Tolva addresses the anxieties which attend "our culture's slow passage from print to electronic textuality." He begins by looking at the similarities between Plato's arguments against the written word in the Phaedrus and modern arguments against the electronic word. Our fear that hypertext will stifle or control rather than liberate thought is a typical reaction in the face of technology's "most recent novum monstrum." Anxiety also focusses on the "fear of pollution" within scholarship. What happens to scholarly standards when publishing a work in electronic form requires considerably less effort than submitting a printed text? Tolva moves on to discuss the fuzzy boundaries between verbal and non-verbal representation within electronic text. He uses W. J. T. Mitchell's definition of ekphrasis to describe the visual ways in which one experiences electronic text. A sort of "ekphrastic fear" influences the anxiety over electronic text's "graphical manipulability of digital words." Ultimately, Tolva asserts that we must let go of our anxieties about electronic text and recall our own power to shape these new technologies. "We can wallow in gloomy self-pity . . . or we can try to devise ways of reading electronic text in the bathtub without electrocuting ourselves." (Stephanie Hill Simione.)
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Michael Hancher

Department of English, University of Minnesota

URL: http://umn.edu/home/mh/ebibshs3.html

Comments to: mh@umn.edu

Created 7 May 1995

Last revised 17 September 1996