The Electronic Word Democracy, Technology, and the Arts

This highly acclaimed collection of author Richard Lanham's witty, provocative, and engaging essays surveys the effects of electronic text on the arts and letters. The author explores how electronic text fulfills the expressive agenda of twentieth-century visual art and music, revolutionizes the curriculum, democratizes the instruments of art, and poses anew the cultural accountability of humanism itself. Claiming that the move from book to screen gives cause for optimism, not despair, the author proclaims that "electronic expression has come not to destroy the Western arts but to fulfill them."