The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age [Paperback]

Sven Birkerts (Author)

Book Description

Release date: October 10, 1995

"[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

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

What hath the inexpensive personal computer, the portable cassette player, and the CD-ROM wrought? Are books as we know them dead? And does--or should--it matter if they are? Birkerts, a renowned critic, examines the practice of reading with an eye to what the future will bring.

From Publishers Weekly

In his jeremiad, literary critic Birkets predicts that the information superhighway will lead to an erosion of language and a diminishing of sustained critical thought.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 248 pages
• Publisher: Ballantine Books; First Edition edition (October 10, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0449910091
• ISBN-13: 978-0449910092
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,957,597 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

57 of 59 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Did we read the same book? October 24, 2004

By amazon3131

Format:Paperback

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.

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars An elegant elegy August 26, 1999

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

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.

21 of 24 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars The End(s) of Reading November 14, 1996

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

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.