading and a boldly original challenge to the new information technologies, The Gutenberg Elegies is an essential volume for anyone who cares about the past and future of books. "[A] wise and humane book....He is telling us, in short, nothing less than what reading means and why it matters." --The Boston Sunday Globe "Warmly elegiac...A candid and engaging autobiographical account sketches his own almost obsessive trajectory through avid childhood reading....This profoundly reflexive process is skillfully described." --The New York Times Book Review "Provocative...Compelling...Powerfully conveys why reading matters, why it is both a delight and a necessity." --The Harvard Review

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Reading Wars	3	(8)
Part I The Reading Self	11	(106)
1. MahVuhHuhPuh	11	(22)
2. The Paper Chase: An Autobiographical Fragment	33	(37)
3. The Owl Has Flown	70	(7)
4. The Woman in the Garden	77	(10)
5. Paging the Self: Privacies of Reading	87	(8)
6. The Shadow Life of Reading	95	(14)
7. From the Window of a Train	109	(8)
Part II The Electronic Millennium	117	(50)
8. Into the Electronic Millennium	117	(17)
9. Perseus Unbound	134	(7)
10. Close Listening	141	(10)
11. Hypertext: Of Mouse and Man	151	(16)
Part III Critical Mass: Three Meditations	167	(43)
12. The Western Gulf	167	(16)
13. The Death of Literature	183	(15)
14. The Narrowing Ledge	198	(12)
Coda: The Faustian Pact	210	(21)
Cited Material	231