Reading Matters

by Tabbi, Joseph; Wutz, Michael

• ISBN13: 9780801433665
• ISBN10: 0801433665
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1997-11-01
• Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr

Summary

The twelve original essays, published here for the first time, are the work of distinguished scholar-critics on both sides of the Atlantic. They cover the range of contemporary literature, from the canonical novels of high modernism and postmodernism through subjects only recently put on the academic agenda, such as cyberpunk and hypertext fiction. In an age that has proclaimed the death of the novel many times over, the editors and contributors argue persuasively for the continued vitality of literary narrative. By responding in ingenious ways to the capabilities of other media, they assert, the novel has enlarged and redefined its territory of representation and its range of techniques and play, while maintaining its viability in the new media assemblage.

Table of Contents

Illustrations	ix	(2)
Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction	1	(28)
Joseph Tabbi
Michael Wutz
PART I MODERNIST NARRATING MACHINES	29	(70)
1 Magic Media Mountain: Technology and the Umbildungsroman	29	(24)
Geoffrey Winthrop-Young
2 Archaic Mechanics, Anarchic Meaning: Malcolm Lowry and the Technology of Narrative	53	(23)
Michael Wutz
3 Writing Machines: Technology and the Failures of Representation in the Works of Franz Kafka	76	(23)
Klaus Benesch
PART II MATERIALITIES OF READING	99	(58)
4 Strange Attractors in Absalom, Absalom!	99	(20)
Jo Alyson Parker
5 Cinema and the Paralysis of Perception: Robbe-Grillet, Condillac, Virilio	119	(17)
Linda Brigham
6 Exploring Technographies: Chaos Diagrams and Oulipian Writing as Virtual Signs	136	(21)
Paul A. Harris
PART III POSTMODERNISMS: THE NOVEL IN THE ERA OF MEDIA MULTIPLICITY	157	(70)
7 Media and Drugs in Pynchon's Second World War	157	(16)
Friedrich Kittler
8 Mediality in Vineland and Neuromancer	173	(20)
John Johnston
9 No More Heroes: The Routinization of the Epic in Techno-Thrillers	193	(34)
Piotr Siemion
PART IV THE BOOK IN BITS: HYPERTEXT AND VIRTUAL NARRATIVE	227	(66)
10 The Literary Canon in the Age of Its Technological Obsolescence	227	(23)
William Paulson
11 Virtual Textuality	250	(19)
Lynn Wells
12 No War Machine	269	(24)
Stuart Moulthrop
Works Cited	293	(18)
About the Contributors	311	(2)
Index	313