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Topic: Sven Birkerts

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	Book review: The Gutenberg Elegies by Sven Birkerts
		It is splintered into several facets, probably reflecting the origin of some of its content in previously published essays, and perhaps a rush to catch the media wave churned up by the changes in electronic communication, the public arrival of the internet, and the impact of digital processes on the publishing industry.
		Birkerts is out to resist the tide of electronic media -- to "refuse it" as he says in the last words of the book.
		For instance, Birkerts has an entirely different spin on the social consequences of electronic media: "Every acquiescence to the circuitry is marked by a shrinkage of the sphere of autonomous selfhood." [pg.
	ccat.sas.upenn.edu /jod/texts/birkerts.review.html (1682 words)

	AGNI \| Masthead \| Editor \| Sven Birkerts
		Sven Birkerts has been editor of AGNI since July 2002.
		He was winner of the Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle in 1985 and the Spielvogel-Diamonstein Award from PEN for the best book of essays in 1990.
		He has taught writing at Harvard University, Emerson College, and Amherst and is currently a lecturer at Mt. Holyoke College and a member of the core faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars.
	www.bu.edu /agni/about/staff/bio-birkerts.html (172 words)

	The Gutenberg Elegies by Sven Birkerts
		So strongly does Birkerts believe this, that he is willing to argue that "every acquiescence to the circuitry is marked by a shrinkage of the sphere of autonomous self-hood".
		While Birkerts' account of his personal love of reading is inspiring and motivating, it must be seen as being a truly personal account.
		Thus, while Birkerts mourns the loss of the written word, others will rejoice in its coming alive with new forms, colours, shapes and sounds that have been made possible by the wonders and magic of technology.
	www.cdli.ca /~elmurphy/emurphy/elegies.html (1347 words)

	History of Print: Sven Birkerts (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-25)
		Birkerts appears to be an old-fashioned writer who is resisting the technologies of print in his age, much like William Blake or William Morris.
		Birkerts is genuine in his fear of technology’s effects on reading, but wise enough to know that he will not stop those effects -- to the extent that he mocks “conservative” critics of contemporary culture who think they can stop progress.
		Second, Birkerts sees his cultural circumstances as being without precedent; he does not locate them in a historical perspective, which might show that the problems with reading, although peculiar to his time, are not completely new.
	www.mprsnd.org /allen/print/birkerts.htm (1487 words)

	Sven Birkerts : interviewed by Derek Alger (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-25)
		Sven Birkerts, the editor of Agni, published by Boston University, is the author of six books, including a memoir, My Sky Blue Trades: Growing Up Counter in a Contrary Time (2002, Viking), Readings (1999, Graywolf), and The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (1994 Ballantine Books).
		Birkerts has taught writing at Harvard University, Emerson College, and Amherst, and is a lecturer at Mt. Holoke College and a member of the core faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars.
		Sven Birkerts: Well, I think about this a lot and each time I do it’s something different that strikes me. I grew up, as you know, in a Latvian- speaking family, and that was the first language, with English coming in when I was kindergarten age.
	www.pifmagazine.com /SID/757 (2654 words)

	Sven Birkerts Webliography
		Birkerts is a fine writer, which is evident in his review in the New York Observer.
		Whether or not one believes that Birkerts is correct in his assumptions that the written page is dying because of the electronic page, it is still somewhat depressing to read Birkerts' accounts of the situation.
		The collection, which explains Birkerts' views and opinions, was one of the first important opponents in the debate concerning the electronic literature age.
	www.courses.vcu.edu /ENG-mkf/other/sbirkerts.htm (797 words)

	Bookreporter.com - MY SKY BLUE TRADES by Sven Birkerts
		Birkerts is stingy with exact dates, but one can deduce that he was born in 1952.
		Birkerts is a good writer and tosses off some very vivid phrases in telling this fairly ordinary story.
		Birkerts is doing pretty well, but he has not yet reached the point where his extended post-adolescent musings are of real public interest.
	www.bookreporter.com /reviews/0670031097.asp (524 words)

	[No title]
		Birkerts has written a warm, personal, reflective and somewhat sad book, and yes, the effect it leaves behind is indeed somewhat elegiac.
		Birkerts' book is based on experience; and that includes experience of hypertexts and interactive video and other such gadgetry.
		Birkerts is no Luddite: he is interested in the new technologies, and looks ahead to the future.
	i.f.alexander.users.btopenworld.com /reviews/birkerts.htm (800 words)

	Books: The tonic of limitation (Seattle Weekly) (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-25)
		Birkerts' writing took a more partisan tone in the 1990s with the rise of computers, the Internet, and the "digitized culture"—developments he believed were corrosive to a literate culture.
		For the last few years, Birkerts seems to have fallen back from the contentious front lines, having made his case as long and as hard and probably as smart as it could be made.
		Birkerts' modest celebrations of distance and time become moral appreciations of separation and waiting, and the argument seems to be that the natural obstacles are the only ones that will keep us whole, sane, and reading.
	www.seattleweekly.com /arts/9913/books-jensen.html (584 words)

	Books \| (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-25)
		And though Sven Birkerts’s coming-of-age narrative suggests, at various points, the presence of all these drives, in the end one gets the impression that the main impetus behind My Sky Blue Trades is the desire to mold the stuff of one’s life into literature.
		When he was in his late 20s, floundering with no job prospects, after a protracted affair that ended unhappily, Birkerts decided to enter a novella-writing competition.
		He’d done some scribbling before but had never made the plunge into serious pursuit; still, he was in love with the idea of being a writer, and that’s not an uncommon beginning.
	www.bostonphoenix.com /boston/arts/books/documents/02481423.htm (561 words)

	Display Interview
		Sven: I took on the editorship of Agni from my long-time friend and colleague Askold Melnyczuk, the founder, when he was hired to teach at U. Mass/Boston and was unable to take the mag from Boston University.
		Sven: Bookstores are a case by case matter---locally we have a long track record and the quantities are known.
		Sven: Message to potential readers: This is a journal you will read from start to finish, and when you are cleaning house, or moving, and putting your New Yorkers on the curb, you will keep your Agnis.
	www.breaktech.net /EmergingWritersForum/View_Interview.aspx?id=135 (8984 words)

	Readings (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-25)
		Birkerts hypothesizes that we are all losing our capacity for extracting meaning from subtle lines of poetry and prose because we exist in an environment saturated with electronic messages that aggressively compete for our attention.
		Birkerts makes little distinction between the more recent marvels of technology and the older electronic media, like television, when it comes to their overall impact on human individuality.
		Birkerts appreciates that computers empower us in many ways, but he is certain that we do not understand the heavy price that we are paying.
	cla.uconn.edu /reviews/Readings.html (605 words)

	Sven Birkerts
		Birkerts uses a similar image when he envisages readers leaving the book "as church goers have been leaving the church -- because they no longer feel the need of what is to be gotten there".
		Birkerts: I think it says that we are much more interested in becoming collectively linked selves than privately suffering selves.
		Summary: Birkerts would have enjoyed the story gleefully told by a university librarian who was critiquing a speech I had made on new technologies at a library conference.
	www.american.edu /jauten/birkerts.htm (390 words)

	So Many Books, So Few Readers
		In 1994 the Boston-based critic Sven Birkerts published "The Gutenberg Elegies," a passionate requiem for a literary culture that seemed to be vanishing in the face of new technology and the indifference of television - and computer-saturated young people.
		For their part, the gurus whose influence Birkerts dreaded conceded that readers would continue to prefer flipping through bound pages to scrolling through electronic text on a screen.
		Where Birkerts and other pessimists detected a shift from the book, Zaid sees the true problem in the hopeless disproportion between the flood of books and the time and physical space of readers already overwhelmed by the larger information deluge.
	www.princetoninfo.com /200405/40512c03.html (2005 words)

	3.05: Digital Refusnik
		Sven Birkerts believes that technology is leeching the spiritual out of human experience.
		In the attic study he and his wife share in their home just outside of Boston, Birkerts's typewriter is at one end, as far away as possible from a desktop PC.
		Birkerts and his wife stagger their hours in the study so that she is not disturbed by the noise of his typing - nor he by the spectacle of her word processing.
	www.wired.com /wired/archive/3.05/refusnik_pr.html (1174 words)

	Amazon.com: Readings: Books: Sven Birkerts (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-25)
		Sven Birkerts got his start as an expert appraiser of such European imports as Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, and Witold Gombrowicz.
		In Sven Birkerts' latest series of essays, "Readings" he insists that we are forgetting how to read because of the deluge of information that we have to process in our modern everyday world.
		Birkerts, who doesn't use a comuter to write, thinks that we are now taking another step, evolving out of the age of literature into something new and, as of yet, not fully understood (but assumed to be bad).
	www.amazon.com /exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1555972837?v=glance (1408 words)

	SVEN BIRKERTS, THE GUTENBERG ELEGIES (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-25)
		Birkerts speaks for the cohort of contemporaries who abhor the advent of electronic technologies.
		From the perspective of critical theory, Birkerts is blind to the Landow hypothesis--that the revolution in technology and the change to a postmodern cultural and critical theory are facets of a single large movement in sensibility.
		He thinks Birkerts is unyielding in his erroneous marriage to the book itself rather than to the creative process that makes books and on-line expression both the outcome of that process.
	webpages.ursinus.edu /rrichter/birkerts.html (365 words)

	The Gutenberg Elegies
		Birkerts acknowledges a cultural shift in our country and views the electronic age as causing a definite rift between our present and our past; the historical time line is now moving along the information highway at the speed of light.
		We, the educators, the book lovers, the seekers of knowledge, must lend credence to Sven Birkerts' intelligently and compassionately rendered text on the future of reading in an electronic age and support his efforts to sustain our cultural literacy by a careful reading and close consideration of what he has to say.
		Birkerts' ideas on the interrelationship of the reading and writing experience also help us to understand the need to read and respond in writing to better retain and understand what it is we have read, producing a growing confidence with novice writers each time they successfully complete such a product.
	english.ttu.edu /kairos/2.1/reviews/wallace/elegies.html (936 words)

	Sven Birkerts (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-25)
		In The Gutenberg Elegies, nationally renowned critic Sven Birkerts argues that we are living in a state of intellectual emergency--an emergency caused by our willingness to embrace new technologies at the expense of the printed word.
		Sven Birkerts is the author of The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age.
		Whatever your opinion of his writing, Sven Birkerts has won numerous awards and citations for his essays and books of criticism, and his message makes you think.
	www.assumption.edu /users/ady/Media/birkerts.html (438 words)

	identity theory \| the narrative thread - sven birkerts
		Sven Birkerts was born in Pontiac, Michigan into a family of Latvian immigrants.
		Sven Birkerts teaches at Mount Holyoke College, is a member of the core faculty of the low-residency Bennington Writing seminars, edits the literary journal AGNI and lives in Arlington, Massachusetts with his family.
		Sven Birkerts: It comes out of the poem "Fern Hill" that to me is the great poem of the loss of lyrical youth.
	www.identitytheory.com /people/birnbaum83.html (5711 words)

	Sven Birkerts Books - Signed, used, new, out-of-print
		In Gutenberg Elegies, nationally renowned critic Sven Birkerts powerfully argues that we are living in a state of intellectual emergency--an emergency caused by our willingness to embrace new technologies at the expense of the printed word.
		Birkerts, a noted essayist, explores the history of his own Latvian ancestors in this memoir about the immigrant experience.
		Sven Birkerts explores the impacts of two world wars and the collapse of the assumption of Humanism on a diverse group of modern writers, bringing to light the aspect of a world literature promoting an international perspective.
	www.alibris.com /search/books/author/Sven_Birkerts (624 words)

	Christy Shannon, Book Review of Sven Birkerts for English 5011 (Spring 1999)
		Birkerts also discusses the passivity of listening to books on tape as opposed to active reading (141-2) and admits that "this glimpse of the future - if it is the future - has me clinging all the more tightly to my books.
		Instead of being eager to try this new tool, Birkerts is extremely hesitant, almost hostile, toward the idea.
		Birkerts’ fears may have some basis, but he fails to acknowledge the benefits that can come with technology.
	www.eiu.edu /~rhetoric/review/birkerts.htm (495 words)

	Amazon.com: The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age: Books: Sven Birkerts (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-25)
		Birkerts, a renowned critic, examines the practice of reading with an eye to what the future will bring.
		As a college professor, Birkerts claims, he experienced a kind of gap in reading ability when asking his students to read some of what we call the classics of American literature.
		Birkerts tone, his praise of reading, echos many of my own sentiments, but his social critique simply crumbles before the raw numbers.
	www.amazon.com /exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0449910091?v=glance (2783 words)

	Sven Birkerts, "Literature: Snapshots From the Bridge" U.S. Society and Values, April 2003
		Sven Birkerts, "Literature: Snapshots From the Bridge" U.S. Society and Values, April 2003
		Dire predictions are risky, and except those that pertained to the coming of the horseless carriage, they usually have been exaggerated.
		Sven Birkerts is the author of six books, including The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age and My Sky Blue Trades, a recently published memoir.
	usinfo.state.gov /journals/itsv/0403/ijse/birkerts.htm (2663 words)

	"The Gutenber Elegies" (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-25)
		These are some of the issues Sven Birkerts explores in The Gutenberg Elegies.
		Birkerts says that our attempt to embrace these new technologies is leaving us little time to think about what we are leaving behind.
		Birkerts also points out that our adoption of interactive video technologies could lead us to "mastering not the information but the retrieval and referencing functions." The admonition as it relates to this class is to find suitable projects based on strong concepts with meaningful content.
	www.usu.edu /~sanderso/multinet/birkerts.html (493 words)

	Sven Birkerts(Features)
		Sven Birkerts is a modern master of the literary essay.
		In his award winning books, The Electric Life: essays on Twentieth Century Literature, American Energies: Essays on Fiction, and The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age he uses this forgotten form to work through critical literary theory, defending the written word in prose.
		Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1994, he is a lecturer at Emerson College's Department of Writing, Literature and Publishing and a Contributing Editor to the Boston Review.
	www.utne.com /pub/1999_67/features/518-1.html (84 words)

	CJR - Books - ETCHED IN ETHER, by Sven Birkerts
		FROM THE GUTENBERG ELEGIES: THE FATE OF READING IN AN ELECTRONIC AGE, BY SVEN BIRKERTS.
		The word processor is not, never mind what some writers say, "just a better typewriter." It is a modification of the relation between the writer and the language.
		The Flaubertian tyranny of le mot juste is eclipsed, and with it, gradually, the idea of the author as a sovereign maker.
	archives.cjr.org /year/95/3/books-birkerts.asp (163 words)

	TAP: Vol 13, Iss. 6. Literature: Kennedy's Quidditas. Sven Birkerts. (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-25)
		Everybody in the cemetery is true." Politics is about fixing things, and in this deepest sense, it can't be true.
		Copyright © 2002 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation: Sven Birkerts, "Literature: Kennedy's Quidditas," The American Prospect vol.
		This article may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission from the author.
	www.prospect.org /print/V13/6/birkerts-s.html (1495 words)

	AGNI \| Interviews/Exchanges \| AGNI 46 \| 'A Conversation with Saul Bellow' by Sven Birkerts
		'A Conversation with Saul Bellow' by Sven Birkerts
		Birkerts: I’m not a dreaming literalist, but I had a very busy dream last night in which you and I were in some seaside town carrying on a conversation—and I woke up with the feeling that we had already talked.
		The interviewer, Sven Birkerts, is now editor of AGNI.
	www.bu.edu /agni/interviews-exchanges/print/1997/46-Bellow.html (3884 words)

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