This is the blurb from the CBC Program Highlights, about the lecture series
(source of the book), _The Elsewhere Community_, by Hugh Kenner:
 
"Exile, identity and fantasy. In the 1997 Massey Lectures, the acclaimed
literary critic Hugh Kenner writes about the idea that people have a
constant need for stimulation from a cummunity encountered 'elsewhere'.
Kenner traces this from the Grand Tour of the 18th Century ... to the
self-imposed exile of modernist writers such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and
James Joyce; to the disembodied world of the Internet.... Kenner's thinking
brings together literature, mathematics, science, computer programming and
popular culture. 'The dividing line between high and low culture is utterly
fictitious,' says Kenner. 'Genuine culture is neither high nor low; it
involves ideas you're happy to keep returning to for the rest of your
life'"-CBC program highlights.
 
-Will Goodwin.
 
>On Mon, 30 Mar 1998 19:02:55 Robert E Kibler wrote...
>
>what does Kenner talk about?
>
>okay...here's part of the blurb from the back of the book:
>
>Human beings have a need to know; in order to know, we need to see and feel
>- or, as the German poet Goethe put it, to "see with an eye that can feel,
>feel with a hand that can see." And so we go elsewhere.
>...literary critic Hugh Kenner provocatively examines Western culture's
>insatiable need for stimulation encountered elsewhere. That "elsewhereness"
>in turn informs much of Western art and literature.
>Kenner traces this trend from the eighteenth century's Grand Tour, wherein
>wealthy young Englishmen travelled Europe before embarking on their career,
>to the self-imposed exile of modernist writers, to the disembodied global
>journeys the Internet avails us today.
>
>It's interesting to think of this list as an "elsewhere community."
>Jim