The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Culture

by Sven Birkerts

Book Overview

A reissue of the book that first examined the future of reading and literature in the electronic age, now with a new introduction and Afterword In our zeal to embrace the wonders of the electronic... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 057119849X
• ISBN13: 9780571198498
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Did we read the same book?

I encountered this book as part of my sister's college courses. I loved it; she struggled with it, but eventually grasped the point (and got an A+ on her essay, if memory serves). But I was looking through the essays and comments by other reviewers, and I wondered -- Did we read the same book? I didn't see a technophobic don't-read-it-online argument; I found an intriguing series of comments on what happens to when readers encounter something alien, and what happens to a culture when what used to be "normal" is now "alien." Were any of the rest of you forced to attempt Chaucer's Tales in the transliterated, but still semi-original Middle English? Did you find it difficult? The literary difference between Chaucer and 1900 is approximately the same difference between 1800 and now. We've gained a lot -- you can have my Mac when you pry it out of my cold, dead fingers -- but we've also lost some things that we used to take for granted. For example, have any of you slaughtered an animal for meat, or even watched someone else do it? Have any of you used an outhouse every day of every year, because there wasn't an alternative? Have you experienced the fear that comes with the knowledge that any illness or injury, no matter how minor, might kill someone? Have you lived in a culture wherein a woman taking a walk at night, or traveling unaccompanied, was assumed to be having illicit sex? (Think about the woman who marries Proteus at the end of Shakespeare's _Two Gentleman from Verona_: Do you really think she would have agreed to marry him if she had any other choice?) All of that was once normal. It's not any more. Our books have changed along with our culture. And just as I struggled through Chaucer, Sven Birkerts says that younger students are struggling through older classics like _The Scarlet Letter_, not because the Internet has made us stupid, but because our notions of acceptable sexual behavior and gender roles and family roles and all of the other things that make up "normal" have changed so dramatically that the situations and character responses no longer seem plausible to the modern ear. (Can you imagine what an educated 1800's person would make of modern works? They'd be as lost with a 2004 novel as the "media generation" is lost with an 1800s novel.) For what it's worth, that's what I read in this book: that what was understood for centuries as common cultural ground is no longer shared by everyone in our modern world, and, as a result, our literary heritage -- the surviving communications from ancestral generations to subsequent ones -- is less accessible to this generation than it ever was before. I thought it was a good book, and I'd like to suggest that you read it, too, and see what it says to you.

An elegant elegy

Birkerts has created both an insightful personal history and an intelligent defense of history and literature. It is perhaps telling that the reviews appearing from other readers are themselves literate and considered, even when criticizing. Clearly, his writing inspired intelligent responses from readers; this may be the highest tribute one could pay any author.I was led to this book by booksellers of the "Wooden Spoon" type, i.e., proprietors of used-book stores who stubbornly insist on old-fashioned, or possibly historic, standards of both literature and salesmanship. (The Wooden Spoon remains a haven. I'm sure this would please the author.) Those sympathetic to Birkerts (and who cannot feel at least some affinity for him and the world he is mourning?) will recognize the type of bookman he describes, a type to which he himself belongs: friendly, perhaps a bit curmudgeonly, and always willing to talk with a serious reader.One aspect of reading which is mentioned but not explicitly discussed is the degree of human interaction which reading engenders. Contrary to the notion of the reclusive bookworm, most serious readers have a gregarious streak that shows itself in "deep" conversation. The loss of the ability to read deeply suggests a concurrent loss of the ability to interact deeply with other people. The very nature of his writing, and the responses herein, suggest a reason for hope. He cannot, after all, be alone in seeking a "deep" connection.It is comforting to know that bastions of literature yet remain, in some few bookshops and in the minds of writers like Sven Birkerts.

A frightening but true account of where we might be headed.

Sven Birkets holds nothing back in this book. He writes very bravely and boldly about what he feels to be a great problem: Literature is taking a back seat to technology. He starts out with an example of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. Birkets discusses how he came across this essay while watching a televised version of it. This example shows just how much television is overtaking literature. For example, Stephen King has many novels that have been turned into films. People are more apt to watch the movies than read the novels. At least I am. Why would you want to sit through a book of over a thousand pages that may take more than a month to read when you can watch the movie in a little over two hours? Plus the movie is packed with much more action, and it is all visible. You don't have to imagine anything. This is exactly Birket's problem. Too many people are turning to electronic means rather than the written word. Birkets read A Room of One's Own, and he enjoyed it very much, but he is upset that he hadn't heard of the essay until he saw a televised version of it. Birkets bravely suggests what and whom we as humans will turn to in a major electronic age. And I think he right on the mark. He feels that in a dehumanizing electronic age, humans will either turn to religion in search of a spiritual fulfillment, therapy for a personal fulfillment, or literature for a sense of self. I think this is very true. In a society that may become very electronic and dehumanized, our natural instinct as human beings would be to turn to something or someone who fulfills our needs. This book reads very easily. This doesn't mean that it is written in a low style. On the contrary, it is written in an upper middle to high style. Birkets does a brilliant job of writing intelligently but also letting the reader in on his true feelings. That is, it is not simply a book containing Brikets' ramblings about how he feels abot the electronic age and the disappearance of literature. Rather, the book is intelligently written while maintaining a personal feeling about it. Although the book reads easily, it is not that you can just whip through. Granted, certain parts of the book go quickly. But there are also parts of the book that need to reread once or twice to fully understand what Birkets is saying. It may sound contradictory to say the book reads easily, but there are many parts that need to be reread. However, the statement is true. The book reads easily because it is written well. The language may be an upper middle style, but it is written so that it can be easily understood. But almost the entire book is written in an explanatory way. Birkets is explaining the problem that he sees and what can or can't be done about it. Despite being an explanatory book, it isn't confusing. Birkets doesn't use big technological or literary terms to get his point across. He makes his point

A devoted champion of Civilization HAS to be read

Being a person that makes a living in the world of high-tech, and having waiting in line to have Mr. Negroponte sign the book "Being Digital", when I read Mr. Birkerts "Gutenberg Elegies", it sent chills to my spine. I try to read as much as I can, but having such an eloquent explanation of WHY our life escence is what we READ, I HAVE to follow his book's advice. I have a 14 year old son that will face that tremendous challenge of the"Digital Era", so I have taken Mr. Birkerts book as a roadmap of WHY I HAVE TO ENCOURAGE reading/thinking vs. Mindless electrons, that as their physical properties, have almost no mass,and the only thing they leave is that empty feeling that "THERE HAS TO BE MORE THAN THIS". Thank you, very, very much Mr Birkerts for opening my eyes..

A passionate and vigorous defense of the art of book-reading

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.