Track Changes
A Literary History of Word Processing
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- $29.99
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- $29.99
Publisher Description
The story of writing in the digital age is every bit as messy as the ink-stained rags that littered the floor of Gutenberg’s print shop or the hot molten lead of the Linotype machine. During the period of the pivotal growth and widespread adoption of word processing as a writing technology, some authors embraced it as a marvel while others decried it as the death of literature. The product of years of archival research and numerous interviews conducted by the author, Track Changes is the first literary history of word processing.
Matthew Kirschenbaum examines how the interests and ideals of creative authorship came to coexist with the computer revolution. Who were the first adopters? What kind of anxieties did they share? Was word processing perceived as just a better typewriter or something more? How did it change our understanding of writing?
Track Changes balances the stories of individual writers with a consideration of how the seemingly ineffable act of writing is always grounded in particular instruments and media, from quills to keyboards. Along the way, we discover the candidates for the first novel written on a word processor, explore the surprisingly varied reasons why writers of both popular and serious literature adopted the technology, trace the spread of new metaphors and ideas from word processing in fiction and poetry, and consider the fate of literary scholarship and memory in an era when the final remnants of authorship may consist of folders on a hard drive or documents in the cloud.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kirschenbaum, an English professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, presents a well-researched, scholarly history of how early electronic typewriters, word processors, and microprocessor-based computers affected literary writers, the act of writing, and writers' plots, characters, literary devices, and stories from 1964 to 1984. The book includes numerous examples of how specific authors thought about, wrote about, experimented with, and used early word-processing machines. Authors whose word-processing experiences or philosophies are mentioned include Isaac Asimov, Stephen King, Haruki Murakami, Joyce Carol Oates, Anne Rice, and Amy Tan, among others. While some were stricken with concerns about perfectionism and automation, others (particularly in science fiction) embraced the ability to collaborate and the time-saving printing and revision functions. Kirschenbaum takes an academic approach to his subject, with lots of research into the mechanics of now-obsolete technology (IBM's Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter (MT/ST), WordStar, Kaypro, etc.). The book is more scholarly than entertaining, but will also appeal to lay readers interested in the impact of technology on culture.
