Sven Birkerts is an American literary critic and essayist. Famous for his 1994 book of The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age and his discussions of digital-age philosophy. He has taught writing at multiple Boston area colleges including Harvard, Amherst, and Emerson. Concerned litterateur.
 

"I often find that a novel, even a well-written and compelling novel, can become a blur to me soon after I've finished reading it. I recollect perfectly the feeling of reading it, the mood I occupied, but I am less sure about the narrative details. It is almost as if the book were, as Wittgenstein said of his propositions, a ladder to be climbed and then discarded after it has served its purpose."

— Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age