The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts

by Richard A. Lanham

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.

Persuading us with uncommon grace and power that the move from book to screen gives cause for optimism, not despair, Lanham proclaims that "electronic expression has come not to destroy the Western arts but to fulfill them."

The Electronic Word is also available as a Chicago Expanded Book for your Macintosh®. This hypertext edition allows readers to move freely through the text, marking "pages," annotating passages, searching words and phrases, and immediately accessing annotations, which have been enhanced for this edition. In a special prefatory essay, Lanham introduces the features of this electronic edition and gives a vividly applied critique of this dynamic new edition.

Genres: Nonfiction, Communication

301 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

Reviews

[Abigail Sommer]

I found this book to be pretty accessible, but its also quite dated, and some questions that are explored in the text like “do you have to be a “good” person to be a good rhetorician” just had me soooo bored like OBVIOUSLY NOT…Hitler was one of the most powerful rhetorician and we can all agree he was evil. At any rate, the only real takeaway I got from this book is that teachers need to continuously change their methodologies to match the digital advancements of the time…which I aready knew, so again, this book didnt do much for me, but honestly I just really dont like scholarly work like this. I find it to be so boring and it seems like everyones just trying to say something important when they are actually just playing with semantics and being wordy and complex for no reason. (I’m also just super cynical right now because I’m being forced to read 3-4 of these kinds of books every week for grad school, and it’s making me want to rip my hair out).

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

I agree with all of Lanham’s conclusions and none of his premises. I like his list of ideas on page 116 about how to focus on each discipline’s rhetorical methods. I like his description of new “writing” assignments on 127-8. But I dislike the “gee whiz,” of his enthusiasm of this technological revolution. It’s partly his generataion, I think. Just because things are changing, even radically, does not mean that we’ll sudden start behaving like different creatures. After all, the print revolution didn’t radically change even aesthetic—Homer and Grimm fairytales are still good reads. The primary flaw I find, I guess, is his insistence that technology comes from “the play spirit” (17). Rather, I think, technology comes from filling an existing need—for online banking, for coordinating business meetings, for keeping in touch with you 783 closest friend—which is based in pragmatics, not play. We use technology to fulfill some aesthetic or attitude that was already pre-existing. Lanham’s excited suggestion of using different fonts for God and Lucifer in Paradise Lost isn’t tied to new media—we could write in stupid fonts by hand before ad during the advent of the typewriter—but the reason we didn’t is because it’s freaking annoying to read anything, print or electronic, in obnoxious fonts all the time. Similarly Lanham’s suggestion that we can have “the colors of rhetoric […] indeed, multicolored” (128) seems like an ill-conceived MySpace page rather than a revolution in the making. My complaints are probably only complaints against the era when Lanham was writing—in the mid-nineties, the Clinton administration was endorsing computers as a panacea for failing inner-city schools, Sandra Bullock starred in the improbable film The Net, and our discipline’s infatuation with new technology was only marked by our adoration for Continentialist theorists. There’s little surprise, then, that Lanham foresaw a world quite different from the needs-driven present where students resist electronic multimedia homework just as they have always resisted written homework, online scholarly journals provide hyperlinks as analogs to footnotes, and Kindles present searchable, sharable, but nonetheless recognizable iterations of the codex book. Things have changed, but then, they’ve stayed very much the same.

[James Pete]

Hard to read. Enlightening to read. Many references. I suppose Lanham wants a lot of support for his theses, because he's a fine writer himself but . . . perhaps because his damn point is so large.

He says, in effect, that much in western literature is misread because of lack of rhetorical analysis. Long quote from C. S. Lewis agreeing with him. I surely didn't know rhetoric's place in history of education.

Anyway, his main concern is the convergence of the three items in the title. And he's optimistic, not a doomsayer.

[amelia]

took me long enough to get back to this thing and read it all.
I liked it less than I liked Economics of Attention. this is probably as much or more because I've changed than because of Mr. Lanham's writing itself. so it goes.