WINNER OF THE SUSANNE K. LANGER AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING SCHOLARSHIP IN THE ECOLOGY OF SYMBOLIC FORM, SPONSORED BY THE MEDIA ECOLOGY ASSOCIATION.
With its rich historical scope, theoretical rigor, and optimistic outlook, Enduring Words is an essential resource for scholars and readers interested in the symbiotic evolution of literature and media.
In Enduring Words, Michael Wutz embarks on a profound, interdisciplinary journey through the history of narrative fiction, examining how the literary novel has not only survived but thrived amid successive media revolutions--from phonographs and photography to cinema and digital technologies. Far from merely succumbing to the rise of film, sound recording, and electronic media, Wutz argues that the novel has reinvented itself as an "extension of thought," providing a unique space for interiority and autonomous subjectivity in contrast to the data-intensive modalities of new media.
Through 8 meticulously structured chapters, Wutz weaves together historical analysis, literary criticism, and media theory. He explores how innovations in technologies--from the photograph and typewriter to the computer--have left their traces in narrative form, while highlighting the novel's evolving mnemonic and reflective capacities. Drawing on modernist writers like Frank Norris, E.L. Doctorow, Richard Powers, and the cosmopolitan Malcolm Lowry, he offers close readings that reveal the thematic and structural imprints of media on literary texts.
Rejecting both technological determinism and anti-humanist perspectives, Wutz builds on--but also diverges from--the work of Friedrich Kittler and other critical media theorists. Instead, he presents a nuanced argument affirming the novel's capacity to adapt, persist, and embody human interiority, even within a media ecology increasingly dominated by visual and data-driven forms.
About the Author :
Michael Wutz is co-editor of Reading Matters: Narrative in the New Media Ecology and co-translator of Friedrich Kittler's Gramophone, Film, Typewriter.
Review :
Michael Wutz seeks to recuperate the literary novel in a post - print world by enhancing our sense of its place - the complexity as well as the security of its niche - within the digitally expanded 'media ecology.' He unfolds a fine-grained historical analysis into photographic, phonographic, cinematic, computational, and digital components. Dwelling on the relays by which these technologies have inscribed themselves on literary texts, Enduring Words makes a number of surprising and illuminating connections. - Bruce Clarke, author of Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems ""Enduring Words is an extraordinary assessment of print culture and its offspring, the modern novel. It navigates the history of technology, the history of the modern subject, biopolitics, the history of science, and the cognitive sciences. For Wutz, fictional narrative offers the 'best possible model' for what will emerge as a truly electronic art form. His is a much more sophisticated and optimistic take on literature's role in our electronic future, one that opens up new avenues for future research in both literary and media studies."" - Klaus Benesch, author of Romantic Cyborgs: Authorship and Technology in the American Renaissance ""For those skeptical, despairing, or merely curious about the novel's survival in the age of multimedia comes the welcome news of Enduring Words. With expert precision, Michael Wutz explains how the novel flourished and became even more insistently itself by assimilating techniques developed by revolutionary aural, visual, and digital technologies - the phonograph, the photograph, the silent, the talking, the color, and the animated film, the computer - without abandoning its own print culture. Enduring Words is a must read in every sense."" - Maria DiBattista, author of Imagining Virginia Woolf and Fast-Talking Dames
