Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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31 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Did we read the same book?, October 24, 2004
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.
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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS, April 22, 2000
Occasionally while I was reading Sven Birkerts' The Gutenberg Elegies, something inside me would repeat the words, "a voice crying out in the wilderness." I first came across this image in the Old Testament. I think it appears in Isaiah and is repeated by Christ in one, if not more than one, of the gospels. If I remember correctly, Christ says that this image was Isaiah prophesying the life of John the Baptist. The voice I heard said the words stolidly and slowly with a pause after "voice" and "out." "A voice, crying out, in the wilderness." It still does.And while I don't mean to liken Birkerts to John the Baptist or suggest that he is the immediate predecessor of a messianic figure, I do think the Old Testament image is fitting. Sven Birkerts is a sort of voice crying out in the wilderness. Only his wilderness is not the harsh deserts of the Middle East but the one that's the same as our's--the new technological wilderness of the infant millennium. Published in 1984, before the arrival of the millennium, The Gutenberg Elegies is a collection of personal essays in which Birkerts examines his relationship to reading and writing and meditates on what the influx of electronic data, particularly the Internet, means and will mean to literature in the future. Simply put, Birkerts does not like new technologies. He believes that their ability to connect people is over-rated, if not something to be feared. While he can not disagree with the fact that electronic media such as e-mail and the Internet make people more connected, Birkerts feels they diminish the quality of our connections. He thinks the sheer number of avenues with which we can communicate scatters our attention and drains our energy and results in shallower interactions. Of course, there are those who say that Birkerts is over-reacting. And doubtless, there are still others who think that Birkerts' writings are sparked by a self-centered fear that the new technologies are going to mean the end of his livelihood and take away power from the elite literary class he and other writers (and publishers) belong to. I disagree with those who maintain that Birkerts is writing out of self-interest. I think he is simply a man who loves to read and write and is genuinely concerned about the future of these activities.
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An elegant elegy, August 26, 1999
By A Customer
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.
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