The Gutenberg Elegies

Information of the Future Task Force

12/15/06 Meeting Minutes

The Gutenberg Elegies

Rob Krapohl led a discussion on The Gutenberg Elegies by Birkerts. He read an excerpt from the chapter “Death of Literature” which was a summary of Birkerts’ argument. It spoke about how technology is antithetical to inwardness, and how he values the state a book puts him in more than the content.

Comments:

• Birkerts seemed to have a limited historical perspective on literature – just bound to its novelistic development. This may make it harder to accept different developments in literature. For example, Hamlet was meant to be performed, not read.
• The current trends could be a corrective to the overly inward perspective of the modern age, which was individualistic and separate from others. There could be a move toward the communal.
• Birkerts seemed to view reading as a secular transformative experience – perhaps a substitute for spiritual transformation through Bible reading and prayer.
• In the past, people had more time for reading. Deep reading is difficult for modern people. They don’t have patience to work through the long descriptions of a novel.
• Throughout history, there have been readers and non-readers, and people like different things and get different things out of reading.
• Modern people have more difficulty with nuanced arguments.
• We seem to be losing the physical world as life becomes more digital.
• Birkerts could be entrenched in the modern world view of the Enlightenment, which is individualistic, and therefore may have a strong reaction to the postmodernism of the electronic age. The Internet could either promote community, or more isolation at the computer.
• Can we use technology to promote art and literature? Students seem to be connecting more to digital than to books. They experience things disconnected from context – songs separate from the albums, video scenes separate from the whole movie.