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Title: The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age by Sven Birkerts ISBN: 0449910091 Publisher: Fawcett Books Pub. Date: November, 1995 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.07
Rating: 3
Summary: A Prophecy Whose Time Never Came
Comment: To argue his point effectively, Sven Birkerts would have needed to show evidence of some direct correlation between the internet and declining literacy. Indeed, he repeatedly states the correlation, but offers no numbers, no data, no evidence, to substantiate his claim. The bulk of his argument relies on a single experince, a catalyst for the diatribe that consumes the second half of the book. As a college professor, Birkerts claims, he experienced a kind of gap in reading ability when asking his students to read some of what we call the classics of American literature. Bothered by student's inability to grasp the prose of Henry James, Birkerts sees a generation in decline, and he blames technology.
Birkerts claims are old. A hundred and fifty years ago, Henry Thoreau bemoaned the lack of deep reading on the part of his neighbors. While Thoreau didn't have a demon straw man anywhere near the internet to blame, he did have a culture in general to critique. Most people, he claimed, practiced "little reading" back in 1850, perusing superficial books on romance, travel, and the like, but having no deep grounding in the classics, in literature. We can gather from Thoreau's remarks that way back in the halcyon days of print, very few people read, and fewer still read deeply and contemplatively.
If we look closely at Birkerts catalytic event, his professorial experience, and try to consider what else has changed in the past century of two, a good deal of his argument deflates. First, and perhaps most importantly, colleges have boomed in size and number. Today's average college student, who once might have been trained in a guild or by family members, expects a technical degree and a job immediately after graduation. Since companies and corporations expect their employees to come pre-trained, and are unwilling to bear the cost of training employees themselves, colleges are seen as service industries, and professors, especially English professors, bear the brunt of this new approach. In all the world, meanwhile, most people can't read, and less than one percent of people obtain any kind of college education at all. People who once might have owned two or three books still own about that many. The book really hasn't been replaced by technology of any kind; TV, internet, radio, or what have you.
A displacement of sorts has happened, though, but Birkerts misses it entirely. Technology didn't replace the book. It replaced the grandfather, the parents, the story-tellers, not the story writers. And this displacement grew out of the kind of gradual historical accumulation that, as Birkerts points out, can only be retraced when we have a literate sense of history as a narrative. Books were the first link in a chain of events that gradually displaced commonality. The internet is an extenssion of Guttenberg's press, from which the first two mass-printed books in history rolled out back in the 1450s. These were, not just the Bible, as we are told, but a book on how to hunt and torture witches as well. From propigating and encouraging the Biblical and social hysterias and bigotries of the late Middle Age, to catalyzing an intensive Reformation, to cranking out the latest "literary fiction," books have evolved with us, but one fact has remained unchanged for the past five hundred years: relatively few people have read them.
A decline in bibliocentric reading then, given all these factors, can only be a universal moan by professors, and not a quantitative fact. Birkerts tone, his praise of reading, echos many of my own sentiments, but his social critique simply crumbles before the raw numbers. The world, hardly literate before the internet revolution, has not become less so. Superficiality has apparently been around at least since 1850, and bad novels have received the same invective from Thoreau that Birkerts reserves for the net...
Rating: 4
Summary: The End(s) of Reading
Comment: by Andrew Stauffer
University of Virginia
Sven Birkerts doesn't approve of what you're doing right now. Reading (or writing) an on-line review of his recent book, _The Gutenberg Elegies_, is like discussing an exercise program over hot fudge sundaes: we are participating in the burgeoning electronic culture that Birkerts urges his readers to resist. He recommends we turn off the computer, stop our superficial surfing through web sites and TV channels, curl up somewhere with a good book, and -- here's the hard part -- actually read the thing.
Birkerts argues that reading books has become difficult for us, precisely because of our saturation with electronic communications media. Television began the destruction of reading; the computer and its electronic attendants have arrived to finish the job. As Birkerts' argues compellingly, the decline of the printed word means the tranformation fo the reading experience, which involves the deep and deliberately slow processes of imaginative thought. Such experience is undone by our desire for increasingly rapid movement across large arrays of text and images -- a desire both inflamed and fulfilled by evolving systems of electronic communication.
In _The Gutenberg Elegies_, Birkerts claims his place in a long and noble line of embattled humanists who have refused the seductions of the technological. According to Plato, the Egyptian god who introduced writing as a new technology praised its usefulness as an aid to memory and wisdom. The king of Egypt, however, took a different view. He saw the destructive potential of this new form of communication, which would eradicate the need for memory and the more patient routes to wisdom. Birkerts similarly asserts grave doubts about the electronic dispensations and sunny reassurances of such modern divinities as Bill Gates and Nicholas Negroponte. He asks us to tally our losses as we turn from ink marks on paper to strands of binary code flowing through microchips. Like the Egyptian king, he fears that we will learn to access archives without using our memories, and to command information without possessing wisdom. We will forget, Birkerts maintains, the importance of the private reading experience to the development of our secular souls.
We are unlikely to get a more eloquent champion of the sheer pleasures of reading books. Birkerts devotes his first seven chapters to the delightful sensual and mental phenomonology of the reading process. This is a book that makes you want to read more books, not by inflicting guilt so much as by reminding you of the unique satisfactions they -- including _The Gutenberg Elegies_ itself -- can provide.
The second half of the book considers our "proto- electronic" age and the slick beasts that slouch towards Silicon Valley to be born. As the father of a 5-year-old, Birkerts is particularly anxious about the evolution of human interaction in the coming decades. Often his book seems less of an elegy for something that is dead than a prophetic announcement that the moment of choice has arrived. In his happier moments, Birkerts hopes we may still stem the tide of electronic images and sounds, assert our love of printed materials, return to that comfortable chair with a cloth-and-paper codex in hand, and start reading again.
"Reading," for Birkerts, means reading novels. However, asserting this as an essential activity of humanity is historically problematic. Novels began to appear only about 200 years ago, and were themselves greeted by fierce denunciations from moral leaders, who saw this new entertainment as a corrupter of souls, an unwholesome distraction from more serious (i.e., Biblical) reading. Birkerts position curiously parallels this one, in that he emphasizes the "soul-making" importance of literature, now facing its successor in the form of the unholy electronic multimedia display. Is the novel another shell we've outgrown, or are we abandoning it, as Birkerts claims, "at our peril?" Birkerts neglects the similarly short history of the private reading private reading experience he champions, itself a luxury of the upper and rising middle classes of the past two centuries, who could afford literacy, leisure, and light to read by.
One can only praise _The Gutenberg Elegies_ as a moving
record of one man's ongoing struggle with our brave new world.
Even Birkerts' blind spots -- his inability to appreciate
anything technological, his insufficient consideration of
history -- are the result of his passionate sincerity.
Everywhere his prose reminds us of its writer's commitment to
intelligent human discourse: our birthright, which we may
be trading away for a mere mess of data.
Rating: 5
Summary: A passionate and vigorous defense of the art of book-reading
Comment:
For those of us in the book-writing business (I am a technical writer), this book articulates the fears and suspicions many of us share about the impact of electronic media. Birkerts makes the strong case that the difference between hardcopy books and on-line documents is not merely the difference between 'old' and 'new'; rather, that there are significantly different underlying mechanisms, both physical and psychological, which directly impact what is being learned, and how.
Birkerts makes his "ethos" argument by relating his personal history of learning to love book-reading, and of his years managing bookstores, of becoming a writer, and of teaching writing and literature in schools. He began to notice that students coming to his classes increasingly weren't "getting it" in reading literature: they had lost the ability to relate the themes, the "great narratives," of human history to their own lives. Much of this blame Birkerts attributes to a lack of sustained focus, an inability by the students to follow long and complex rhetoric within traditional literary structures. And Birkerts lays the blame for this directly at the feet of electronic media, where reading materials are scanned, not read; where the rush of information overwhelms the critical faculties needed for evaluation, reflection, and integration.
For Birkerts, the difference between reading a book -- a physical structure with both substance and texture -- and reading the same material in an on-line format is the way with which the reader can and will interact with that material. "The Gutenberg Elegies" posits that the difference is not just one of experience and style, but that the physics and form of on-line presentation make sustained focus and contemplation nearly impossible. Birkerts writes,
"Wisdom can only survive as a cultural ideal where there is a possibility of vertical consciousness. Wisdom has nothing to do with the gathering or organizing of facts -- this is basic. Wisdom is a seeing *through* facts, a penetration to the underlying laws and patterns. It relates the immediate to something larger -- to a context, yes, but also to a big picture that refers to human endeavor *sub specie aeternitatis*, under the aspect of eternity. To see through data, one must have something to see through *to*... It is one thing to absorb a fact, to situate it alongside other facts in a configuration, and quite another to contemplate that fact at leisure, allowing it to declare its connection with other facts, its thematic destiny, its resonance."
The Gutenberg Elegies is a stimulating discussion of the impact of electronic media on our culture for now and for the future, and a battle-cry for those who don't want the art of book-reading crushed by technology.
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Title: The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts by Richard A. Lanham ISBN: 0226468852 Publisher: University of Chicago Press (Trd) Pub. Date: February, 1995 List Price(USD): $13.45 |
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Title: My Sky Blue Trades: Growing Up Counter in a Contrary Time by Sven Birkerts ISBN: 0670031097 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: 22 August, 2002 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper by Nicholson Baker ISBN: 0375726217 Publisher: Vintage Books Pub. Date: 09 April, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The End of Books--Or Books Without End: Reading Interactive Narratives by Douglas, J. Yellowlees, J. Yellowlees Douglas ISBN: 0472088467 Publisher: University of Michigan Press Pub. Date: September, 2001 List Price(USD): $20.95 |
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Title: Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (Parallax - Re-Visions of Culture and Society) by George P. Landow, George P. Landlow ISBN: 0801855861 Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr Pub. Date: September, 1997 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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