Sven Birkerts
Born
in Pontiac, Michigan, The United States
September 21, 1951
Genre
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The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
12 editions
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published
1994
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The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again
8 editions
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published
2007
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Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age
6 editions
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published
2015
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The Other Walk: Essays
7 editions
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published
2011
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My Sky Blue Trades: Growing Up Counter in a Contrary Time
4 editions
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published
2002
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Reading Life: Books for the Ages
5 editions
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published
2007
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Esejas
by |
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Readings
3 editions
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published
1999
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Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory: Bookmarked
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An Artificial Wilderness:Essays On 20th-Century Literature
4 editions
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published
1987
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“I often find that a novel, even a well-written and compelling novel, can become a blur to me soon after I've finished reading it. I recollect perfectly the feeling of reading it, the mood I occupied, but I am less sure about the narrative details. It is almost as if the book were, as Wittgenstein said of his propositions, a ladder to be climbed and then discarded after it has served its purpose.”
― The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
― The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
“What reading does, ultimately, is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that a life is not a sequence of lived moments, but a destiny...the time of reading, the time defined by the author's language resonating in the self, is not the world's time, but the soul's. The energies that otherwise tend to stream outward through a thousand channels of distraction are marshaled by the cadences of the prose; they are brought into focus by the fact that it is an ulterior, and entirely new, world that the reader has entered. The free-floating self--the self we diffusely commune with while driving or walking or puttering in the kitchen--is enlisted in the work of bringing the narrative to life. In the process, we are able to shake off the habitual burden of insufficient meaning and flex our deeper natures.”
― The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
― The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
“Reading, because we control it, is adaptable to our needs and rhythms. We are free to indulge our subjective associative impulse; the term I coin for this is deep reading: the slow and meditative possession of a book. We don't just read the words, we dream our lives in their vicinity. The printed page becomes a kind of wrought-iron fence we crawl through, returning, once we have wandered, to the very place we started.”
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Topics Mentioning This Author
topics | posts | views | last activity | |
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The Seasonal Read...: Spring Challenge 2012 Reading Plans | 49 | 315 | Apr 14, 2012 03:24PM |
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