The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts

The personal computer has revolutionized communication, and digitized text has introduced a radically new medium of expression. Interactive, volatile, mixing word and image, the electronic word challenges our assumptions about the shape of culture itself.

This highly acclaimed collection of Richard Lanham's witty, provocative, and engaging essays surveys the effects of electronic text on the arts and letters. Lanham explores how electronic text fulfills the expressive agenda of twentieth-century visual art and music, revolutionizes the curriculum, democratizes the instruments of art, and poses anew the cultural accountability of humanism itself.

(Source: Publisher's catalogue copy)

Contents

1: The Electronic Word: Literary Study and the Digital Revolution
2: Digital Rhetoric and the Digital Arts
3: Twenty Years After: Digital Decorum and Bi-stable Allusions
4: The Extraordinary Convergence: Democracy, Technology, Theory, and the University Curriculum
5: Electronic Textbooks and University Structures
6: Strange Lands, Strange Languages, and Useful Miracles
7: The "Q" Question
8: Elegies for the Book
9: Operating Systems, Attention Structures, and the Edge of Chaos
10: Conversation with a Curmudgeon