Richard Lanham's

The Electronic Word

The personal computer has revolutionized the structure of communication, concealing beneath its astonishing versatility and consumer appeal a bolt 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 fulfill them."

Throughout, Lanham argues that the dichotomy between a fixed, authoritative printed text and the dynamic, negotiable electronic word reenacts 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 nineteenth-century cultural solemnity.

Whether discussing how electronic text fulfills the expressive agenda of twentieth-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.

Richard A. Lanham is professor of English at UCLA. He has written nine books, including A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms; Sidney's Old "Arcadia"; "Tristram Shandy": The Games of Pleasurc; Style: An Anti-Textbook; The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissanse; Analyzing Prose; and Literary and the Survival of Humanism.

"The Electronic Word is a stunner, an utterly original contribution to the discussion of reading, television, education, democracy, technology, competitiveness, and Theory.... Lanham is more literate than the defenders of literacy, more hip than the defenders of hipdom. He looks forward, not too far, and sees us all pushing computer mice and synthesizing music. The breadth of reference in the book is astonishing.... Who better than such a wordsmith as Lanham to welcome the new age? It is not some computer-mad barbarian but Richard Lanham, the historian of rhetoric, the master teacher of writing, who invites us in.''
--Donald McCloskey

"A rounded argument about the need to rethink the English curriculum in terms of rhetoric.... No one else has used a genuine knowledge of classical rhetoric and the modern electronic media to make an argument of this kind.... The arguments are brilliant and often persuasive . . . only Richard Lanham could have written it." --Robert Scholes