The Emerging Media of Early America
By Sandra Gustafson

The twenty-third annual James Russell Wiggins Lecture in the History of the Book

Electronic media are radically reshaping our understanding of what texts are, how they produce meaning, and how verbal forms affect society and culture. Recent transformations in verbal technologies help to illuminate earlier moments in the history of textual forms. In this lecture, Gustafson will examine some common assumptions about the history of verbal technologies and offer new ways of thinking about the emergent properties of textual media.