Electronic Word

The personal computer has revolutionized the structure of communication, concealing beneath its versatility and consumer appeal a bold transition to electronic, postmodern culture. Unchecked by the inherent limitations of conventional print, digitized text has introduced a radically new medium of expression. Interactive, volatile, mixing word and image, the electronic word challenges all our assumptions about artistic, educational and political discourse. "The Electronic Word", Richard Lanham's collection of witty, provocative and engaging essays, explores this challenge. With hope and enthusiasm, Lanham surveys the effects of electronic text on the arts and letters and how they might be taught in a newly democratized society. To those who view electronic text as a cultural catastrophe, he counters that "electronic expression has come not to destroy the Western arts but to fulfil them." Throughout, Lanham argues that the dichotomy between a fixed, authoritative printed text and the dynamic, negotiable electronic word re-enacts a much older opposition, the ancient debate between the philosophers and the rhetoricians. The computer, an "intrinsically rhetorical device," enfranchises the free play and experimentation that pervade postmodern arts and letters. It embodies the new kind of seriousness that is now replacing 19th-century cultural solemnity. Whether discussing how electronic text fulfils the expressive agenda of 20th-century visual art and music, how it will revolutionize the university curriculum, how it democratizes the expressive instruments of art, or how it poses anew the cultural accountability of humanism itself, Lanham insists that the move from book to screen gives cause for optimism, not apocalyptic despair. This disk provides this text in electronic form. Using the Voyager Expanded Books software, this hypertext edition allows readers to move through the text, marking "pages", annotating passages, searching words and phrases and immediately accessing annotations, which have been enhanced for this edition. In a prefatory essay, Lanham introduces the features of this electronic edition and gives a critique of this new medium. "The Electronic Word" is designed to be read on any Macintosh computer that has at least 2MB of RAM and a hard disk drive. (4MB of RAM are recommended.) System software 6.07 and HyperCard 2.1 (or HyperCard Player) are required. This Chicago Expanded Book is shipped on 1.4MB high-density floppy disks.