The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts. - book reviews

A generation or so ago the academic trained by New Critics, in order to keep up, would take a crash course in critical theory. In subsequent years more and more "isms" would be absorbed. Today "neocolonial literature," "multiculturalism," postcolonialism," "intertextuality," "new historicism" seem to be the buzz words. But something even more insidious has crept into the literary academics' necessary tools for adapting to an ever-changing world: technology. Writing is taught through computers, visual-display units are features in faculty offices, and the faculty, member magically knows how to use them, or at least will not admit to not knowing how they are used.

Richard A. Lanham, professor of English at the University of California at Los Angeles, author of works on Sidney's Old Arcadia, Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Renaissance rhetoric, and other scholarly writings, has turned his attention to the technological revolution. The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts is divided into ten sections, seven of which appeared in differing versions in Journals or essays in collections between 1988 and 1992. Each section is prefaced by a summary outlining its main positions and an account of developments since Lanham wrote the section. Lanham's "Preface" is succinct. His first sentence is to the point: "The change in expressive technology-about which these essays offer some preliminary reflections was announced in the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics magazine" (ix); the preface champions the personal computer, which "allows us to manipulate words and images and sounds as well as numbers" (ix). The first essay in the collection is "The Electronic Word: Literary Study and the Digital Revolution," first published in New Literary History, in which Lanham suggests "the broad spectrum of changes brought by electronic text" (1). His focus is literature, but electronic revision of his t ext by others substitutes "architecture" and building," and so forth, for "literature." Serious matter is at hand. Portentously Lanham writes, "By fundamentally altering art's radix of presentation and reception, technology forces us to rethink fundamental equations we have preferred to answer with windy, self-serving spiritual protestation" (18). The tone is reminiscent of early followers of Derrida and other poststructuralists claiming that the author no longer exists! Lanham's first section ranges over copyright issue, the question of intellectual property: "The electronic word has no essence, no quiddity, no substance.... It exists in potential as what it can become, in the genetic structures it can build" (19). Lanham's purpose is to model "literary study against a technological screen" (25). He writes, "If we are in any respect to pretend that majoring in English,' or any other literature, and all that it implies, [!] teaches our students how to manipulate words in the world of work, then we must accommodate literary study to the electronic word in which that world will increasingly deal" (23).

"Digital Rhetoric and the Digital Arts," the second section, is a longer and different version of an essay which appeared in Myron C. Tuman's collection Literacy Online: The Promise (and Peril) of reading and Writing with Computers (1992). It begins with a discussion of the humanities curriculum and its relationship to the new technology as it moves with the electronic text into the ways in which "that electronic text[s] expressed both the postmodern spirit and the classical rhetorical one better than print" (30). The third section, "Twenty Years After Digital Decorum and Bi-stable Allusions," which appeared in Texte: Revue de critique et de theorie litterature in 1989, is a review of what Lanham perceives to have happened in his profession over the past twenty years. It is followed by ninety-four often-detailed footnotes (85-96). In essence, for Lanham, "What is extraordinary is not how digital technology has compelled us toward a fundamental critical reevaluation, but rather how that technology can -- if we use it right -- express so eloquently an omnipresent reevaluation already in being"(84).

"The Extraordinary Convergence: Democracy, Technology, Theory, and the University Curriculum," which was first published in South Atlantic Quarterly in 1990, is prefaced by seven paragraphs of somewhat surprisingly autobiographical observation. Included is the revelation that at the age of sixteen, Lanham entered the Directed Studies Program at Yale as a Ford-Foundation scholar. He took many years to recover from "the magic that I found" at Yale, attempting, when Director of the UCLA Writing Programs, to "create the curriculum" (100) described in the section. Parts of the fifth section, "Electronic Textbooks and University Structures," appeared in 1990 in Scholars and Research Libraries in the 21st Century, an Occasional Paper, of the American Council of Learned Societies. The next section "Strange Lands, Strange Languages, and Useful Miracles," which first appeared in Liberal Education in 1990 again is concerned with adjusting undergraduate education to technological developments. In the seventh chapter Lanham moves away from a preoccupation with education to conceptual analysis. "The Q' Question," first published in South Atlantic Quarterly, draws upon Lanham's expertise as a classicist. Quintilian, at the beginning of book 12 of his Institutio Oratoria asks, "What is the perfect orator?" Lanham explores the issue of "What are we trying to protect? The old technology itself or what it carries for us, does to us?"(154). Discussion of Walter J. Ong, Arthur S. Kinney's Humanist Poetics (1986), Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine's from Humanism to the Humanities (1986), and other examinations of rhetoric culminate in remarks on the Apple computer, strictures on land grant universities, and concluding remarks about the "humanist establishment in America" creating and deserving "its own Anthony Blunts" (193).

"Elegies for the Book" (the eighth section), "Operating Systems, Attention Structures, and the Edge of Chaos" (the ninth section), and "Conversation with a Curmudgeon" (the final section) appear not to have been published elsewhere even if in different versions or forms. "Elegies for the Book" is prefaced by a lengthy introductory discourse (195 -98) summarizing what Lanham believes has been achieved so far in his book, including "our Answer to the `Q' Question" (197), which certainly eludes the present reviewer! "Elegies for the Book" is in fact a review of six books, including Landow's Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (1992). The books "suggest that the convergence of technology, democratization, and the return of rhetoric provides the dominant reality for the arts and letters in our time" (221). The penultimate section suggests "how important the new convergence of C. P. Snow's 'two cultures' promises to be" (226). The last section is a dialogue with the self about the "movement from book to screen, from fixed print to digital volatility" 258).

There is much food for thought in The Electronic Word, which often becomes a dialogue with other postmodern literary prophets such as Allan Bloom, Gerald Graff, Anthony Grafton, Arthur F. Kinney and others. The index contains five passing references to Shakespeare, none to Dickens, George Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, or John Milton. C. P. Snow gets in twice, but an even more powerful figure of this reviewer's youth, a pervasive influence upon the British literary world, F. R. Leavis, does not make it into Lanham's ever-changing digital electronic world. But then F. R. Leavis was concerned with what we read and its quality whether the words be read on a screen or in book form. He had a different concept of what a professor of literature should be professing than Richard A. Lanham. A more surprising omission from the Lanham galaxy is the name of Jerome McGann, who does write about "The Visible Language of Modernism." To end on these caveats is not to do justice to a deeply thought and on the whole clearly written, highly intelligent book upon an important subject. We are in Richard Lanham's debt.

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