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The Electronic Word Richard Lanham 1993 285 pages Complementary Texts James Joseph O’Donnell Keywords Theory Copyright © 2000 - 2007 Isabel Pedersen

"The Electronic Word: Literary Study and the Digital Revolution" This essay was first printed in 1983. It predicts several things which are a reality now like the Internet, which Lanham does not write about here. The essay, in general, is predictive. He provides an interesting model for a "new rhetoric of the arts, an unblushing attempt and unfiltered attempt to plot all the ranges of formal expressivity now possible " "Digital Rhetoric and the Digital Arts" In this essay, Lanham is largely influenced by the Italian Futurist, Marinetti (1919), who deconstructed literacy with typographical play and attack. Lanham uses allegory in other arts (Tate gallery exhibit) to describe the way that electronic words disrupt the way that we conceive of language and writing. A disruptive exhibit at the Tate gallery makes silence seem “part of the act”. Silence is no longer given, it becomes artifice. The Running Fence exhibit 1972 in California, by Christo Javacheff mimics the illusive nature of the subject in the world. The piece of art takes 3 years to go up and stretches 24.5 miles. It is destroyed 2 weeks after it is completed. It signifies evolution and the changeability of Man and his landscape. Electronic text does the same for the codex book.