The personal computer has revolutionized communication, and digitized text has introduced a radically new medium of expression. Interactive, volatile, mixing word and image, the electronic word challenges our assumptions about the shape of culture itself. This highly acclaimed collection of Richard Lanham's witty, provocative, and engaging essays surveys the effects of electronic text on the arts and letters. Lanham explores how electronic text fulfills the expressive agenda of twentieth-century visual art and music, revolutionizes the curriculum, democratizes the instruments of art, and poses anew the cultural accountability of humanism itself. Persuading us with uncommon grace and power that the move from book to screen gives cause for optimism, not despair, Lanham proclaims that "electronic expression has come not to destroy the Western arts but to fulfill them." The Electronic Word is also available as a Chicago Expanded Book for your Macintosh®. This hypertext edition allows readers to move freely through the text, marking "pages," annotating passages, searching words and phrases, and immediately accessing annotations, which have been enhanced for this edition. In a special prefatory essay, Lanham introduces the features of this electronic edition and gives a vividly applied critique of this dynamic new edition. Lanham, UCLA English professor and author of nine books, turns his attention to the impact of electronic text upon rhetorical discourse and humanities education. This collection of ten essays, a mixture of new and revised contributions, successfully presents a cohesive and engaging overview of the challenges introduced by electronic publishing upon traditional models of research, instruction, and even the nature of academic departments. Writing in a pleasant, readable manner that is scholarly and witty, Lanham takes a more optimistic and realistic approach to this subject than many other humanists. Reflecting this attitude, the publisher is simultaneously publishing an electronic hypertext edition not seen by this reviewer. Recommended for academic collections. - Robin P. Peek, GSLIS, Simmons Coll., Boston Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. Richard A. Lanham is professor emeritus of English at UCLA and President of Rhetorica, Inc. He has written ten books, including A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms and Literacy and the Survival of Humanism .