Ebr version 1.0: Winter 1995/96

To introduce an electronic book review, in the very medium that is reducing book technology to a museum piece, is to confront some of the more persistent cultural contradictions of the past few decades. This is the late age of print we’re in, when all the books worth saving are being scanned into digital archives, and the very conception of the book as a fixed object is giving way to the hyperreality of letters floating on a screen. For those writers who are committed to working in the new electronic environments, such a “review” might better be named a “retrospective,” a mere scholarly commemoration of a phenomenon that is passing. “The death of books” has spawned a rather lively academic discourse of its own, following in the wake of post-history, post-structuralism, post-feminism, and the various postmodernisms that have worked to undercut the authority of original authorship. The argument has been made that technological change represents a happy “convergence” with developments in literary theory; yet new technologies and media of reproduction are pervasive enough to have themselves produced the cultural climate that gave rise to the theory. As the critic and media theorist William Paulson has argued, there’s a technological subtext to the declining prestige of authors and literary canons. To bring that subtext to the surface will be part of ebr’s agenda.