The Gutenberg Elegies

Author : Sven Birkerts
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2006-11-14
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1429923946

Get Book

The Gutenberg Elegies by Sven Birkerts Pdf

"[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

Author : Sven Birkerts
Publisher : Macmillan
Page : 266 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 1994
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 057119849X

Get Book

The Gutenberg Elegies by Sven Birkerts Pdf

The author argues that we are living in a state of intellectual emergency, that is caused by our willingness to embrace new technologies at the expense of the printed word. In this case the author takes a stand on the side of the book.

Author : Sven Birkerts
Publisher : Graywolf Press
Page : 120 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 2014-05-20
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781555973391

Get Book

The Art of Time in Memoir by Sven Birkerts Pdf

The Art Of series is a new line of books reinvigorating the practice of craft and criticism. Each book will be a brief, witty, and useful exploration of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry by a writer impassioned by a singular craft issue. The Art Of volumes will provide a series of sustained examinations of key but sometimes neglected aspects of creative writing by some of contemporary literature's finest practioners. In The Art of Time in Memoir, critic and memoirist Sven Birkerts examines the human impulse to write about the self. By examining memoirs such as Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory; Virginia Woolf's unfinished A Sketch of the Past; and Mary Karr's The Liars' Club, Birkerts describes the memoirist's essential art of assembling patterns of meaning, stirring to life our own sense of past and present.

Author : Sven Birkerts
Publisher : Graywolf Press
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 2015-10-06
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 9781555979102

Get Book

Changing the Subject by Sven Birkerts Pdf

Trenchant, expansive essays on the cultural consequences of ongoing, all-permeating technological innovation In 1994, Sven Birkerts published The Gutenberg Elegies, his celebrated rallying cry to resist the oncoming digital advances, especially those that might affect the way we read literature and experience art—the very cultural activities that make us human. After two decades of rampant change, Birkerts has allowed a degree of everyday digital technology into his life. He refuses to use a smartphone, but communicates via e-mail and spends some time reading online. In Changing the Subject, he examines the changes that he observes in himself and others—the distraction when reading on the screen; the loss of personal agency through reliance on GPS and one-stop information resources; an increasing acceptance of "hive" behaviors. "An unprecedented shift is underway," he argues, and "this transformation is dramatically accelerated and more psychologically formative than any previous technological innovation." He finds solace in engagement with art, particularly literature, and he brilliantly describes the countering energy available to us through acts of sustained attention, even as he worries that our increasingly mediated existences are not conducive to creativity. It is impossible to read Changing the Subject without coming away with a renewed sense of what is lost by our wholesale acceptance of digital innovation and what is regained when we immerse ourselves in a good book.

Author : Bliss Carman
Publisher : Boston ; New York [etc.] : Lamson, Wolffe
Page : 142 pages
File Size : 40,6 Mb
Release : 1898
Category : Canadian poetry
ISBN : PRNC:32101068176096

Get Book

By the Aurelian Wall, and Other Elegies by Bliss Carman Pdf

Author : Shafquat Towheed,Rosalind Crone,Katie Halsey
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 2011
Category : Books and reading
ISBN : 0415484200

Get Book

The History of Reading by Shafquat Towheed,Rosalind Crone,Katie Halsey Pdf

'The History of Reading' offers an accessible overview of this developing discipline, from the rise of literacy through to the current trend of book clubs.

Author : Sven Birkerts
Publisher : Graywolf Press
Page : 199 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 2011-09-13
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781555970369

Get Book

The Other Walk by Sven Birkerts Pdf

Other Walk is a series of autobiographical pieces by the master of reflection and slow time Throughout his life, Sven Birkerts, one of the country's foremost literary critics, has carved out time for himself—to walk, to swim, to read, to contemplate. Now in his late fifties, he has clocked up many thousands of hours of reflection. It shows in his prose, which proceeds at a refreshingly deliberative pace as it draws the reader into his patterns and rhythms. In this deeply appealing and engaging collection of essays, Birkerts looks back through his own life, as well as at the generations before him, and ahead at the lives of his children. We read how the writer witnesses his son's frightening sailing accident, how he feels when he encounters his own prose from many years ago, how finding a cigarette lighter or a lost ring releases a cascade of memories. The objects he sees around him—old friends, remembered places—are excavated, their layers exposed. But most winning of all is the emerging character of Birkerts himself. We come to have great respect for this competitive but deeply loyal friend, the caring father who respects his children's independence even as he tries to connect with them, the traveler, the onetime bookseller, the writer at all stages of his writing life, and throughout it all, the attentive, passionate reader.

Author : William Trevor
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 225 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 2006-04-25
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780143039624

Get Book

Fools of Fortune by William Trevor Pdf

Penguin Classics is proud to welcome William Trevor—"Ireland’s answer to Chekhov" (The Boston Globe) and "one of the best writers of our era" (The Washington Post)—to our distinguished list of literary masters. In this award-winning novel, an informer’s body is found on the estate of a wealthy Irish family shortly after the First World War, and an appalling cycle of revenge is set in motion. Led by a zealous sergeant, the Black and Tans set fire to the family home, and only young Willie and his mother escape alive. Fatherless, Willie grows into manhood while his alcoholic mother’s bitter resentment festers. And though he finds love, Willie is unable to leave the terrible injuries of the past behind. First time in Penguin Classics Winner of the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award

Author : Tibullus
Publisher : Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Page : 104 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2015-05-10
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 1512145165

Get Book

The Elegies of Tibullus by Tibullus Pdf

"The Elegies of Tibullus" from Tibullus. Tibullus, latin poet and writer of elegies (55B.C.-19B.C.).

Author : D. Salwak
Publisher : Springer
Page : 208 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 1999-04-23
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780230374515

Get Book

A Passion for Books by D. Salwak Pdf

Leading writers and critics, including Margaret Drabble, Alan Sillitoe and Ferdinand Mount, share their passion for books and the joys of reading in an inspiring collection of essays and writings. A Passion for Books is both a celebration of the value and importance of reading and a spirited defence against the many gloomy voices in our so-called electronic age who say the book will soon be obsolete. This book, itself a joy to read, is written for anyone who cares at all about the past and future of books and reading.

Author : Sven Birkerts
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 212 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 2007-04-03
Category : Fiction
ISBN : UOM:39015067678972

Get Book

Reading Life by Sven Birkerts Pdf

Reading a selection of novels for a second time, Birkerts reflects on his first readings and what later readings reveal about the passing of time and of memory.

Author : Leah Price
Publisher : Basic Books
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 2019-08-20
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 0465042686

Get Book

What We Talk About When We Talk About Books by Leah Price Pdf

Reports of the death of reading are greatly exaggerated Do you worry that you've lost patience for anything longer than a tweet? If so, you're not alone. Digital-age pundits warn that as our appetite for books dwindles, so too do the virtues in which printed, bound objects once trained us: the willpower to focus on a sustained argument, the curiosity to look beyond the day's news, the willingness to be alone. The shelves of the world's great libraries, though, tell a more complicated story. Examining the wear and tear on the books that they contain, English professor Leah Price finds scant evidence that a golden age of reading ever existed. From the dawn of mass literacy to the invention of the paperback, most readers already skimmed and multitasked. Print-era doctors even forbade the very same silent absorption now recommended as a cure for electronic addictions. The evidence that books are dying proves even scarcer. In encounters with librarians, booksellers and activists who are reinventing old ways of reading, Price offers fresh hope to bibliophiles and literature lovers alike.

Author : Jonathan Franzen
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Page : 317 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2007-05-15
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 9780374707644

Get Book

How to Be Alone by Jonathan Franzen Pdf

Passionate, strong-minded nonfiction from the National Book Award-winning author of The Corrections Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections was the best-loved and most-written-about novel of 2001. Nearly every in-depth review of it discussed what became known as "The Harper's Essay," Franzen's controversial 1996 investigation of the fate of the American novel. This essay is reprinted for the first time in How to be Alone, along with the personal essays and the dead-on reportage that earned Franzen a wide readership before the success of The Corrections. Although his subjects range from the sex-advice industry to the way a supermax prison works, each piece wrestles with familiar themes of Franzen's writing: the erosion of civic life and private dignity and the hidden persistence of loneliness in postmodern, imperial America. Recent pieces include a moving essay on his father's stuggle with Alzheimer's disease (which has already been reprinted around the world) and a rueful account of Franzen's brief tenure as an Oprah Winfrey author. As a collection, these essays record what Franzen calls "a movement away from an angry and frightened isolation toward an acceptance--even a celebration--of being a reader and a writer." At the same time they show the wry distrust of the claims of technology and psychology, the love-hate relationship with consumerism, and the subversive belief in the tragic shape of the individual life that help make Franzen one of our sharpest, toughest, and most entertaining social critics.

Author : Jeff Brown,Jesse Wisnewski
Publisher : Baker Books
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2021-08-31
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9781493430253

Get Book

Read to Lead by Jeff Brown,Jesse Wisnewski Pdf

It's the common habit shared by many successful people throughout history. It's responsible for unlocking limitless creativity and influence. It's known to reduce stress, improve decision-making skills, and make you a better leader. What is it? Reading. And it's the single best thing you can do to improve yourself professionally. Reading more and better books creates opportunities for you to learn new skills, rise above your competition, and build a successful career. In Read to Lead you'll learn - why you need to read like your career depends on it - the five science-backed reasons reading will help you build your career - how to absorb a book into your bloodstream - a technique that can double (or triple!) your reading speed - tips on creating a lifetime reading habit - and more If you want to lead a more satisfied life, have more intelligent conversations, and broaden your mind, you need to read to lead!

Author : Edward Dowden
Publisher : Books for Libraries
Page : 484 pages
File Size : 52,6 Mb
Release : 1897
Category : History
ISBN : STANFORD:36105010369325

Get Book

A History of French Literature by Edward Dowden Pdf

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ++++ The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to ensure edition identification: ++++ A History Of French Literature; Short Histories Of The Literatures Of The World Edward Dowden Heinemann, 1897 Literary Criticism; European; French; French literature; Literary Criticism / European / French