Sven Birkerts

Sven P. Birkerts (born September 21, 1951 in Pontiac , Michigan ) is an American essayist and literary critic of Latvian descent.

life and work

Birkerts was born the son of the Latvian architect Gunnar Birkerts . He studied at the Cranbrook Kingswood School in Bloomfield Hills and at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor , where he graduated in 1973.

He has taught literature on the east coast, including Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts , Emerson College in Boston , Amherst College in Amherst, and finally Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley . Birkerts teaches writing at Bennington College in Bennington , Vermont, and is the editor of the literary journal AGNI .

His best-known works are The Gutenberg Elegies (German: Die Gutenberg Elegies ), in which he complains about the loss of reading ability due to the supposed advantages of the Internet and comparable technologies of the so-called electronic culture . Using plastic examples, Birkerts shows the damage that this causes to the transmission of educational traditions in western society.

In 2012 Sven Birkerts was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Works

An Artificial Wilderness: Essays on 20th Century Literature . (1987). New York: William Morrow.
The Electric Life: Essays on Modern Poetry . New York, William Morrow, 1989.
American Energies: Essays on Fiction . New York, William Morrow 1992.
The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age . Boston, Faber and Faber, 1994. Published in German under the title:
- The Gutenberg elegies. Reading in the electronic age . Frankfurt, S. Fischer, 1997. ISBN 978-3-10-003508-9
Readings . St. Paul (MN), Graywolf Press, 1999.
My Sky Blue Trades: Growing Up Counter in a Contrary Time . New York, Viking, 2002.

Div. Magazine articles, etc. a .:

Postmodern Picaresque . In: The New Republic , 200: 13 (March 27, 1989), 36-40

Quotes

The time of reading, the time that is defined by the resonance of the author's language in the self, is not world time, but soul time.
Committed to duration, reading resists the idea of time as a simple succession.
If you open a book voluntarily, you state on a certain level either the inadequacy of your own life or your attitude towards life.
Thinking is an intertwined choreography of movement, transition and calm, an appearance of the muscles of the mind.

Web links

Individual evidence

^ [1] Michelle Dean: Sven Birkerts: The struggle to concentrate in a digital age. Critic who once warned the internet would destroy the novel now tweets, but he still believes the web is a severe distraction to the contemplative act of writing. The guardian, October 13, 2015

personal data
SURNAME	Birkerts, Sven
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Birkerts, Sven P.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	American media scholar and critic
DATE OF BIRTH	September 21, 1951
PLACE OF BIRTH	Pontiac (Michigan) , USA

[1] [1] Michelle Dean: Sven Birkerts: The struggle to concentrate in a digital age. Critic who once warned the internet would destroy the novel now tweets, but he still believes the web is a severe distraction to the contemplative act of writing. The guardian, October 13, 2015