The Gutenberg Elegies
eBook - ePub

The Gutenberg Elegies

The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age

  1. 273 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

The Gutenberg Elegies

The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age

About this book

"[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

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Yes, you can access The Gutenberg Elegies by Sven Birkerts in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & Literary Criticism History & Theory. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Title Page
  2. Epigraph
  3. Table of Contents
  4. Introduction to the 2006 Edition
  5. Introduction - The Reading Wars
  6. PART I - The Reading Self
  7. PART II - The Electronic Millennium
  8. PART III - Critical Mass: Three Meditations
  9. Notes
  10. Also by Sven Birkerts
  11. Critical Acclaim for The Gutenberg Elegies
  12. Coda: - The Faustian Pact
  13. Afterword to the 2006 Edition
  14. Cited Material
  15. Copyright Page