The Electronic Word: Literary Study and the Digital Revolution

Abstract

whether our students will be reading Great Traditional Books or Relevant Modern ones in the future, but whether they will be reading books at all. Our first round of technological perturbation, which pitted the codex book and Culture As We Know It against commercial television, didn't turn out so badly as we feared. The print media continued to thrive during TV's great expansion period.' And literature continued to be taught in American schools and colleges much as before; students read books and wrote papers and exams about them, which the professor then read, marked up (time and zeal permitting), and returned to the student. Compared to other areas of textual informing in the society around us, literary study has felt almost no pressure from changing technology. This grace period has now been ended by the personal computer and its electronic display of what, until a new word is invented, we must call text. The literary world, having gingerly learned to manipulate pixeled print (pixels are picture elements, the dots which electronically paint the letters onto the computer screen) through word processing, has found personal computers handy engines to produce printed about printed texts. But our thinking has not gone much further than that. Meanwhile, the electronic word has been producing profound changes in the outside world. Some of the billions of dollars American business and government spend to train their employees are being spent in redefining the textbook-and, almost in passing, the codex book itself-into an interactive multimedia delivery system.2 Sooner or later, such electronic texts will redefine the writing, reading, and professing of literature as well. This changed status of the word affects the whole range of arts and letters. Digitized communication is forcing a radical realignment of the alphabetic and graphic components of ordinary textual communication. In music, not only notation but creation and performance have been transformed. Digitization is desubstantiating the whole world of the visual arts. This common digital denominator of the arts