Readings

By Sven Birkerts.

263 pp. St. Paul:

Graywolf Press. Paper, $16.

IN his 1994 collection of essays, ''The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age,'' the literary critic Sven Birkerts presented a range of thoughtful, if not always persuasive, reflections on the switch from print to digital culture and the changes it was likely to bring about in our ways of thought. His new collection, ''Readings,'' returns insistently, even a little obsessively, to the same theme.

Birkerts proposes that the technological innovations of the last few decades, and especially the computer revolution, have subtly altered not only our way of life but our perception of the world. ''It is not enough to say that life has simply evolved and gotten more complicated,'' he observes. Life ''is now in some crucial ways a new substance, and this basic fact must be contemplated deeply.'' This opinion is both subjective and debatable, but it is safe to say that the vast majority of readers of a contemplative or literary bent would agree with Birkerts and be to some degree persuaded by his reasoning.

Our technology has speeded up our daily routines in ways that previous generations would have found inconceivable. ''We are now deeply immersed in the perception of life as a set of scheduled events -- a kind of actuarial decathlon that has us hitting specific marks at regular intervals through the day as well as at all of the appointed stages of life's way.'' No one in urban or suburban America could argue with this, or deny that our punishing schedules have indeed altered our consciousness: forever preoccupied, we see our surroundings as though through a pane of frosted glass, and when we remember to stop and smell the roses, we find that we hardly remember how.

This perceived acceleration of time is intensified by what Birkerts calls ''the great mediation'': ''We have put between ourselves and the natural world so many layers of signals, noises, devices and habits that the chance for . . . connection is very limited.'' The result is a constant sense of oversaturation in a pig's wallow of undigested news and information; we are perpetually distracted, and haunted by a vague but insatiable nostalgia for the unmediated reality of the past.

Being a literary critic, Birkerts concerns himself largely with the effect these cultural shifts have upon literature. How is the act of reading altered by the new technology? Something of a Cassandra, he contends that ''the shift from book to screen may, in its eventual impact on our sense of what knowledge is . . . be as transformative as the shift from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics.'' It might sound a little alarmist, but as Birkerts discusses the differences between knowledge and information, print and electronic media, there is no denying the force of many of his arguments.

Reading a book, he states, is a more hermetic and concentrated activity than reading on a screen: ''One book does not suggest all books in the way that a branch in the data trail suggests a network of endless branchings.'' As for the ingestion of digital information, ''movement across the vast surface of the grid is favored over immersion in any of its isolated spaces. . . . We have all but lost that sense of immersion . . . we move over the surface like water striders.'' What is lost to the reader and to literature itself is a sense of mystery, of permanence, a significant orientation toward the future: reasons, perhaps, for the brittleness and ephemerality of so much post-modern literature. Poetry, Birkerts suggests, which requires deep attention, is doomed; so is the work of a multilayered writer like Henry James.

Some 12 essays in ''Readings'' are devoted to these themes, and each of them tends to repeat points made in the others; Birkerts would have done better to have excluded some of these redundant selections. The rest of the book, which fans out from the author's central preoccupations and explores specific writers and genres, is with a few exceptions (the essays on Keats, Anne Tyler, Don DeLillo) lively and informative. In a piece on ''docufiction,'' for example, Birkerts attacks the genre without the measure of politeness that too often blunts his sword: ''The 'nonfiction novel' is an oxymoronic phrase and a moronic idea. . . . If 'In Cold Blood' or 'The Executioner's Song' had been made up, their artistic impact would have been negligible.'' And on the Norton anthology of post-modern American fiction: ''One would have to be of charitable heart to call more than a few selections in the book suitable reading for a thoughtful adult.'' Birkerts has also included excellent essays on political poetry, on Flaubert and on Fitzgerald.

But the heart of ''Readings'' is in the reflections on technology and culture, and while they are written with feeling and insight, as well as a healthy dollop of common sense, their tone is too wistful, bland and belletristic -- too English-teachery -- to make the powerful impact their insights deserve. Birkerts is quite correct in identifying irony as the deadly sin of our age, but this is not to say that a lack of irony is desirable, and Birkerts's essays do, unfortunately, lack both irony and bite, and will probably not find many readers outside the literary world. In other words, he is preaching to the converted.

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