Literature: The Evolving Canon

by Sven Birkerts

Literature, the Evolving Canon

Genres: Reference

1760 pages, Hardcover

Published July 28, 1995

About the author

Sven Birkerts is an American essayist and literary critic of Latvian ancestry. He is best known for his book The Gutenberg Elegies, which posits a decline in reading due to the overwhelming advances of the Internet and other technologies of the "electronic culture."

Birkerts graduated from Cranbrook School and then from the University of Michigan in 1973. He has taught writing at Harvard University, Emerson College, Amherst College, and most recently at Mount Holyoke College. Birkerts is the Director of the Bennington College Writing Seminars and the editor of AGNI, the literary journal. He now lives in the Boston area, specifically Arlington, Massachusetts, with his wife Lynn, daughter Mara, and son Liam.

His father is noted architect Gunnar Birkerts.

Reviews

[Chelsea · Rating 5 out of 5]

My lit book for AP English in high school. AWESOME. According to notes, I read the poetry by: Sappho, Wang Wei, Li Po, Tu Fu, Rumi, Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe, Raleigh, Sidney, Wyatt, Milton, Herbert, Donne, Marvell, Herrick, Bradstreet, Pope, Burns, Blake Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Byron, Shelley, Tennyson, Arnold, both Brownings, Hopkins, Hardy, Bronte, Yeats, Johnson, cummings, Angelou, Rich, Takamura, Bishop, Hikmet, Millay, Moore, Vallejo, Lorca, Ahmatova, Takahashi, Neruda, Rilke, Hughes, Pavese, Lorde, Milosz, Paz, Brooks, Levertov, Amichai, Stern, Boychuk, Plath, Gluck, Silko, Kenyon, Dove, Erdrich, Cofern, Ha Jin, and Lee. I read the short fiction by Mahfouz, Marquez, Jewett, Head, Schwartz, Narayan, Bambara, Tanizaki, Kundera, Calvino, Gilman, Sontag, Valenzuela, Hempel, Joyce, Munro, and Balwin. Also the play Waking Women, if that's in there. Phew.